May poll may be a pont too far for canny Jacques; PARIS DAYS

The workmen next door to the office have stopped their ceaseless drilling. The children rarely seem to go to school. Black, the peripatetic school rabbit, has moved in with us for a five-day weekend. There is a luxurious choice of parking places in the street.

The newspaper kiosk on the corner is closed. So, tragically, is the patisserie next door. It is, in short, Paris in the month of May.

August is the laziest month in France; but May is the oddest. The month is punctured by official 24-hour holidays - May Day, Ascension Day, Pentecost.

It is further cluttered by ponts, which are like the Pont d'Avignon, bridges to nowhere: official and unofficial extra days of holiday, which join up the real holidays with the weekends.

Thus this week there were only two days of school. Thursday was a religious holiday (Ascension Day). Friday was a pont. Wednesday was thrown in for good measure.

Last week, with May Day falling on Thursday, Friday became a pont and there were three days of school. Next week is normal. The following week, with Pentecost on the Tuesday and a pont on the Monday, school is down to three days again. Charlie cannot believe his luck: three half-term holidays in the same month.

The same pattern is repeated throughout the civil service (which invented ponts) and much of business and industry, especially in the capital. The provinces appear to work a little harder. The ponts, it is maintained, regularise what would otherwise be a chaotic situation. Hundreds of thousands of people would take the bridging days off anyway.

The result is that much of the country spends the month in a kind of twilight between work and leisure; barely recovered from one long weekend of traffic jams and relatives before it is time to dive into another. May is, notoriously, a thankless time to conduct business in France. If your business is with the administration, and anything out of the routine, you might as well forget it until June.

It so happens, however, that this particular month of May, the French nation is trying to conduct an important piece of business with itself.

In the parliamentary elections on 25 May and 1 June, it must decide whether to continue with one of the least popular governments since polling began; or turn to the left. (Anything familiar there?)

It so happens that most of the campaign falls in the talk-to-me-later month of May, one of the worst possible times to call an election. Or rather: it does not just so happen.

President Jacques Chirac, it is widely believed, picked those dates deliberately. The initial plan was to have the statutory two rounds of polling on 1 June and 8 June. The President chose to have the heart of the campaign carved up by long weekends, which would make it difficult for the opposition parties to build up any momentum, or consistently attract the attention of the French people.

The President is a calculating man but he has a history of electoral miscalculations. In one sense, the campaign is going exactly as he expected: nowhere. All around the country, candidates report that their meetings are poorly attended; volunteers hard to come by. One opinion poll last week reported that 51 per cent of the electorate had little or no interest in the election. Just down our street, there is a primary school which will be a polling station. It has been fenced around by vast steel temporary noticeboards to discourage candidates from fly-posting. At this stage the boards would normally be a colourful jumble of earnest faces and vacuous slogans ("Let's change the future"; "A shared leap forward"). At the last count, there were two posters, one severely ripped.

Apathy and lethargy, Mr Chirac calculated, would be agents of the government. They would freeze the opinion-poll lead of the centre-right and benefit incumbent members of the National Assembly, four-fifths of whom are members of the governing coalition.

But three weeks into the election, opinion polls are drifting towards the left. It is the government's campaign which seems most becalmed. A nervousness, approaching panic, is haunting the centre-right. Mr Chirac, who was supposed to be above the fray this time, joined in the campaign this week, earlier than expected. It was as if a football manager had run on to the pitch in his sheepskin coat and tried to head in a corner.

The time of year is not the only explanation for the lifelessness of the campaign. The French remain in a morose and pessimistic mood. The Prime Minister, Alain Juppe, is a poor campaigner, and thoroughly disliked. The Socialist leader, Lionel Jospin, is a good campaigner, with a dated and unconvincing programme.

The bridges of May are taking their toll, however. The President called the election, nine months before he needed to, because he said the country needed a new elan . As one semi-dissident, senior figure in Mr Chirac's camp said this week: "The problem is that to have elan, to take a leap forward, you need a run-up. For a run-up you need a clear runway. Every time we take a run, we fall over all these ponts."

Next week, a full week, without holidays, will be crucial. Afterwards, the nation will plunge into Pentecost, which may a be a pont too far. As Le Monde pointed out, this last long weekend ends, for many, on 21 May, four days before the first round. Four days to overcome apathy and boredom. The President hoped a stop-start campaign would lock in his side's advantage; he may have turned the election into a lottery.