BRUSSELS (Reuters) — A shock vote for the xenophobic far-right in France’s presidential election first round dramatised a swing to the right in much of Western Europe, fuelled by fears about crime, immigration and loss of identity.

Sunday’s poll, in which extreme rightist Jean-Marie Le Pen sensationally beat Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin into third place to qualify for a run-off with conservative President Jacques Chirac, was both exceptional and part of a wider trend.

It was exceptional because French voters faced a rare choice between two jaded incumbents who had shared power for five years and ran lacklustre campaigns. Nearly 30 percent abstained and of those who voted, more than 30 percent voted for radical alternative candidates of the far right and left.

But it fitted into a wider trend of defeats for the European centre-left that began in Italy last year, spread to Denmark and Portugal and may engulf the Netherlands and Germany next.

“Clearly the right and far-right in several countries have been able to exploit issues to which the left has no answer — migration and crime,” said Heather Grabbe, director of studies at the Centre for European Reform in London. “In addition, there is a general disillusionment with politics, high abstention rates, and no sense of new ideas or of real economic differences between left and right,” she said.

Chirac looks certain to win re-election on May 5, and the centre-right seems well placed to regain control of parliament in June, although some European officials fear another period of debilitating “cohabitation” power-sharing. Across Europe, the natural swing of the political pendulum against incumbent governments in an economic slowdown may have been amplified by a heightened sense of insecurity since the September 11 attacks on the United States, analysts say.

Both Chirac and Le Pen made law and order the number one issue in a dull campaign. A massacre by a deranged gunman at a suburban Paris council meeting, and a wave of anti-Semitic attacks linked to Middle East violence, may have scared voters.

The French result shared other features with recent European elections — sinking turnout, protest votes for extremist or xenophobic groups, and an apparent working-class backlash against globalisation and European integration.

It also highlighted the way in which opinion surveys have frequently underestimated the far right across Europe, perhaps because voters are reluctant to tell pollsters they will vote for groups treated as pariahs by the media. Le Pen, a former paratrooper, played on fears of rising crime, Muslim immigration from North Africa and a loss of national identity due to globalisation and the European Union to win 17 percent of the poll, just two points less than Chirac.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder must be quaking in his boots after a regional vote in eastern Germany on Sunday closely mirrored the French upheaval.

In the poll in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, the last before a September general election, Schroeder’s Social Democrats lost a stunning 16 percentage points while the opposition centre-right Christian Democrats regained almost as much.

With last month’s centre-right victory in Portugal, the centre-left lost its majority among the 15 European Union governments after five years of dominance.