It was widely expected that Chirac and Lionel Jospin, the outgoing cohabitation Prime Minister and nominee of the Socialist Party, would be the most popular candidates in the first round, thus going on to face each other in the runoff, with opinion polls showing a hypothetical Chirac versus Jospin second round too close to call. However, Jospin unexpectedly finished in third place behind Le Pen. Journalists and politicians claimed polls had failed to predict Le Pen’s second-place finish in the general election, though his strong stance could be seen in the week prior to the election.[citation needed] This led to serious discussions about polling techniques, the climate of French politics and especially the high numbers of candidates from the left-wing.

Although Le Pen’s political party, the National Front, described itself as mainstream conservative, observers largely agreed in defining it as a far-right and nationalist party. As a protest, almost all French political parties called for their supporters to vote against Le Pen, most notably the Socialists, who were traditionally billed as the archrivals to Chirac’s party. Chirac thus went on to win in the largest landslide in a presidential election in French history (greater even than that of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte in 1848, the first by direct ballot), winning over 82% of the vote.

That sure sounds like a carbon copy of US politics (or vice versa). You have politicians and journalists spinning a story about how things will turn out, and when they dont turn out that way the leftist candidates move to the right to find ‘solidarity’ just before the right sweeps the entire government.