Counting the champagne bottles - read Charles Bremner's weblog

President Sarkozy is on course to win full control of all the levers of French power after voters yesterday gave his centre-right camp a record lead in the first round of national parliamentary elections.

Candidates for Mr Sarkozy’s Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), and their allies won 46 per cent of the vote, compared with about 36 per cent for the Socialist opposition. This should translate into a landslide victory with up to 440 seats in the 577-seat parliament in next Sunday’s runoff.

François Fillon, Mr Sarkozy’s Prime Minister, hailed the vote as a huge endorsement for the President’s plans for modernising France. “You have shown your wish to set France on a firm course . . . endorsing the great hope that was born with the election of Nicolas Sarkozy”. The vote gave the biggest first round share to a centre-right party in modern French history.

Ségolène Royal and other figureheads of the battered Socialist party appealed to voters to turn out next week to head off what they said was the threat of a virtual dictatorship under a President with “absolute power”.

François Hollande, the Socialist leader, said: “I make a solemn appeal to all those who do not want a single party to control the National Assembly . . . turn out to vote next Sunday.”

With the election seen as a formality after Mr Sarkozy’s victory, voters stayed away from the polls in record numbers. After the near-record turn-out of 84 per cent in the presidential run-off, nearly 40 per cent of voters abstained yesterday.

The “blue wave” in favour of Mr Sarkozy reflects the optimism that has swept France since the reformist President defeated Ségolène Royal with promises to jolt the country out of its economic slide of the past two decades.

Mr Sarkozy and Mr Fillon are appealing to voters to endorse their crash programme of reforms, dominated by tax cuts and curbs on union powers, to “restore the value of work”.

The expected UMP victory represents unusual continuity because it returns the majority which was consistently unpopular while governing since 2002 under President Chirac, Mr Sarkozy’s former boss.

This marks a break with recent French history, in which the governing party has been ousted in all six parliamentary elections since 1978.

In theory the Socialist-led opposition could have won power, casting Mr Sarkozy into cohabitation with a left-wing government. In reality though, the Socialists had no hope of revival after Ms Royal’s defeat and the high expectation that Mr Sarkozy has generated with his dynamic style and promises to redeem French prosperity.

“Sarkozy’s strategy has been impeccable,” said Dominique Moisi, a political analyst. “He has done the popular things first and is saving the unpopular ones for later. There is a sense . . . that we are on top of things.”

With the two-round system of majority voting amplifying the score of the leading party, Ms Royal last night pleaded with voters, saying: “The Right must not be allowed to consider itself the owner of France”, recalling that 47 per cent of presidential voters chose her over Mr Sarkozy. She is trying to gain leadership of her party next year after the resignation of François Hollande, its chief for the past decade and her domestic partner.

As well as the Socialists, two other big losers of yesterday’s voting were the National Front party of Jean-Marie le Pen, who seem to have failed to gain a single seat, and the new Democratic Movement (MoDem) of François Bayrou, the centrist who for a while appeared within reach of the presidency.

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