PARIS - France has been very tense recently. Eight months remain until presidential elections, and the country is already up to its neck in the "morning after." There is hardly a daily paper or a news broadcast that does not devote extensive coverage to the upcoming campaign, and there is virtually no everyday conversation that fails to mention the event that is due to take place in late April 2007.

The nightmare of the 2002 elections still hovers in the air. The thought that the far right will once again succeed in making it to the second round is causing many Frenchmen sleepless nights. A major success by Jean-Marie Le Pen is liable to drag the Fifth Republic into a constitutional crisis whose profound consequences are difficult to exaggerate.

Politicians and public opinion researchers are afraid that the socioeconomic crisis in the country and the general atmosphere of despondency are liable to help the leader of the extreme right. Le Pen tried his luck three times in the past in the presidential elections, and gained strength each time. In 1988 he received 14.4 percent of the votes, or the votes of 4,376,742 people. In the 1995 elections he received 15 percent, and in 2002 he received 16.9 percent, or 4,804,713 votes.

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This time, there is a fear that the Le Pen bombshell is liable to explode in the face of France. The surveys give him 20 percent support. On all the previous occasions, they underestimated the number of votes he actually received. If that happens this time as well, the parties on the extreme right and the extreme left may become strengthened to the point that they will take over the center of gravity and power of the French Republic. At present the parties of the extreme left are making efforts to agree among themselves on one joint candidate. Surveys predict a double-digit result for such a candidate. If that happens, and the marginal parties receive 40 percent of the votes, France will no longer be the same country, and we can assume that we will be witnesses to the final chapter of the Fifth Republic.

That is why many Frenchmen consider the upcoming elections to involve a decision concerning not only the identity of the next president, but about the national identity of their country as well. Some compare the present times to 1788, the year preceding the French Revolution, believing that 2007 will look like 1789.

Emile Malet, editor of the biannual journal Passage, told Haaretz that these times are actually reminiscent of the period of the rule of Marechal Petain, which began in 1940: "People do not recall such ugly interpersonal relations and such hostility toward the government and politics. There is evil in the country. France is paying a high price for globalization, for poverty, for the rebellion in the immigrant suburbs, for crime."

Last week saw the publication of "Les Bullocrates" ("The Bubble-Bureaucrats"), a book by Jean-Francois Kahn, editor of the weekly magazine Marianne. The book places the blame for the serious crisis in France on a gang of technocrats who live in a bubble, who took care of the interests of their colleagues in the elite classes at the expense of the public. Kahn claims that these elites, on the left and the right, established golden ghettoes for themselves, neglected the public good and developed an abhorrence of the masses.

In light of this one can understand the flourishing of the extremist parties, and at the same time, the longing for new figures of leadership. That is why a relatively anonymous woman caused a major disruption in the Socialist Party and is expected to be chosen as its presidential candidate. Segolene Royal is a protest candidate. Her tremendous popularity is a reaction to the disgust that has spread among the general public with respect to that same elite-in-a-bubble.

That is also the reason for the success of Nicolas Sarkozy on the right. In spite of his many years in politics, he is considered an outsider, a son of immigrants who is not a product of the assembly line that produced the reigning oligarchy. The other presidential candidates are portrayed as the legal children of arrogant, obtuse and egoistic France.

During the upcoming elections, the question of the national identity of the country will be at stake. Quite a number of Frenchman fear the spread of the Israeli and American models, which replaced officialdom with a federation of identities and interest groups. Sarkozy is seen as someone who is liable to unite them around the fading values of the Republic. The question of religion will come up as well: One hundred-and-one years after its separation from the state, many Frenchmen are afraid that religion is returning to center stage. The law prohibiting the wearing of religious symbols inside schools did not calm the fever of the return to religion that has seized the large local Muslim community. There is a genuine fear that if the Muslims manage to organize themselves into a communal-ethnic structure, other communities are likely to follow suit.

The questions of personal security will also be of central importance in the elections. The memory of the events of last fall in the immigrant suburbs has yet to evaporate. The French are demanding law and order and total security. In recent weeks the streets of the big cities have been filled with policemen patrolling mainly the train and Metro stations, where there are many immigrants and foreigners.

And at the margins of the political drama that will determine the future of France, another drama will be taking place. Jacques Chirac, 74, will leave the public stage and for the first time in 50 years, will be a rank-and-file citizen. During his two terms as president, which lasted 12 years, this complex man made a serious contribution to the process of decline from which his country is now suffering. His decline and that of France are amazingly similar.