Oakley: Election may make French rethink system

CNN's Robin Oakley

PARIS, France (CNN) -- Enthusiastic crowds greeted newly re-elected French President Jacques Chirac almost everywhere he went Sunday, but beneath the celebration there was a widespread sense that the political system may need reform. CNN Correspondent Robin Oakley, mingling with hundreds of Chirac supporters in the Place de la Republique in Paris, spoke with anchor Hala Gorani about the president's win and France's political future.

OAKLEY: The warm-up groups are continuing to prepare people for Jacques Chirac's arrival later tonight. We hope that he will make another victory speech fairly soon. They're all in a very good and relaxed mood here.

Political analyst Dominique Moisi was saying earlier that Jacques Chirac now needs to reinvent himself to a degree. I think the people here like the way he started doing that tonight, as a highly inclusive politician taking up a position now in the center.

But having raised in his speech the question that politics in France had to change, he didn't really suggest anything tonight about how the political system should change. Specifically, he didn't discuss how people are going to change the technocrats who seem to be running French politics, who have alienated the people and who gave Le Pen his temporary success.

EXTRA INFORMATION In-depth: France Decides 2002    MORE STORIES • Colorful, silent protest mark French election  • Anti-Semitic attacks play into Le Pen's hands  • French system creates power struggle

And the other question in the back of some people's minds is -- does France need to change the system of having a president with political power and a prime minister with political power? Is it time to go either for the U.S. model of a president will full executive power, or more for the UK-style parliamentary system?

The idea would be to not continue with a system that lends itself to muddle as the French system did, with cohabitation between the president and prime minister from different parties. In a sense, this system led people to react -- if only temporarily -- and go to the extremes and back people like the Trotskyites and Le Pen.

GORANI: If we do end up after mid-June with yet another cohabitation -- with a prime minister from one party and a president from the other -- that would really force France to rethink its political system. What do you think will happen in the coming months, especially with the approaching parliamentary elections?

OAKLEY: Jacques Chirac's worries with those parliamentary elections ahead is that Le Pen, having had the publicity he's had in this presidential contest, can still build on that with the National Front. As a result, there could be a number of three-way contests for a number of parliamentary seats.

Remember that in 1997 a similar situation let in the Socialist government and caused the cohabitation then between Chirac and Jospin. The right wing vote got split between the center and the extreme right of Le Pen, even though the National Front in the end didn't win any seats.