By Rory Mulholland
French President Nicolas Sarkozy's rightwing party was headed for a landslide victory in the parliamentary elections that will give him free rein to push through his bold reform programme.
A month after Sarkozy defeated the Socialist Segolene Royal in the presidential election, his ruling UMP party and its allies were set to take between 420 and 463 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly, according to the latest opinion poll.
The Socialists and their allies will get between 95 and 130 seats in Sunday's second round of voting, said the CSA-Cisco poll in Friday's Le Parisien newspaper.
Sarkozy, who took over from Jacques Chirac, plans to present a first raft of bills this summer to give universities more autonomy, tighten immigration, make labour laws more flexible and slash taxes.
He has already broken new ground by appointing the prominent Socialist Bernard Kouchner as foreign minister and Rachida Dati, a woman of north African origin, as justice minister.
Opinion polls show that a majority of French approve of his performance so far.
The opposition Socialists, in disarray after their third consecutive presidential defeat and their poor showing in the first round of voting last Sunday, have focused their campaign on warning of an over-concentration of power if Sarkozy's party dominates parliament.
Deeply divided, the party suffered a further setback when centrist leader Francois Bayrou this week rejected Royal's offer of negotiations on forming an alliance to limit their losses in the second round.
Royal's overture to Bayrou also prompted a public spat with party leader Francois Hollande, her partner, whose opposition to an alliance was backed up in a vote by the party's top decision-making body.
The bitterest debate in the campaign this week was over the government's mooted plans to switch the financing of health care from payroll charges to higher sales taxes.
The Socialists accused Prime Minister Francois Fillon of aiming to finance tax breaks for the rich with money from ordinary workers.
Fillon retorted at an electoral rally in Paris late Thursday that the left "prefers to sacrifice the (nation's) general interest, rather than sacrifice a partisan position," because leading Socialists had earlier appeared to back a similar sales tax plan.
Sarkozy issued a statement late on Thursday saying he would reject the sales tax hike if it reduced the purchasing power of French consumers.
The Communists, once France's biggest party, look set to fall from 21 seats to between 10 and 15 seats after Sunday's vote, according to the CSA-Cisco poll.
The new centre party Modem of third-placed presidential candidate Francois Bayrou can expect three at most, with a similar score for the Greens.
Due to the particularities of the voting system, Jean-Marie Le Pen's far-right National Front is expected, as usual, to win no seats despite having garnered 10 percent of the vote in the May presidential election.
Participation in last Sunday's vote was a record low at 60.5 percent, indicating the widespread feeling that last month's presidential election was the more important democratic moment.
The UMP had 359 seats in the outgoing parliament while the Socialists had 149 deputies. - Sapa-AFP
