France's borderless election

There were posters of the candidate, aides on the stage brandishing microphones and macroeconomic statistics, minions in orange T-shirts with clipboards and polling figures, rambling questions from a man at the back of the lecture hall in a blue shirt. It was, in many senses, an unremarkable election campaign rally – apart from one small detail.

The audience was French. But the venue was London.

"London is the seventh-largest French city," says Nicolas Perruchot, a French member of Parliament and campaigner for the centrist candidate François Bayrou, referring to the burgeoning French population in the British capital. "We want to talk to them to see why they are here. We guess this campaign will be a tight fight, and it is important to see all the people that seem to be concerned by the election."

The Bayrou camp is not the only one to venture abroad. France's imminent presidential contest is setting an intriguing new trend as it rolls back the map of electoral battlegrounds to take in important constituencies overseas. Candidates are pinging e-mails to hundreds of thousands of expatriates the world over seeking their vote. Front-runner Nicolas Sarkozy has already held one campaign rally in London. Mr. Bayrou's team has done Britain and Switzerland and is heading to Germany to stump this week.

Several reasons underlie the extraterritorial campaigning. First, the race is tight. All three leading candidates are bunched within about 12 points of each other, which means every vote in the balloting that begins Sunday is important.

Second, the number of French expatriates has grown steeply in recent years, to at least 2 million people. In Britain, the number has jumped by 50 percent in the past seven years. Officially, 107,000 French citizens now live in Britain. Unofficially, the figure is thought to be as many as 400,000. Everywhere you go now you hear French accents – at the school gates, in restaurants, cinemas, churches, parks. "If you go to a party, you always find French people there now," says Emelyne Cheney, a student here.

More important is the reason for the great escape. Most of those at the London rally were in their 20s and 30s. French newspapers are lamenting "la fuite des jeunes" or the exodus of the young, who are rejecting jobless stagnation and an atmosphere that discourages entrepreneurship in France and heading for more vibrant scenery in London, New York, or Shanghai. In France, unemployment among those under 25 hovers around 20 percent. Laws against firing older employees mean that the young find permanent jobs hard to find. The exodus demands an important question of the candidates: What would they do to transform the ponderous French economy to give young people greater prospects and perhaps encourage some to come back?

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Dominique Maximin has no intention of going back just yet. The business consultant, 32, says he can't see any of the candidates tackling the institutional torpor. When he moved to London almost three years ago, his wife, Mireille, was concerned that she might struggle getting a job. Within weeks, she found one at a major bank. "I can't see how France will change because I don't see how someone will be able to change the labor laws," says Mr. Maximin. "There are limitations on firing people that they should scrap. Because here [in London], if I'm not doing good, I will lose my job more easily than in France, but I will find a job more quickly."

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