Why French candidates are wooing the also-ran

François Bayrou has accepted an invitation to meet finalist Ségolène Royal for a televised 'debate' Saturday.

By Robert Marquand | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the April 27, 2007 edition

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PARIS - When the future of your country is on the line, who are you going to call?

For France, it appears to be a slightly tendentious scholar, farmer, and politician named François Bayrou, a man more comfortable on a tractor than at a Saint Tropez reception. Though Mr. Bayrou was knocked out of the first round of the French presidential race on April 22, by throwing his support behind one of the two final contenders, he could swing Europe's most important election of the year.

France faces a stark choice in the May 6 runoff: an elegant heroine who wants to be a Tony Blair-style leftist or a tough-guy reformer on the right à la Margaret Thatcher.

Ségolène Royal feels France needs maternal understanding to wrench itself away from its ossifying social-welfare model. Nicolas Sarkozy effectively suggests that it needs a good spanking.

This week the "Ségo-Sarko" race narrowed to less than a two point difference, 49 percent for her, 51 for him, according to polls by Le Figaro, the Paris daily newspaper.

Down-to-earth authenticity gives him clout

In the midst of this tremulous choice is Bayrou. For the next 10 days, a man who sits in the front seat with his driver and eschews tinted-window limousines, is in a position to be kingmaker, say a host of political cognoscenti.

Bayrou's leap from 6.9 points in the 2002 election, to 18.5 points in 2007 put him at the edge of history. By nature he is on the center right. But by trying to bridge left and right in a country long divided between placard-carrying communists and Gaullist sons of the soil, and attracting younger voters who like his European thinking, ecological riffs, and down-to-earth authenticity – analysts say Bayrou has brought something new. That gives him clout.

At a much-anticipated press conference Wednesday, Bayrou criticized both candidates and said he wasn't going to endorse anyone. A strong Roman Catholic with six children, Bayrou says he doesn't want to compromise his small centrist party's chances of scoring big in June parliamentary elections.

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