PARIS, April 11 (UPI) -- The French presidential election, now just 11 days away, presents a striking contrast between old and new. The issues are politically antique, hoary old shibboleths of left and right and public provision against private enterprise that have been obsolete in most modern societies since the end of the Cold War.
But the dramatic role of the Internet in this campaign suggests that France is conducting the most modern election that the world has yet seen. Each of the main contenders is waging a sophisticated Internet campaign, with Web sites filled with blogs and video clips, interactive questions and answers, policy prescriptions and attacks on rivals.
The French media follow suit. It seems not a moment of any candidate's day goes unrecorded by at least half a dozen video cameras or by jerky cell phone lenses, and the various newspapers and TV channels and political blogs and Web sites run these scenes non-stop.
This may well be the most recorded campaign in history, and also the most friendly to couch-potatoes. Thanks to the Net, the lazy voter does not even have to stir to buy a newspaper or read an election address. Manifestos, speeches, policy papers and statistics and debates, they are all on the Net. And if that is too much like hard work, the Web site of the newspaper Le Monde runs a 20-question quiz, and the answers will tell voters which of the candidates comes closest to their views.
You can watch the center-right candidate (and front-runner) Nicolas Sarkozy speaking live at Lyon, then click a key and see him answering questions at a press conference the previous day, or see him in a TV appearance the day before that. You can read his new book "Together" on line, or thumb through a photo album that shows him turning from a long-haired and dreamy-looking teenager to a young political activist; or watch a clip of a folk singer lyrically hymning his praises as "the first president who's a cyclist" (Sarkozy.fr).
Segolene Royal, the attractive unwed mother who is the Socialist Party candidate and currently a close second in the polls, offers not only an easy way to start blogging, but also a splendid map of France (which she calls Segoland) showing where all her 1,400-plus bloggers can be found. She offers separate sites for e-debaters, e-watchers and e-creators, for people who want to offer poster, T-shirt and Web designs, and also has an online appeal for volunteers to subtitle her videos for the hard of hearing (desirsdavenir.org).
Her site has a delightful area that offers some of these creations. You can see her prancing to the tune of "Wonder Woman," or watch a visiting Dane videocam his way around France's election meetings. There is a terrifically vicious clip that denigrates each of her opponents. It features one of the nastiest photos of Sarkozy ever taken, in which he looks like a deranged ax murderer, and then it segues into Star Wars-style receding titles that say, "He profits (literally, 'he takes his honey from') urban riots and social insecurity." It then shows the far-right and anti-immigration candidate Jean-Marie le Pen, and the titles say, "Only one solution, only one hope ... perhaps the last."
Ironically, for the oldest candidate by far (he is 78), le Pen has the most impressive, or at least the simplest and most immediately accessible, of all the campaign Web sites (lepen2007.fr). It does, however, depend overmuch on images of the old fellow, giving formal speeches, giving his daily video blog on the events of the day, giving TV interviews and so on.
He looks so grandfatherly; it is not easy to see him as the young torturer of the Algerian war when he served in the French Army. (Le Pen has admitted knowing that torture took place, but denies being a torturer. But he lost a court case that he brought for defamation against the newspaper le Monde when it published a detailed account of his interrogation methods on Algerian detainees. Le Monde produced in court the dagger they claimed he had used against the victims.)
The various policies can make for heavy reading. The section on the European Union begins: "The Europe of Brussels, this multi-tentacled hydra, arrogates unto itself, with the complicity of the European government, powers over practically every area of our political, social, economic, cultural and scientific life."
But if you want to see one of Europe's most effective demagogues at the top of his alarming form, click on le Pen's speech in Marseilles on immigration and note how he draws out the word "trahison" (treason).
All this may or may not be having a profound effect; it should be noted that France voted against the new EU constitution in the 2005 referendum, even though the Web sites of the day were overwhelmingly in favor of a yes vote. They are certainly being viewed.
Segolene Royal's Web site has had 23 million page views. Sarkozy, whose site offers pages in English, German, Italian, Arabic and Chinese, claims that 5 million of his video clips have been viewed, and he gets 70,000 visitors a day. Le Pen claims 60,000 a day. This may all be taking place in some distant cyber-universe, but it testifies to an extraordinary degree of public interest and involvement.
And it is odd to see all these teeming electrons in service of a distinctly old-fashioned political debate about a 35-hour working week, spending more public money on saving near-bankrupt companies that are defended as "national champions" and on public jobs to bring down the unemployment figures (although France has already added 1 million new government jobs in the past 5 years). It seems that everything has changed in French politics except the issues.
Strangest of all, for such an interactive and Web-intensive campaign, French voters seem to have real trouble making up their minds. One of the best-respected polls reported Sunday that 42 percent of voters are still undecided. They will just have to go back to the Internet.
