François Bayrou said that if he reached 18% of the vote by the end of February he would be happy; on Monday one of the many polling experts declared that if Bayrou ever reaches 20% he will become a major force. Well, it’s not quite the end of the month and Bayrou is at 19%. There is a feeling that, as with the No vote for the European referendum in 2005, there is a momentum gathering, a winning momentum which is going to be hard to stop. The difference of course is that whereas in the European referendum the reasons for voting Yes, though organised, were badly expressed, Bayrou has to beat the superbly organised Sarkozy machine, which is now going all out to stop him.
Jean-Marie Le Pen is also climbing, though more slowly. Two things to know about his figures: he tends to get a lower score in the opinion polls than he does in the election itself, since many of his voters do not like to say they’re going to vote Le Pen, and secondly, his supporters do not waver. 62% of those saying they are going to vote Bayrou admit their mind is not finally made up, whereas Le Pen’s base is firmer.

The loser at the moment is Ségolène Royal: Bayrou has risen 2 points, Le Pen 0.5: Royal has dropped 2.5. The figures are eloquent. Last week, before this latest poll, she re-organised her team, throwing out the young blood - the very interesting Arnaud de Montebourg and Christiane Taubira, born in French Guiana and one of the very few non-white French politicians, in favour of 13 elephants (average age 62) who had helped her party to defeat in 2002. Montebourg and Taubira were both part of the younger, internet-friendly team who helped her beat those same elephants in November’s primaries. Sarkozy has also risen 1 point. If Royal were to be against Sarkozy in the second round, this latest poll claims he would beat her by a widening margin of 52 - 48%.

On the extreme left, Olivier Besancenot has gained a point to 4%, Bové remains unmoved at 2%, the Communist Marie-George Buffet at 2.5%. Sadly the Green Dominique Voynet is sinking: she has lost 1.5% to her lowest score ever, 0.5%.

For French-readers it’s worth taking a hike over to Thierry Crouzet’s blog. Thierry is internationally considered one of the key figures in the active and powerful French web scene: his blog is always stimulating. I’ve never met him, but we seem to share at least three quirky beliefs: neither of us feel that Paris is the centre of France, or even the universe; both of us feel that open-source, participative internet is a vital and beautiful addition to the world; neither of us has a television. In yesterday’s blog, Thierry describes going to his neighbour’s house on Monday evening to watch François Bayrou being interviewed by le peuple on television, and his horror at seeing how a man he met and admired a few months ago has become subservient to the media he once decried. Indeed Bayrou once declared he would not appear on that very programme, and there he was, aping his rivals in a desire to please. One of the best things about Web 2.00 is that it allows (fosters?) independent thinking. Some people criticise it for pandering to the lowest common denominator in politics: rampant and visceral populism. But its great appeal is that it gives space for both.

If it’s true, then war could follow. There’s a madness, growing possibly to violence, resulting from this business of getting signatures. Like throwing a double six to start a board game, each candidate needs to have 500 signatures from elected representatives to kick off their presidential campaign (and qualify for financial support). The main parties rely on their parliamentary deputés, their regional councillors and the mayors of big and not so big towns who are all party-based. So the independent candidates have to go cap in hand to anyone left, meaning the rural mayors, many of whom are not affiliated to a party. Both extremes, left and right, have serious problems getting the requisite signatures. On the left, the Socialist Party has formally told all its representatives not to sign for anyone except Ségolène Royal: one of the reasons Lionel Jospin failed to reach the 2^nd round in 2002 was the plethora of candidates on the left. So this year she is desperate to limit the number by squeezing the signatures.

So what happens? Neither of the two extreme-left candidates, the Trotskyist Olivier Besancenot nor the anti-global José Bové, have anything like their 500 promises, let alone the signatures themselves. The shepherd Bové has counted only 353 into his fold, whereas Besancenot may have at most a hundred more. Meanwhile, thanks to Mme Royal’s whipping them into line, rural mayors willing to put their names on the left-of-left are a dwindling resource. And as the stakes get higher and the commodity gets rarer, the inevitable is bound to happen. So far the violence is virtual, on the web, but given M. Bové’s oft-repeated calls for direct action and civil disobedience, and his own willingness to go to prison for his beliefs, it is not inconceivable that amongst his supporters something more physical may happen.

