National Front

PARIS -- Since French President Jacques Chirac's calamitously miscalculated dissolution of a conservative-dominated government little more than a year ago, putting the left into unexpected power, the French right has exploded.It has divided into factions, each centered on some (usually, to the public, overly familiar) politician thought a plausible eventual candidate to succeed Mr. Chirac's presidency. Existing parties have split or been renamed, but they no longer consistently connect to the divisions of conservative opinion.

Are the French getting their Tea Party on? That's what an outsider looking at the country's first-round presidential voting results might have been led to believe. But, as with many things French, the reality is très compliquée . The weekend vote knocked out all but the two candidates long expected to square off in the May 6 final: Socialist Francois Hollande (28.6 percent) and incumbent center-right President Nicolas Sarkozy (27.2 percent). This isn't the story, though. The most striking news is the 17.9 percent score by Marine Le Pen's National Front party.

The rejection of the left in France's parliamentary voting, to be concluded today, is decisive. It will leave the aloof Socialist president, Francois Mitterrand, isolated in the last two years of his seven-year term. It is a foregone conclusion he will appoint Edouard Balladur, the chief lieutenant of Gaullist Jacques Chirac, as prime minister. The shouting is about whether Mr. Mitterrand should resign the presidency, which he insists he will not.The constitution of the Fifth Republic of 1958 is boomeranging.

PARIS - French President Jacques Chirac was re-elected in a landslide last night as France ended its flirtation with the ultra-conservative right and rejected the anti-immigrant firebrand Jean-Marie Le Pen. The move to the center occurred after two weeks of national soul-searching and international humiliation that followed last month's first round of presidential voting, when Le Pen was elevated from the political fringe and scored a second-place finish...

The 20th century's most original and successful attempt to overcome the destructive consequences of nationalism is the European Community, now the European Union. Nationalism's domination of recent history has provoked three liberal and two totalitarian attempts to establish a new international order. The totalitarian ones were communism and nazism. The liberal ones have been the League of Nations, the United Nations and ''Europe.''The League collapsed. The United Nations is not in a particularly reassuring condition -- doing much that is useful and admirable but remaining in all large matters the creature of the major powers.

PARIS - Waving homemade placards and chanting "No to fascism," more than 1 million people took to the streets across France yesterday in May Day demonstrations aimed at the far-right presidential candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen. The turnout, including 400,000 in Paris, was far larger than predicted and dwarfed the 10,000 to 15,000 people who gathered in an early morning show of support for Le Pen. The marches were watched carefully here as an opportunity to...

DES MOINES, Iowa - Weeks of relentless pounding by his Democratic opponents appear to have done little to dim Howard Dean's appeal in Iowa, putting the former Vermont governor in position for a major victory in this state's presidential caucuses next week. Dean has opened up a 7-percentage-point edge over his nearest rival here, Rep. Richard A. Gephardt, in a new Tribune Newspapers Poll. Gephardt, from neighboring Missouri, finished first in the caucuses 16 years ago and has called Iowa a must-win for him. Dean's advantage is slightly larger than his lead in another Iowa survey released last week, which showed him four points ahead of Gephardt, but is within the Tribune poll's error margin.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, -- Premier Marc L. Bazin resigned unexpectedly yesterday after losing a power struggle with the nation's military rulers.No successor was named by Parliament or the army, and it was un- clear if the move would help efforts to restore ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.The U.S. State Department and Dante Caputo, the U.N. envoy trying to restore democracy to Haiti, welcomed the news. Father Aristide said it may mean he could return from exile within days.The 8,400-member Haitian army, which overthrew Father Aristide in 1991, was placed on maximum alert.

JERUSALEM - They have worked with Weight Watchers and the New York Yankees. Now the experts at Rubenstein Associates, a public relations firm, are taking on a new client: the state of Israel, which hopes to spruce up its image in the deadly conflict with the Palestinians. The New York-based agency, hired this year, already has come up with several suggestions it believes would help Israel sanitize the battlefield. First, reduce the number of security guards hovering around Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Dearest Anne:For weeks even months I have been praying only that I be shown what I must do. This morning with no warning I was Shown as clearly as I was shown that Friday night in August, 1955, that you would be my wife. ... And like Abraham, I dare not go without my child. Know that I love thee but must act. ...NormanOn the last afternoon of his life Norman R. Morrison stopped somewhere between Baltimore and Washington to mail a letter to his wife.The evening rush hour was in full swing that chilly Tuesday on Nov. 2, 1965, when Norman, driving an old, borrowed Cadillac with his infant daughter behind him in a car crib and a gallon jug of kerosene beside him in a wicker picnic basket, paused briefly to post the handwritten, one-page letter.