In addition, General de Gaulle, the founder of the Fifth Republic, succeeded in getting across the idea in France that the President of the Republic should not be the man of a political party. Thus any presidential hopeful, whether of the left or the right, has to distance himself from his original party by solliciting the backing of other parties, campaigning on a personal programme and appealing directly to the electorate as a whole. This gives the candidates and, to an even greater degree, the elected President a very large degree of political independence from their original party. In France a party without a presidential candidate is a party in crisis, but a presidential candidate without the support of a party has practically no future. In short, political parties still count under the Fifth Republic.
Power is focused around two poles.
On one side is the RPR, which has succeeded in making Gaullism a permanent presence on the political scene from the time of General de Gaulle to Georges Pompidou and then Jacques Chirac, while at the same time anchoring to the Fifth Republic the UDF coalition of moderates and Christian democrats. Lionel Jospin, thanks to his performance in the presidential election, has gotten the party moving again and reconfirming its role as a force for structuring the left and as a party to alternate in power. Along with the presidential election and partly linked to it, the key innovation is the growing importance of public opinion polls - an average of two are published every day, without taking into account the confidential polls carried out for the State, the presidential candidates, members of parliament, local elected officials and political parties. The polls are often disparaged by politicians, for less than honourable reasons when the tide is running against them and fairly enough when polls are misused to support claims that have not been rigorously demonstrated. They contribute to increasing the proportion of direct democracy to representative democracy, even if the latter necessarily remains the dominant force.