With a record number of more than 160 Socialist Party women candidates in the general election, Europe's most misogynous Parliament is about to overturn a situation in which women MPs are proportionately fewer than when female voting rights were granted 53 years ago.

On a world rating on women in Parliament, France ranks at 72 alongside Albania, but the feminine revolution guaranteed by leftwing positive discrimination in the two-round poll on May 25 and June 1 could pave the way for a female presidential socialist candidate for 2002.

A national change of attitude to women in politics has created a bigger rift between left and right than any other question, including Europe. While Gaullist Prime Minister Alain Juppe, has told potential women national assembly candidates that parity might be considered in ten years, Socialist Party leader Lionel Jospin, has already accepted equal representation.

In this election, 30 per cent of the 577 constituencies have been reserved for women socialists, making it certain that France, with only 33 female MPs, will lose its last place among the 15 European Union (EU) States and will end up with well over 100 women members. Because of male obstructionism, women politicians have had to turn to the European parliament where nearly a third of France's representation is female.

Positive discrimination has shaken voters' attitudes, according to an opinion poll in Le Nouvel Observateur, which showed that 90 per cent of the electorate favoured a woman prime minister, despite the disastrous image created by the socialist former premier, Edith Cresson, whose 10 months in office were ruined largely by male dirty tricks inside her own government.

Her experience showed that Frenchwomen had benefited little from the establishment of a Women's Rights Ministry in 1974 under Valery Giscard d'Estaing's presidency, or attempts to promote women by Francois Mitterrand in 1981.

In fact, the attempts backfired through slanderous speculation that the presidents promoted former lovers, a point made by the former European Affairs minister, Elisabeth Guigou, in a damning account of prejudice called Etre femme en politique (Being a woman in politics).

Other women candidates, like the former sports minister, Frederique Bredin, have been by plagued with anonymous phone calls in which the preferred insult is `putain' -- whore. But Martine Aubry, the former labour minister and most impressive of the future feminine intake, also has to fight another common allegation — that she is just a daddy's girl.

She looks much like her father, the former EU commission president, Jacques Delors, and cannot deny a privileged political background in the higher regions of the Socialist Party social-democratic wing.

Because of this, she carries the heaviest burden of proving that women will modernise political priorities and introduce a less confrontational style.

In the working class Paris suburb of Chatillon this week she gave a brief demonstration of common sense politics during one of dozens of flying visits to support other candidates with a series of face-to-face conversations and a reassuring explanation of socialist pension policy at the open air market.

Whether or not the Socialists win on June 1, she has the chance to become the most influential woman politician, already destined to become mayor of Lille where she is assistant mayor at present. Control of the forward-thinking northern city would provide a perfect platform to challenge for the Socialist Party leadership and increase her personal standing before general and presidential elections coincide for the first time in 2002. The Observer News Service