With three months to go, France’s presidential election has been shaken up by gains of far-right and centrist candidates at the expense of main rivals Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist Francois Hollande.
“The current campaign’s originality is indeed that for the first time the fight is between four candidates not three, as was always the case from 1965 to 2007,” the left-leaning Liberation daily said in a recent editorial. Marine Le Pen of the far-right anti-immigrant National Front party and Francois Bayrou of the centrist Democratic Movement have been making strides in opinion polls as the French watch a so-far insipid campaign stumble on. Hollande has consistently led opinion polls which indicate he is set to win 28-30 percent of votes in the first round on April 22, ahead of President Sarkozy’s 23-24 percent, Le Pen’s 18-20 percent and Bayrou’s 12-14 percent.
But the popularity of Hollande, who was on Sunday to hold his first mass rally, is slowly but surely being eroded, while Sarkozy remains deeply unpopular with 63 percent of voters, allowing Le Pen and Bayrou to progress. Le Pen has to some extent managed to shake off her party’s xenophobic image, while her tough line on Islam, immigration and the elite in a France stricken by both a financial and identity crisis is increasingly popular.
Her hope is to repeat her father Jean-Marie’s historic achievement in 2002, when he made it to the second round before being trounced by incumbent Jacques Chirac. Former education minister Bayrou, who has made his independence from the politics of left and right his trademark, has meanwhile gone from seven percent of polled votes in December to 14 percent in January.
Opinion polls show that most French no longer identify with either Sarkozy’s right-wing discourse or that of the Socialist Party, handing Bayrou a gift. The latest edition of the popular L’Express weekly featured Le Pen and Bayrou on the cover, with the headline: “And if it were them?”
The magazine said the two candidates had the same target audience, “the forgotten victims of the economic crisis.” Le Pen claims to speak for the “forgotten” and the “silent majority”, while Bayrou says he represents “the small, the humble, those without influence.” In response to the slow disappearance of France’s manufacturing base, Bayrou has launched a campaign to “buy French”, while Le Pen has promised to pass a “let’s buy French” law were she to come to power.
Former Sarkozy acolyte Dominique Paille, ex-spokesman for his UMP party, has written a political novel based on the humiliating scenario of Sarkozy and Hollande both getting knocked out in the first round. In the book Sarkozy is portrayed as a victim of his own attempts to get votes back from the resurgent far-right while Hollande is shown as being simply too indecisive to garner votes. Instead, in “Panic at the Elysee”, Le Pen and Bayrou battle it out in the final May 6 round of voting, with Bayrou ultimately victorious. “It’s not impossible that Bayrou could win. He’s taking our votes and those of the right,” admitted the head of the Socialist Party grouping in the National Assembly, Jean-Marc Ayrault.
At his first campaign rally on Thursday, Bayrou called on “the people” to “resist”, saying they should “retake France’s destiny” and that “most French” want neither Sarkozy nor Hollande.
“Our country is ready to make this important choice. People are angry, they have a need to punish errors,” Bayrou told the pro-government Le Figaro’s weekly supplement, which also featured him on the cover.
