Wild card has good hand in French race
Polls indicate centrist candidate is within striking distance of left, right leaders
By Tom Hundley
Tribune foreign correspondent
April 8, 2007
PARIS -- In the last presidential election, French voters gave themselves a severe fright when they propelled perennial far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen into a second-round runoff against the none-too-popular incumbent Jacques Chirac.
To avoid further embarrassment, the nation rallied around Chirac, handing him an 82 percent majority.
This time, the French have settled on a more moderate choice for their wild-card candidate: a folksy, tractor-driving, farmer-turned-politician named Francois Bayrou.
Bayrou, 55, heads the Union for French Democracy, a small centrist party. If he can make it into the second round -- and the polls show him to be within striking distance -- it is almost certain that he would be able to beat either of the two leading candidates, the right's Nicolas Sarkozy or the left's Segolene Royal.
Two weeks ahead of the April 22 first-round vote, most polls show Sarkozy leading with about 28 percent of the vote, Royal with about 25 percent, Bayrou with 20 percent and Le Pen with as much as 17 percent. The two top finishers face each other in a May 6 runoff.
For months, the French media have portrayed this as two-horse race between "Sarko" and "Sego," as they are popularly tagged. But last month, Bayrou, a former education minister, surged out of the crowded pack of also-rans and briefly drew even with Royal.
"One reason for this is that French people do not like to be told for whom they are supposed to vote," said Corinne Lepage, a prominent environmental lawyer and former Cabinet minister who is backing Bayrou.
Although the gaffe-prone Royal seems to have rebuilt her lead, Lepage is convinced the race is still wide open. She explained why: More than 30 percent of those polled say they have not made up their minds, and more than 4 million new voters have registered since the last election, an unprecedented increase and an added measure of uncertainty.
Avoiding political labels
The new voters tend to be young, and they tend to rely on mobile phones rather than land lines, which makes them inaccessible to conventional pollsters.
"A lot of these people don't believe in the left-right divide. They don't believe it is good for the country," said Lepage.
That is the gist of the case that Bayrou has been trying to make to the French people.
A self-described centrist and "son of the soil," Bayrou has promised to end the dominance of what he calls the "left and right mafias" that have defined French politics for the last quarter of a century.
His political track record puts him slightly to the right of center, so he has focused his campaign on wooing voters from the left who have doubts about Royal. He has hinted that he would choose a left-wing prime minister.
A gentleman farmer who enjoys showing off his two tractors to journalists who make their way to his small village in the Pyrenees, Bayrou is a man of little pretense. On the stump, he is hardly dazzling, but his simple, unslick style seems to have clicked with French voters.
"He's clear, he's credible. He doesn't make a lot of promises. Instead, he explains that we can make certain choices," said Anne Perru, a retired recruitment executive who said that her politics generally leaned left but that she was not impressed by Royal.
Gerard Michel, a barman in a Paris bistro, describes himself as a Gaullist. Normally, he would be expected to support Sarkozy, but Michel shook his head.
"Sarko is a little bit too far right for me, a little bit too much like Le Pen," he said. "Bayrou is really good. He's simple, down-to-earth; he has good ideas. I don't think he can win, but I'll vote for him anyway."
Although most of the conventional polls have him trailing Sarkozy and Royal, at least two popular Internet polls show Bayrou leading the field. And even the professional pollsters agree that in head-to-head competition with either Sarkozy or Royal, Bayrou wins easily.
Lesson learned in 2002
The French often use their first-round vote to make an ideological statement and reserve the second round for a practical choice.
But after the debacle in 2002 in which the French left dispersed its vote so widely among fringe candidates that the far-right Le Pen was able to make it into the second round, it is expected that voters, especially on the left, will not take that risk again.
That caution may explain Royal's recent recovery in polls, according to Bruno Jeanbart, a Parisian pollster and political analyst at OpinionWay.
Jeanbart believes that Bayrou's support has plateaued and that it will be difficult for him to make it into the runoff.
But he also notes that unlike Le Pen, Bayrou is seen as a legitimate candidate, not a statement of protest or ideology.
"The people who vote for him really want him to be president," he said.
Bayrou's critics -- mainly operatives from the Sarkozy and Royal camps -- argue that his party is too small to govern alone and that it would be unable to find coalition partners from the left or right.
Lepage, the environmental lawyer, scoffs at this.
"So who is Sarkozy going to form his government with? Le Pen? And Madame Royal? With the postman?" she asked, referring sarcastically to Olivier Besancenot, a 32-year-old letter carrier who heads a Trotskyite party.
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Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune
