French presidential race heading for surprise ending

By Siegfried Mortkowitz Mar 13, 2007, 15:27 GMT

Paris - The biggest surprise of this year's French presidential election may very well be if there is no surprise: if Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy goes on to defeat Socialist Party candidate Segolene Royal in the second round of the vote, as most pundits predicted just a few weeks ago.

But if polls are any indication, this outcome is beginning to seem more and more unlikely, because centrist candidate Francois Bayrou has come out of nowhere to loom as a threat to both Sarkozy and Royal.

In the first round of the election, which is set for April 22, Royal is most immediately threatened by Bayrou's unprecedented surge in popularity, which has seen his support rise from around 7 per cent to as high as 24 per cent in some recent surveys.

Only the two top finishers in the first round advance to the second round, to be held on May 6.

After spending most of his political career as a centrist politician with a definite lean to the right, Bayrou has remade his image to such an extent that, according to a survey published Tuesday in the daily Liberation, many French voters now see little difference between his programme and Royal's.

Significantly, 43 per cent of Socialists contacted in the poll agreed, which presents a major problem for Royal because it turns the first round of the election into what Liberation dubbed an 'anti-Sarkozy primary' between her and Bayrou.

In that case, many centrist and left-wing voters may simply decide to vote for whoever has the best chance of defeating the interior minister, who is detested and feared by large segments of the electorate for his tough law-and-order talk and his open courting of the supporters of right-wing extremist Jean-Marie Le Pen.

That will mean a victory for Bayrou because all polls now show Sarkozy handily defeating Royal in a head-to-head encounter but being overwhelmed by Bayrou by margins of up to 10 percentage points.

Ironically, it is therefore in Sarkozy's interest that Royal makes it through to the second round, and so his aides and political allies have ignored her while mounting a ferocious campaign against the head of the UDF party.

To cite two recent examples, Sarkozy's political counsellor Francois Fillon compared Bayrou to a video game ('He is a virtual personality, with a virtual programme') and Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy warned that a Bayrou presidency would result in a power-sharing administration that would paralyze the government.

But if a Bayrou-Royal face-off in May for the presidency seems the least likely eventuality, it is certainly not out of the question. Although Sarkozy continues to lead in all polls for the first round, his support has been slowly shrinking.

The problem for the interior minister is that he is too well known as a person and a presidential candidate. Sarkozy has unofficially campaigned for the presidency for more than two years, and has never shied away from explaining his views on everything. It will therefore be difficult for him to say anything that will significantly increase his popularity.

In addition, last week he made a direct appeal to Le Pen's electorate by declaring that, if elected, he would create a ministry for immigration and national identity.

The outcry was immediate, with Bayrou declaring that Sarkozy had 'crossed a line' by suggesting, as Le Pen often did, that immigration was a threat to France's identity.

French human rights groups vehemently denounced the interior minister, with SOS Racism warning that candidates for the French presidency 'must not divert the citizens by appealing to the basest instincts of some of them.'

In fact, the only politician who came out in support of Sarkozy's statement was Le Pen, who seemed delighted to see his ideas being taken up by a mainstream candidate.

This strategy may very well come back to haunt Sarkozy, who is certainly politically astute enough to know that elections are won and lost in the centre.