France began choosing a new president Sunday after a frenzied campaign among a dozen contenders in a race with unpredictable results.

Only four of the candidates, including conservative front-runner Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist Segolene Royal, placing No. 2 in polls, had a real chance of making it to a final round of voting May 6.

A Trappist monk from Abbaye du Mont des Cats in northern France chooses from one of the 12 candidates in the first round of French presidential elections in Godewaersvelde April 22, 2007. [Reuters]

The new president will replace Jacques Chirac, ending 12 years as head of state at the close of his second mandate.

With unusually dynamic front-runners and a suspense-filled campaign, the election was bringing in voters who sat out the 2002 election or cast protest votes for the extreme left and right.

Sarkozy, blunt, reformist and pro-American, was frightening to many French. Royal presented a smiling, feminist mother-figure. Scholarly farmer's son Francois Bayrou could pull off a surprise win, and the anti-immigrant nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen was still counting on big support, in hopes of repeating his shock 2002 second-place finish.

Turnout was likely to be high, with voter registration numbers up nationwide ¡ª especially in rundown immigrant neighborhoods wracked by rioting in 2005.

1

2