FRANCE:The candidate of the centre aims to redraw the French political map, writes Lara Marlowein Paris
For years, snobby Parisians made fun of François Bayrou, the deputy from the Pyrénées Atlantiques region with big ears and slow diction because of the stutter he mastered with great difficulty. The political puppet show Les Guignols de l'Information portrayed him as the bumbling would-be superman of the "flabby centre", going into contortions to transform himself in a phone booth.
In just a few weeks, the "flabby centre" had become the "extreme centre", and François Bayrou the number one threat to both Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal, the right-wing and socialist presidential candidates.
Though Bayrou has again reverted to a close third in polls, after tying with Royal for second place last weekend, he has totally destabilised the campaign. The scenario dreaded by the right-wing UMP and the socialists is that Bayrou will beat Royal in the first round on April 22nd and Sarkozy in the run-off on May 6th.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about Bayrou is that a man who has been a deputy in the national assembly for 21 years, who was education minister from 1993 until 1997, has succeeded in portraying himself as the anti-system candidate.
In the 2002 presidential race, Bayrou won 6.84 per cent of the vote. The most memorable moment was when he slapped a child who was trying to pick his pocket on the campaign trail in Strasbourg.
The main plank of Bayrou's platform is his "plague on both your houses" attitude to the UMP (and its predecessor, the RPR) and the Socialist Party, who have alternated in power for the past 26 years. If he becomes president, Bayrou says he will work with men and women "from the two main democratic sensibilities of the country, to set the country right, to guarantee unity and impartiality of action".
Bayrou compares himself to Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. In an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur published yesterday, he staked his claim to "the social democratic sensibility" which "needs to be born and to make itself heard" in France.
Bayrou's desire to end the country's polarisation was greeted as heresy. It was "an illusion" to "want to make the left-right divide disappear", said the right-wing defence minister Michèle Alliot-Marie. "There are between the right and the left two concepts of society that are completely different, two visions of the country that are radically opposed," she explained.
The left-wing newspaper Libération expressed the same opinion. "A country must be governed by one side or the other," an editorial warned when Bayrou surged ahead in the polls last month. "A door must be open or closed. For François Bayrou, this man of the right disguised as a candidate of the left, it will close quickly."
But 71 per cent of French people say they like Bayrou's idea of a "government of national union" combining right-wing and left-wing ministers. Such coalitions already exist in Germany, Holland and Austria. To those who say his small party could never win a majority in the June legislative elections, Bayrou replies that "the UMP and PS [ socialists] are internally fragmented. This election will lead to a profound restructuring of the French political system."
Bayrou calls himself a "social liberal". He has made reduction of France's massive debt a campaign issue, and lambasts Sarkozy for promising cuts in tax and social charges that he can't deliver, and Royal for promising new subsidies and allocations that she can't deliver.
Bayrou says he wants to be "the advocate of the poor against
the powerful". Sarkozy is clearly the target of passages in Bayrou's book Project of Hope, published on March 8th. "It seems the dominant model in the world is the rule of the strong, and the rich are the strong. It seems that money, the world of money, the power of money, have definitively triumphed." Bayrou says he doesn't like "speeches that imply that basically, the unemployed and welfare recipients are guilty for their own disgrace". The UDF party he heads was founded by former president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. It is considered the most European of French parties. Bayrou was a member of the European parliament from 1999 until 2002. His closest associates belong to the Strasbourg parliament, not the French national assembly. They are Marielle de Sarnez, his campaign director, whom Le Monde calls Bayrou's "confidante, organiser, inspiration and leader of the pack", as well as MEPs Jean-Louis Bourlanges and Jean-Marie Cavada.
On a recent campaign trip, Bayrou visited the grave of Robert Schuman, one of the French fathers of Europe. He rejects Nicolas Sarkozy's idea of a "mini treaty" ratified by parliament on the grounds that it would "cut off the French a little more from the European ideal". In a speech in Strasbourg last month, Bayrou said his priorities in Europe would be shared policies in economics, diplomacy, defence, the environment, energy and research. Like Ségolène Royal, he shuns Sarkozy's hardline approach to immigration, instead favouring a European policy of "co-development" with countries whose populations emigrate to the EU.
Back in the 1970s Bayrou's country ways made him an oddity among the affluent and influential Christian democratic politicians for whom he wrote speeches. His father, a farmer named Calixte, died from a fall from a hay-wagon. Bayrou earned a doctorate in French literature, taught classics and wrote a biography of Henri IV, the king who promised to "put a chicken in the pot every Sunday".
Bayrou (55) is a father of six and grandfather of 11. His wife, Elizabeth, stays on their horse farm in the foothills of the Pyrenees. He is often photo- graphed with his mares, or on one of his two tractors. "Just mentioning the tractors on my property declaration touched a chord," he wrote in his book. "People started giving me toy tractors. It means: we know where you're from. I come from the land."
Rural roots are now so stylish that the urban Sarkozy and Royal have struggled to imitate Bayrou. A quarter of the French electorate live in towns of less than 10,000 inhabitants. "I was never Parisian. I never lived in Paris," Bayrou said. "I've always lived in the village where I was born."