Each morning, on our daily 30-minute walk to town, we are greeted on Cours Saint Louis by a black-and-white sign that announces livraisons tolérées, “deliveries tolerated.” The choice of verb intrigues. Deliveries on this busy street, part of the circular route that carries traffic around the city, are not allowed. They are not accepted or encouraged. They are tolerated.

It’s a sensibility, it seems, that applies to the country’s presidential election, too. Tolerance, at least of personal style and eccentricity, remains eminently French, even as the country struggles in choosing its next president with issues of economic uncertainty, dwindling influence, and growing immigration. One of the two remaining candidates in the presidential runoff, to be held May 6, Socialist Ségolène Royal, had four children out of wedlock and has never married her partner. The wife of the other leading candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy, recently left him for a while, but returned. Such facts might cause ripples in an American political race. En France, c’est la vie.

But the next two weeks of campaigning in this country’s presidential runoff just might strain the civil manner in which life, business, and politics are carried out here. With the conservative Sarkozy holding a polling edge over Royal, one commentator on BBC Sunday night suggested that Royal might try to make the final vote a referendum on the character of her opponent.

Sarkozy, after all, is a candidate who has alienated many in France’s immigrant communities. As interior minister, he branded as “thugs” the unemployed youths in the weary Paris suburb where violence flared 18 months ago. “He is personally very controversial,” a Parisian economist said. But Sarkozy also is the candidate of choice among those who would cast themselves as economic modernists, those who say France can no longer tolerate a social welfare state that in their view impedes growth and progress. Sarkozy has positioned himself as the candidate more willing to cha-nge an economic climate that rigidly sets the work week at 35 hours and that creates barriers for employers seeking to lay off workers.

Such a change is appealing to many troubled by economic conditions in a country in which the official unemployment rate sits at about 8.5 per cent and the national debt keeps spiralling. France’s GDP per capita has fallen from seventh in the world to 17th in 25 years’ time.

Royal, meanwhile, has raised concerns of her own, both in terms of her command of the issues and her ability to lead. While she has improved as a stump speaker, commentators criticise the vagaries of her campaign promises. Of late, she has unabashedly campaigned as woman and nurturer, sort of a “mother France” counterpart to Sarkozy’s law-and-order image.

The candidates’ blemishes didn’t stop an astounding 84 per cent of voters from casting ballots in Sunday’s first round, which winnowed the field from 12 to two.

By contrast, 64 per cent of Americans voted in the 2004 presidential election. — The Christian Science Monitor