Arlette Laguiller of Lutte Ouvrière, the front-running revolutionary left candidate in the first round with 5.8%, has commented:
"As was absolutely predictable, Le Pen has got no more votes than he got, with his colleague Mégret, on the first round.
That means, in the first place, as we have often said, that Le Pen would very easily have been beaten with the votes of the mainstream right alone, who
scored twice as many on the first round as Le Pen.
It also means that the leaders of the left have prostituted themselves for nothing and have given Chirac by far the biggest majority of any president of the
Fifth Republic. Even De Gaulle never got as many.
Thus the leaders of the left have just told us, in the worst of ways, that the governmental left and the governmental right have much more in common than
sets them apart.
The leaders of the left blew up the Le Pen bladder. They knew that Le Pen had no chance at all of winning on the second round, but they raised a Le Pen
scare as if he could be elected. They raised a scare about the spectre of fascism, which in the current situation was no more than a theatrical fiction,
though Le Pen's ideas do represent fascist survivals.
For the last 15 days the leaders of the left have succeeded in avoiding any explanation to the working people on the causes of the left electorate's
disillusion with them and on the fall of the Socialist Party's vote and the collapse of the Communist Party's.
The campaign which they led in favour of Chirac was as shameful as it was pointless and artificial, as they full well knew.
We for our part refused to align ourselves with that campaign and refused to abase ourselves to calling for a vote for Chirac. We are often accused of
defending an out-of-date programme, but we are proud of standing firm for our ideas and not turning our coats on the first opportunity.
Chirac, whatever hypocrisy may be used to explain voting for him, and regardless of whether one talks of taking his ballot paper with gloves or with a peg
on one's nose, is an enemy of the working class.
It should be known that in the workplaces many workers, CP activists or voters, refused to vote for Chirac. Even if their numbers were insufficient to appear in
the statistics, they will surely count in the struggles to come".

Laguiller called for blank ballots in the second round. About 6% of the electorate did cast blank or spoiled ballots, although opinion polls indicate that
72% of Laguiller's first-round voters backed Chirac on 5 May. Abstentions were 19.2% on the second round, down on 28.4% in the first round.

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