PARIS - With two months to go before France's voters choose a new president, the two main candidates -- incumbent President Jacques Chirac and French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin -- are waging campaigns in vastly different style.

Chirac, 69, a center-right neo-gaullist running for a second term, brought his mix of sleek glad-handing and calculated imperiousness to bear on the race from the moment he threw his hat in the ring on February 11 by declaring his "passion" for France and the French.

In dour contrast, Jospin, 64, faxed in his declaration last week and told state television that after five years hitched to the government cart, he was now ready to "snort in the field of democracy".

On Sunday, at a congress of his Socialist Party that officially endorsed him as its candidate, he said that, even though he was committed to trying to win the elections, "I can't guarantee success. There is an incumbent president. I am only the challenger."

The statement, a reminder of his defeat by Chirac in very tight 1995 presidential elections, seemed more genuine modesty than an attempt to wave the underdog flag to muster more support.

But, perversely, Jospin's no-frills frankness has not cost him in terms of public support in a country where flamboyance and elegance are idolized.

Opinion polls give Chirac a slight edge in the first round of the election on April 21, which a total 19 candidates have said they will contest, but the two men are seen as neck-and-neck in the second, showdown round between the top two contenders on may 5.

Chirac's main disadvantage, it seems, is the cloud of corruption that has been cast over him by judicial investigations into alleged abuses of office and alleged slush-fund spending from his long previous stint as Paris mayor.

His use of presidential immunity to refuse to respond to questioning by judges in the affair has not endeared him to left-wing media and voters, particularly when he put "zero impunity" for crime at the heart of his campaign. The left-wing daily *** Liberation *** mocked his hypocrisy with the headline "zero impunity -- except for me".

It also has not helped that right-wing parties, which gathered in Toulouse on Saturday under an embryonic grouping known as Union in Movement (UEM), have not overcome rivalries to fall into step behind Chirac.

For most of his first term, he has been seen as something of a lame duck as a result of sharing executive power with a government of a different political stripe.

That arrangement, known as "cohabitation", was the result of him calling grossly miscalculated legislative elections in 1997 that swept his rpr party from the ruling benches.

Jospin, on the other hand, has kept most of his election promises -- including labor reforms that have helped reduce chronically high unemployment and reduced the working week to 35 hours -- and generally maintained a reputation of honesty.

A tardy admission last June that he was a Trotskyist sympathizer in his student days slightly hurt his reputation, but more because he had kept quiet about it for so long than the fact that he once flirted with extremist left-wing views.

More worrying for his camp is France's economy. For the last four years it has been, with Britain's, the most vibrant in the European Union, but now it is being sucked toward recession by the downturn in Germany and the United States. Both unemployment and inflation are looming as potential problems.

And with more than half of France's 60 million people expressing apathy in the upcoming elections, according to a Louis Harris poll released late Sunday, the refusal to put on a presidential-style performance worthy of charles de gaulle or Francois mitterrand could cost Jospin votes.