PARIS, March 12 (UPI) -- The gloves have come off between France's two top presidential contenders, who spent the past five years gingerly managing a cohabitation government together.
But the days when President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin presented a united front abroad, and shared awkward public smiles at home, are history.
With presidential elections a month away, Jospin came out swinging this week, taking aim at a very personal matter -- Chirac's age.
During a Sunday flight home, Jospin confided to accompanying reporters the 69-year-old president "appeared old and tired," and "a victim of a certain abuse of power."
Ironically, the prime minister himself was dubbed "Grandfather Jospin" by Reunion citizens, during his election stump around the island.
Later, during a Monday night interview on France-Info radio, Jospin claimed his remarks were intended to be off the record -- but didn't retract them.
For his part, Chirac initially opted for the high road during his own Monday night appearance on France 2 TV, as he argued for campaign debates about ideas rather than personalities.
Still the barbs finally came out, when the president denounced Jospin's remarks as "a fault of opinion, almost a crime of bad face."
With Chirac heading toward 70, and an array of presidential contenders in their 60s and 70s, the question of age in French politics is a sensitive one. At 64, Jospin himself is no spring chicken.
Indeed, Chirac used the age argument himself in 1988, when he was running against Jospin's Socialist mentor, former French president Francois Mitterrand.
Then 71, Mitterrand won re-election handily. He served his full seven-year term, despite being secretly diagnosed with terminal cancer. He died in 1995.
By contrast, French wunderkind Valery Giscard d'Estaing, elected president in 1976 at the age of 48, was not re-elected seven years later.
"If old age was a hindrance in the presidential race, Francois Mitterrand would never been elected in 1981, nor re-elected in 1988 against his junior Chirac who, already wanted to push him from the presidential palace to the hospice," wrote the leftist Liberation newspaper in a Tuesday editorial. "At least for that reason, Jospin should have shut up about the age of the captain."
Jospin's remarks about his rival's age have sparked a barrage of commentary in other French media as well.
France's conservative Le Figaro newspaper rebutted the characterization of Chirac, describing the president instead as "serene," "pugnacious" and "incisive."
Of Jospin's in-flight description of Chirac age and energy level, the newspaper quipped, "Must one climb so high, to descend so low?"
On the streets, many French grumble about the same old cast of presidential characters. But if the recent barrage of polls are any indication, the candidates' ages will figure little in the April-May voting.
The youngest presidential contender -- 27-year-old Olivier Besancenot of the Revolutionary Communist League -- captures less than 1 percent of support in most surveys. Former education minister Francois Bayrou, of the center-right UDF party, also scores in the disappointing single digits, despite being only 50.
By contrast, support for Jean Marie Le Pen, the 73-year-old leader of the far right National Front, figures in the low double digits.
Not everybody is ignoring the age factor however.
Jean-Pierre Chevenement, the designated "third man" in the presidential race between Chirac and Jospin, feted his 63rd birthday Saturday among hundreds of young supporters in Paris.
"This society is ignoring you," Chevenement told them, a message that drew applause and cheers.
