Bayroumania

Well, this fellow seems interesting to me - at the least, I love the last sentence -

Guardian Link


Francois Bayrou visits a students' fair in Paris. Photograph: Mehdi Fedouach/AFP/Getty


The text -

Tractor-driving 'son of the soil' ruffles election tactics of his French presidential rivals


· François Bayrou spells out his vision for the nation
· Electric shock therapy, but not a new Thatcherism

Angelique Chrisafis in Bordères
Monday March 19, 2007
The Guardian


At the kitchen table of his home in a tiny village at the foot of Pyrenees, François Bayrou, the gentleman farmer and shock challenger in the French presidential election, was eating his usual breakfast of dry toast. Three cats purred beside him as he explained why, as a "son of the soil", he has emerged to rescue France from its "profound malaise".
In an interview with the Guardian, the first foreign press that the intensely private Mr Bayrou has invited into his home in the village where he was born, he explained why France needs "electric shock therapy", but not a Margaret Thatcher. "The French people need unity, if not, the country will explode."

Mr Bayrou, the centrist whose sudden rise is threatening both the rightwing candidate Nicolas Sarkozy and the Socialist Ségolène Royal, owes much of his popularity to his image as a tractor-driving "man of the people". A statue of the Virgin Mary perched on a kitchen shelf and postcards of the French countryside decorated the kitchen cupboards as he chatted to his wife Babette about whether to get a labrador. The only hint of his status was a magazine carelessly thrown in the fruit basket with the headline, "Bayrou president?"
"I was a great admirer of Tony Blair for his first few years, although with the Iraq war I distanced myself," he said. "But I am a man of the third way." He felt the French, battered by unemployment and "distrustful" of the traditional left and right, were ready to declare themselves social democrats.

For weeks, Mr Bayrou, a thoroughbred-breeder known as the horsewhisperer, has been throwing the opinion polls into disarray. An election once seen as a clear "Sarko v Sego" runoff now seems hard to predict. Last week, his latest book, Project of Hope, calling for a new republic where power shifts from a monarchic president back into the hands of parliament, and promising to end the French "caste" system of a ruling privileged elite, shot into the bestseller list. So unexpected is the rise of the one-time education minister and head of the small, centrist UDF party, that half the nation still mispronounces his name. (The "Bay" is pronounced like the English word "bye").

His house sits in a quiet village below the Pyrenees, between the Catholic pilgrimage shrine of Lourdes and Nay, the birthplace of the beret. It is nicknamed the "White House" by locals, partly because of Mr Bayrou's pretensions from a young age to go into politics to "defend" the rural voiceless, like his farmer parents.

"I'm just a man of the countryside who's read a few books in his life, who has a sense of the history of France ... but who has never left the village where I was born. I'm a man who is proud to have toiled with his hands," said Mr Bayrou, 55, when asked to explain his appeal. But the bookish Rudyard Kipling fan and biographer of the French king Henri IV told the Guardian he could be a cultural force on a par with François Mitterrand, able to champion huge arts projects for France.

The previous night, he addressed a rally in nearby Tarbes, and was cheered when he promised to put a brake on France's spiralling debt. "In the climate of fear and mistrust in France, he is reassuring. He's gentle, but firm," said Ana Maria Marti, a local mother, who has attended his meetings for seven years. He has an air of the school-master that he once was.

France is wondering how "Bayroumania", the surprise phenomenon of the election, will hold up during the five weeks until the first-round vote on April 22. Commentators question how he would unite a government as head of a party which currently has only around 30 members in the 577-strong national assembly. Detractors on the left warn that he is rightwing at heart and his plans for coalition government would paralyse France. Mr Sarkozy's camp, disturbed by his rise, say he lacks concrete plans.

For many, Mr Bayrou is a protest vote against both the right and the left, but much of his potential support base comprises waverers.

Meanwhile, he is trying to reach out beyond the traditional intellectuals and the middle class with a pledge of "no empty promises". In Tarbes, he made the unusual gesture of bringing his wife up on stage to stand beside him for his entire speech. Smiling shyly, in jeans, a T-shirt and jacket and with no make-up, she was a far cry from Sarkozy's glamorous hopeful first lady, Cecilia.

In her kitchen, Mrs Bayrou, a former teacher, said she did not advise her husband on politics. "I'm not cut out for that, I'll say if something is good or bad if I'm asked," she said, adding that she was relieved that France did not have the "the kind of perpetual reality show" of politicians' private lives in Britain.

Mr Bayrou vowed enigmatically to bring France a "calm and happy revolution". In a flourish worthy of the contemporary philospher Jacques Derrida, he defined himself as a new political species: "I'm a reconstructionist".