PARIS -- France's presidential election system is meant to ensure both a maximum of democracy and the emergence of a strong national leadership at the end of the two rounds of voting. That was the model set by Gen. Charles de Gaulle when he established the Fifth Republic four decades ago.

After the first round of voting on Sunday, however, France finds itself terribly weakened. Its politics are in the greatest mess ever under the Fifth Republic, and its international standing is at risk.

On Sunday, in which no fewer than 16 candidates were free to run, the heads of the major rightwing and leftwing parties did not expect to get more that 40 percent of the vote between them as people backed everybody from the Trotskyites and two environmentalists to a defender of the country's hunters and anglers.

The conventional wisdom was that, after the splintering of votes in the first round, everything would come together in the decisive second round between neo-Gaullist President Jacques Chirac and Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin.

By pushing Jospin out of second place, far-right National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen has broken the Gaullist-Socialist mold and produced what French commentators call "an earthquake."

Chirac will win the second round -- early opinion polls gave him 80 percent of the vote in the runoff May 5. But, apart from raising the question of how an anti-immigrant, xenophobic opportunist like Le Pen could grab second place, the result has destabilized French politics, as the National Front leader scored 17 percent of the vote to the president's 20 percent. The shock is strongest on the left. Jospin, who came to office when a Socialist-Communist-Green coalition won legislative elections in 1997, immediately announced that he would quit politics next month. The once powerful Communist Party saw its score slump to 3.4 percent. Socialist leaders have lined up say that they will vote for Chirac, their archenemy, in the second round to stop Le Pen. Trotskyites scored almost 11 percent, and are talking of direct action against the far right.

All this enables Le Pen to say that the reaction of the left to his unexpected success shows it cannot accept the democratic result of the election. But the reasons for his victory go deeper than the failure of the Jospin government to rally the left to its man.

France's political elite is woefully out of touch with the country as shown by a record abstention rate of nearly 30 percent. Its leaders are old -- Chirac is 69, Le Pen 73, Jospin 65. They have been around for decades, and have nothing new to offer.

Opinion polls showing that law and order was the main public worry that stampeded the mainstream right and left into proposing stiff measures -- playing into the hands of Le Pen. Often this was a cover for concern about France's four million Arab and African immigrants -- again a major Le Pen theme. Television news played up reports of "insecurity."

In the dying days of his campaign, Jospin unveiled new measures on gun control that represented a final lunge to reassure voters that the left was not soft on crime. What his government had been doing on the issue for the previous five years was none too clear; the prime minister acknowledged that he had been "naive" in thinking that falling unemployment would cut crime.

Such episodes have sharpened the public perception of politicians as men and women who will do anything to try to win votes, but will not perform effectively when elected. A wave of scandal allegations that have broken over politicians -- notably Chirac -- have added to public disillusion. As one commentator put it, French politics is now marked by derision for its leading figures. Economic growth is slowing and, after falling for nearly five years, unemployment is rising again.

On top of this, the system of electing the president has been shown up for all its faults. France is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, a nuclear power, one of the world's top six economic nations and a pillar of the European Community. Yet, its system allowed a ragbag of also-rans to compete for the job of running it last Sunday. Apart from Chirac, Jospin and, now, Le Pen, none of the other 13 candidates could ever see themselves in the Elysees Palace.

They were there to represent small parties, protest voters and single-interest groups. But their effect was to drain votes from the main parties. For them -- and for far too many of their voters -- politics had become a game without consequences. Now the chickens have come home to roost in the shape of Le Pen.

On the left, Jospin was doomed because of the number of voters who would have backed him in the end but who chose to go for the Trotskyites or others smaller candidates in the first round. Mainstream candidates of the right totaled only 31 percent, their worst ever score, opening the way for Le Pen's incursion on their side.

Socially, the first round appears to have borne out a recent trend by which working class voters have moved to the far right, with Le Pen scoring highly in several previous Socialist industrial bastions. Personified by the schoolmasterish Jospin, the Socialists are now the party of white collar, public-service voters, losing touch with their popular roots. At the same time, Chirac's support is diffuse, and the parties that will back him on May 5 are bitterly divided among rival contenders for future power.

All this raises the fear, now being expressed in Paris, that France is becoming ungovernable. If Chirac seems sure to win the biggest presidential margin of victory ever seen on May 5, it will have been achieved for negative reasons -- to stop Le Pen. After that, the country has parliamentary elections in June that, in the current uncertainty, could end up in a strong showing for the left as voters recoil from what they did on Sunday.

That would open the way for another prolonged period of paralysis at the top as right and left share the supreme organs of power -- as happened in the later stages of the "cohabitation" between Chirac and Jospin. France's global partners will confront a severely weakened nation, and ask themselves about the stability of a country that has shot Le Pen to the forefront in a way that should have been unthinkable, and faces deep social tension to which the politicians have no answers.

As they mull Sunday's lessons and look to the second round, the French should be asking serious questions about their electoral system and about their own attitude to filling the most powerful post in the country. Le Pen will be held up as the scarecrow figure in coming days, but the nation's ills go much deeper.