PARIS, France (AFP) — World leaders breathed a collective sigh of relief yesterday as Jacques Chirac trounced extreme right-winger Jean-Marie Le Pen in an election that had cast a cloud over France’s image on the world stage.

With almost once voice, governments in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa lauded the result as a resounding defeat for the “racism” and “demagoguery” of Le Pen.

“It’s a victory for democracy and a defeat for extremism and the repellent policies Le Pen represents,” said British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Latest results gave Chirac more than 82 per cent in the second-round run-off against Le Pen, the National Front leader widely reviled for outbursts including a dismissal of the Nazi gas chambers as a “detail of history”.

Le Pen’s first round success vote two weeks ago had set off a political earthquake in France and shudders throughout Europe over his fiercely anti-immigrant, anti-EU platform.

“The extremist, isolationist policies of Jean-Marie Le Pen have been rejected and crushed,” said European Commission president Romano Prodi. “Today the French people have once again demonstrated that their nation belongs to the heart of Europe.”

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder concurred.

“The French people have rejected extremism without ambiguity,” he wrote in a message of congratulations to Chirac, who at 69 is preparing for a new five-year term in office.

“A policy of demagogy, contemptuous of our common values and the abandonment of Europe, is not the model to follow,” he said, referring to Le Pen’s pledge to pull France out of the European Union if he won power.

“Xenophobia and populism have lost,” said Antonio Tajani, who represents Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia in the Strasbourg-based European Parliament.

At home, as thousands of jubilant Parisians braved the cold and rain in celebration, left-wing leaders hailed Le Pen’s defeat but made clear their backing for Chirac ended on election day.

“This is not a victory for Chirac but for the French people,” said Noel Mamere, presidential candiate of the ecologist Greens party, a partner in the outgoing coalition government led by the Socialists.

He said the popular mobilisation to form a united front against Le Pen now needed to ensure a defeat of the right in June’s legislative elections.

In the former French colony of Algeria, the source of hundreds of thousands of immigrants to France, President Abdelaziz Bouteflika voiced relief.

“I do not need to tell you with how much satisfaction I welcome your re-election… in conditions which increase your stature in the eyes of the world,” Bouteflika said of Chirac, who in December became the first French president to visit Algeria in 12 years.

His reaction was echoed in Lebanon, where Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri congratulated Chirac on his “brilliant” victory.

“France has chosen Jacques Chirac to continue working for peace in the Middle East,” said Hariri, considered a long-time friend of Chirac and whose country was ruled by France after World War I.

Before the polls closed, US Secretary of State Colin Powell had said he was pleased Le Pen was set to be “overwhelmingly marginalised and defeated” by Chirac.

But Michael Ancram, shadow foreign secretary with Britain’s opposition Conservative Party, said there were lessons to be drawn from Le Pen’s emergence on the centre stage of French politics.

“The lesson of the last two weeks in France is of what happens when the electorate begin to feel disenchanted with and disengaged from a remote political elite apparently more concerned with the grand politics of Europe than with them,” he said.

He was speaking just days after Britain was shaken by the success of the far-right anti-immigrant British National Party (BNP) in gaining an albeit small foothold in local government after municipal elections last week.

The secretary general of Austria’s governing conservatives, Maria Rauch-Kallat, hailed French voters for having “clearly rejected the racist policies of the National Front”.

But Austria’s far-right Freedom Party said Chirac’s landslide win was no cause for celebration.

“France will be governed by a president whose programme has only been supported by 20 per cent of the electorate,” secretary-general Peter Sichrovsky said of Chirac’s first-round vote.

France had spearheaded EU sanctions against Vienna after the Freedom Party entered a coalition government in February 2000.

Elsewhere in Europe, Dutch Foreign Minister Jozias Van Aartsen voiced delight that “the racist Le Pen is beaten,” while Finnish President Tarja Halonen described the result as an “unequivocal” display of France’s determination to protect civil and human rights and European values.