Washington ? French voters have succeeded where the Bush administration failed: They have punished President Jacques Chirac and his center-right government. And it is unlikely that the French are finished, or alone, in taking out their bitterness and frustration on their rulers.

Humiliating defeats in regional elections last Sunday forced Chirac into a midweek Cabinet reshuffle that is a holding action for bigger domestic battles to come. But the angry growl heard at French ballot boxes echoes beyond the Hexagon. Chirac’s governmental makeover may help reshape the troubled trans-Atlantic dialogue about Iraq. Moreover, Chirac’s punishment suggests that even local politics in the global era are not all local all the time.

It comes at a pregnant moment in Washington’s attempt to find common ground with Europe on Iraq and President Bush’s Greater Middle East Initiative. Gone are last year’s once-secret White House vows to ignore Germany and punish France for opposing the war in Iraq. In vogue are glad-handing meetings for President Bush with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder last month in Washington and with Chirac in France in June.

But more than glad-handing is needed. A moment of trans-Atlantic opportunity will evaporate if significant agreements are not reached this spring to bring American and European interests in the Greater Middle East and Iraq into line with each other. That outcome needs to be clear by the time NATO nations gather for their Istanbul summit at the end of June or it will float out of reach.

What does the decision by French voters to give the once-discredited Socialist Party control over 20 of the country’s 21 regional administrations — and to defeat every one of the 19 Chirac Cabinet ministers running for local office last Sunday — have to do with these larger international questions?

For one thing, it forced Chirac to move from his foreign ministry the Frenchman many Americans and U.S. officials love to hate over Iraq: Dominique de Villepin, the hard-charging, impossibly romantic Gaullist who spearheaded the international campaign against going to war. In a change dictated solely by domestic politics, de Villepin was named interior minister, a post that positions him better to become prime minister in a new shuffle likely this autumn.

The new foreign minister, Michel Barnier, is no less a Gaullist. But he does not carry the heavy emotional baggage on Iraq that de Villepin accumulated. Barnier, a consensus-builder in his previous job as a top European Union official in Brussels, will be more reflective and conciliatory, especially in his opening moves. U.S. officials should seize this small opening — while remembering that Chirac is still president and regards de Villepin as his most trusted adviser and almost as a son.

French voters were not of course punishing Chirac for Iraq, as Bush contemplated. But it is striking that last year’s high-profile international campaign by France against Washington’s “arrogance” and “law-breaking” bought Chirac little if any respite at home in a vote that had the distinct flavor of a national referendum. Moreover, the French vote shared one important characteristic with Spain’s national elections two weeks earlier, where conservatives who supported the war in Iraq were booted out: In both countries voters seemed to have gone to the polls in a fury against the incumbents.

The big victor in the French ballot, Francois Hollande, the Socialist Party chairman, felt it necessary to caution his followers “not to take to the streets” after Chirac’s party lost and the president refused to fire Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin in the reshuffle.

The French press quoted voters as expressing extraordinarily high levels of anger with Chirac for having refused to listen to them for the last two years. Editorials echoed this accusation in particularly harsh terms.

Wars polarize and push opinion to feverish levels. The trans-Atlantic leadership quarrels of the past 18 months, centered on Iraq and the Middle East, have undermined public confidence in incumbents in general, whatever their party or position. Polls show Schroeder’s Social Democrats facing a disastrous string of losses in upcoming state elections that would cost him control of the German parliament’s upper house.

Europe’s spreading distemper does not dictate the final result of elections in the United States this November or in Britain next year. But it does suggest that blind anger is an important force in the voting booth right now, and leaders who quarrel so bitterly with each other should remember that they may not get the chance to continue doing so for very long.