The first round of voting in the French presidential campaign takes place next week, on April 22. In theory the first round could produce a winner, but only if one candidate wins more than 50% of the vote. That’s proven impossible in recent elections, and this year’s campaign is no different. French political loyalties are too fractured, and polls aren’t showing any one candidate passing 30% next week.

The two main candidates are Segolene Royal of the Socialists and Nikolas Sarkozy of the UMP, the party previously led by Jacques Chirac. Ms. Royal is having a hard time in the polls, struggling to maintain second place; last time, the Socialist candidate, Prime Minister Jospin, finished third, with the far right demagogue, Jean Marie Le Penn, taking second place and facing Mr. Chirac in the run off.

Most French voters from far left to moderate right, rallied around Mr. Chirac’s candidacy; it was more of a vote against Mr. Le Penn than for Mr. Chirac. Now, polls give Mr. Sarkozy a slight edge, with Ms. Royal running a close second and a centrist, François Bayrou, threatening a surprisingly strong showing in third place.

Mr. Bayrou represents the centrist bourgeoisie, committed above all to preservation of the status quo. Ms. Royal has adopted some language from the Clinton and Blair models moving a left party to the middle, but to cement her base she must win votes from the radical left, which accounts for 10% or so. For every move she makes to draw away Mr. Bayrou’s support, she loses support to a constellation of communists, Trotskyite, Green, and anti-globalization candidates.

It is a sobering thing that in the first round, one quarter of French voters will vote for parties of the extreme left and extreme right. The two main parties have to survive that moment and then manage to draw in that 25% in the second round.

Should Ms. Royal finish in second place, she can depend upon getting that hard left vote in the final round. But when you add up the votes that according to polls appear to tilt center left to far left, it is difficult to see how Ms. Royal could prevail and win the presidency. It is more likely that Mr. Sarkozy will finish first and, if he faces Ms. Royal, become president. Mr. Bayrou’s early spurt in the polls has subsided, but in the now less than likely outcome that he should finish second next week, he would have a better chance of beating Mr. Sarkozy.

The left would rally around Mr. Bayrou, joining his centrist supporters, painting Mr. Sarkozy as a virtual Le Penn, a man of the radical right. There have already been expressions of this strategy. Every time Mr. Sarkozy speaks bluntly, as he often does, he is characterized as a closet racist. Yet that bluntness is a tactic for Mr. Sarkozy to draw supporters away from Mr. Le Penn.

The limits of this dance came to the surface last week as Mr. Le Penn attacked Mr. Sarkozy as unworthy of the presidency because of his non-French background. Mr. Sarkozy is the son of a Hungarian immigrant father and of a Jewish maternal grandfather who converted to Catholicism.

“Mr. Sarkozy does not have this past which constitutes the structure of the nation’s and having three foreign grandparents is not what qualifies [him] more for this exceptional function,” Mr. Le Penn said. In case voters missed his point he added, that Mr. Sarkozy “comes from an immigrant background. It’s obvious, there’s a difference. There is a choice there which might be considered fundamental by a certain number of French people.”

Mr. Le Penn has also criticized Mr. Chirac for acknowledging the responsibility of the French state for the deportation of Jews during World War II. Mr. Sarkozy presents a unique figure in French political life; he is unashamedly close to the Jewish community, openly sympathetic to Israel, and pro-American.

It is not simply a case of a hard foreign policy line versus a softer one. Ms. Royal has come out against any nuclear program in Iran, even for civilian purposes, and has spoken publicly about the military option as a necessary part of the diplomatic and economic tool kit. Thus the French Socialist candidate is more open to the possibility of a military confrontation with Iran than any of the candidates vying for the Democratic party presidential nomination here in America.

Mr. Sarkozy has taken great pains to strip the French Gaullist right of its anti-Jewish preoccupations. He resembles no one so much as President Reagan, vigorously pro-West, with no time or sympathy for the striped pants brigade and their pro-Arab policies at the Quai d’Orsay, a vigilant against anti-Semitism and Islamic extremism, and committed to a pro growth conservative economic agenda.

Mr. Twersky is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.