Pressure mounted on French President Jacques Chirac yesterday to fire his prime minister and shake up the government after opposition Socialists dealt his conservative camp a humiliating defeat in regional polls.

Sunday?s election results were a worst-case scenario for Chirac and Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin as the left won in nearly all of France?s 26 regions and trounced all cabinet ministers running for regional council seats.

The outcome, with the left winning 50 per cent of the vote against 37 per cent for the centre-right, raised doubts about the government?s commitment to ambitious economic reforms such as cost-cutting in the public health system.

But with three years left to his presidential mandate, the unpredictable Chirac could ask Raffarin to soldier on with a reshuffled cabinet to push through reforms sweetened by a few concessions to public opinion, analysts added.

?Jacques Chirac has time on his side, but the pressure will be very hard to bear in the next few weeks,? said pollster Pierre Giacometti. ?Everybody?s wondering about Jean-Pierre Raffarin?s future,? Europe 1 radio commented.

<B>Raffarin vows to press on</B>

Some commentators saw the defeat as such a setback that they mentioned the possibility of an early general election.

?Sunday?s vote was directly aimed at Jacques Chirac, who the country has in fact asked...to dissolve the National Assembly,? said the business daily La Tribune. The left-wing Liberation went a step further and called for a general election.

Raffarin vowed on Sunday to press on with reforms to cut a soaring state deficit in the eurozone?s second largest economy.

?The reforms must continue simply because they are necessary... (But) policies must be more efficient and fair, and it is certain that some changes must be made,? he argued. Socialist Party leader Francois Hollande disagreed, demanding ?a major change in the direction of the government.?

The left had expected to win after gains in the first round of voting on March 21 but the sweep of its victory was a shock, painting France?s regional political map almost entirely red.

The left swept 20 of the 22 regions in metropolitan France, with the right winning only in Alsace. In Corsica, the left was ahead but needed to agree a coalition before declaring victory.

Chirac, whose centre-right UMP party had run 14 regions since the last regional vote in 1998 against 11 for the left, did not comment on the results.

Economic analysts said the crushing defeat was likely to weaken the government?s resolve to forge ahead with reform.

?There is a genuine danger of France losing steam,? said Stephane Deo, an economist at UBS Warburg bank. ?Support has caved in and reform is seriously compromised.?

Chirac is not obliged to respond to the regional defeat, since the right still holds a comfortable majority in the National Assembly, but a cabinet reshuffle has been widely expected since the first-round setbacks.

Analysts also expected him to make changes to head off another bruising in the European Parliament election in June.

With a 65 per cent turnout, two percentage points higher than last week?s first round of the elections, the anti-immigrant National Front took a low 13 percent of the votes.

The left made a big rebound from the 2002 general election, when it lost control of parliament with 37 per cent of votes compared with the centre-right?s 43 per cent. The popular Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy would appear to be a favourite to succeed Raffarin but his poor relations with Chirac and his overt presidential ambitions could work against him taking over as prime minister.

There is no other obvious candidate to replace Raffarin, especially after one hopeful -- the respected Labour Minister Francois Fillon -- lost in his Loire region.

Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin and Defence Minister Michele Alliot-Marie are expected to stay in a reshuffled cabinet. Two political appointees ? Finance Minister Francis Mer and Education Minister Luc Ferry ? are rumoured to be on their way out.