As discontent mounts with both main candidates, could France be ready to elect a 'third-way' candidate in April's presidential elections, asks David Tresilian in Paris With fewer than two months to go before the first round of the French presidential elections on 22 April, a new candidate, François Bayrou of the centre-right UDF party, has emerged to challenge the two front-runners, left-winger Ségolène Royal and the centre-right UMP party's candidate and favourite for the presidency, Minister of the Interior Nicholas . Against a background of panic in the Socialist Party at Royal's thus far unconvincing campaign and widespread distrust of , Bayrou has emerged as a possible compromise candidate, presenting what the French newspaper Le Monde last month described as a manifesto that was both "social and liberal" and combining elements from the platforms of both main candidates. While Bayrou, a former minister of education, does not have the weight of one of France's two main parties behind him, he has aimed to position himself as the candidate of the average Frenchman, alarmed at the "ideological" politics of the two opposing main parties and seeking to go beyond them. His campaign, he told Le Monde last month, was based on the "best" of right and left, and he aimed to appeal neither to those "who consider competition and the market as inescapable horizons", nor "to those for whom free enterprise is suspect and profit a dirty word". Instead, his campaign was designed to appeal to those "who accept modernity, know about the challenges of globalisation and choose to manage them within a national and European framework". In an interview with the paper on 2 March, Bayrou said that having witnessed the "degradation of French political life and the weakening of our country", he was convinced that the only way forward was through "a national union that would convince every French person that we are going to pose the real questions and find non- partisan answers to them." If he were elected president he would form a coalition government, he said, as had recently happened in Germany. Here, Chancellor Angela Merkel has found widespread support on the left despite herself being a member of the centre- right CPD, in order to drive through reforms seen as necessary to preserve German competitiveness. What was needed in France, Bayrou told the newspaper, was a "refoundation" of the country's education system, which had lost its way, and a reduction in the national debt, which has now reached 64 per cent of GDP. Seven billion euros, or a little over US$9 billion, must be found immediately to reduce the debt, he said, reaching 21 billion over the next three years. As worries mount that Royal's campaign is failing to convince the Socialist Party's main constituency of public- sector workers and that 's lead in the opinion polls is becoming irreversible, there are signs that Bayrou's centrist campaign is beginning to pay off with French voters worried at the on-going crisis in French society and institutions. In opinion polls published at the end of February, 19 per cent of those questioned said they would vote for Bayrou in the first round of voting, as opposed to some 25 per cent for Royal and 29 per cent for . While these figures will please , who has been consistently ahead in the polls, they should also encourage Bayrou, for whom they are a personal best. The figures are, however, bad news for Royal, since they indicate that potential Socialist Party voters are turning away from her and towards Bayrou, the "third-way" candidate, and thereby splitting the anti- vote. If Bayrou manages to overtake Royal in the first round of voting, the Socialist Party candidate will be eliminated from the running, leaving the two centre-right candidates to slug it out in the election's second round on 6 May. If there is a contest between and Royal in the second round, then polls taken late last month suggest that 52 per cent of voters will vote for , with 48 per cent voting for Royal. Meanwhile, the dirty-tricks-campaign against both main candidates has been hotting up in advance of the first-round vote. Such campaigns are a feature of French political life, with both main parties trawling through the rival candidate's tax declarations for evidence of undeclared earnings or seeking to discredit them in other ways. While the centre-right UMP Party has traditionally been better at this than the socialists, the French satirical weekly Le Canard enchainé last week broke the news that had in 1997 acquired a luxury apartment in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine under "advantageous conditions". Unfortunately for , the real-estate company selling the apartment was also a beneficiary of various building contracts in the area, permits for which would have been given by the local mayor's office, headed until 2002 by . Royal, too, has not been saved from embarrassing headlines. Last month, her campaign suffered a series of setbacks, among them the resignation of Eric Besson, the Socialist Party's economics spokesman, who criticised the "incoherence" of the party's election proposals and the "failures" of the Royal campaign. Assuming that there are no new scandals, and with both main candidates now lined up behind their respective proposals, events now are likely to turn on how convincingly they can manage to present themselves in the run up to the elections. The latest test of Royal's "presidential" qualities came last week with the news that the European plane manufacturer Airbus, hit by management problems and falling orders, planned to put its house in order by laying off workers in both France and Germany as part of a continent-wide shake-up. Royal immediately announced that this was "unacceptable", pledging that she would do everything possible to prevent it, including meeting with Chancellor Merkel in Berlin. For his part, has been emphasising the by now well-known law-and-order features of his campaign, telling a group of young people in the southern French city of Perpignan recently that France's problems stemmed from the "moral crisis" sweeping the country. Where there is no "order" and no "authority", said, there is nothing to stop the "law of force, the law of gangs and the law of yobs" from taking over. "What the socialists have never understood is that law is there to serve the weakest members of society," he said, reiterating his view that France was now reaping the results of the alleged collapse of values represented by the strikes and protests of May 1968. has long broken a taboo of French life by arguing for American-style "positive discrimination" in order to help young people from immigrant backgrounds, mostly of African or Arab origin, to succeed in education and get better jobs in France by giving them assistance unavailable to people from European backgrounds. This he did in Perpignan, also telling his audience, from mixed backgrounds, that "when you live in France you have to respect French values...Ritual sacrifice cannot be carried out [in France] in the way it is in Kayes [Mali]." "There is a tiny minority that behaves in France in a way it could not in any country on the other side of the Mediterranean," said, referring to his belief that the weeks of rioting across France in late 2005, leading to the declaration of a state of emergency in the country, could be laid at the door of "unassimilated" immigrants.