In their blogs several Bové militants proudly affirm that they have “changed the minds” of 10 mayors who had agreed to sign for Besancenot. They did this by the simple expedient of going to see them. It is true, given that most of these mayors are rural, therefore agricultural, they may feel greater affinity with the sheep-farming Bové than with the urban postman Besancenot.

However, some of Bové’s own supporters criticise this form of field work. “This is not how you bring about a radically different sort of politics,” say some. “Our whole approach is to say José is not dividing the left but bringing it together.” Other supporters are unrepentant: “It’s quite normal to take Besancenot’s signatures. The political weakness of his candidacy is the duplicity of the LCR (the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire – Besancenot’s party).”

While this is going on, many mayors are going on “strike” – refusing to sign for anyone: “Every five years the candidates come and pester us,” says the mayor of a village with 750 inhabitants. “The rest of the time they ignore us.” Well at least this form of democracy is also good theatre.

The weekend saw Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Grande Messe at Lille – two days of rallying his supporters just as he is being left behind by François Bayrou in opinion polls.

Le Pen provokes waves of disgust amongst many of his compatriots: this weekend at Lille there were several anti-FN demonstrations (I haven’t heard of equivalent anti-Royal, anti-Sarkozy or anti-Bayrou demonstrations), and five years ago when he got into the second round, the streets of all major cities shook with anti-Le Pen chanting. This manifestation of disgust not only plays into Le Pen’s hands – for part of his appeal is to be a martyr to the truth he sees – it is tangible evidence of the great fear he causes (presumably the demonstrators do not credit their fellow-voters with enough intelligence to refrain from voting Le Pen of their own accord). More importantly, with their slogans his detractors paint Le Pen in the same simplistic bogeyman terms which they accuse him of using towards immigrants. It’s very hard to have a reasoned argument about the pros and cons of Le Pen’s policies, even, I suspect with the man himself, although I doubt I shall ever find out, since my interview with him last week was cancelled on the grounds he doesn’t have time for the foreign press.

It’s too easy to dismiss Le Pen as merely the incarnation of our worst racist selves, or as a populist whose ranting will blaze like a straw fire and die as quickly. The Front National is France’s oldest political party on the right and it is 24 years since their first electoral success: like it or not they are now anchored in the French political scene and to deny them, as many French politicians have done, enhances the martyr image. Far from representing only a narrow minority of frustrated Fascists, the Front National is the principal electoral voice of a much wider element of right-wing French life, including Traditional Catholics, monarchists and nationalists, none of whom are given space by the media and all of which are active in different parts of the country. Most of the Front’s new recruits come from the Communist Party and membership in rural France is soaring. The desire for the FN is complex.

The strength of Le Pen’s argument is that over 30 years it has not changed one iota, although under the influence of some of his team, it is now broadening to take in international issues. His main theme is still the rotten core of the political establishment, a concept which has turned-on the Great Unwashed since the late 1780’s. Contrary to what many like to believe, Le Pen’s message is not directly anti-immigrant. Certainly he sees what he calls the flood of immigrants as the immediate reason for France’s decline, but for him it is not the immigrants’ fault: they can’t help wanting to come to a great country. It is the fault of the politicians who have let them in. France’s greatest problem for Le Pen is its political elite. He says he is ready to let in immigrants, but only once all French people have secure employment. For him, the French have priority over everyone else – that’s why he cancelled my interview. That is the key to his success: national preference.

That in turn engenders policies such as the imposition of a heavy duty on all imported goods, payable by the country producing the goods, so that French-made clothes or washing machines are not at a disadvantage. Protectionism would be too weak a word for what he proposes, for he says that France cannot exist as a mere state within Europe, controlled by Brussels.

Taken as a whole, though, the programme for his fifth presidential race is far more reasonable than his previous programmes and is aimed at a far wider electorate. Leaving Europe is no longer seen as a sine qua non, instead he would try to renegotiate the existing treaties and, if that failed, hold a referendum. Similarly his objection to the 35 hour week has been tempered. This weekend he announced he wants a Marshall Plan to get the rural areas of France back on their feet, to be paid for presumably by tax levied on imports. He says that although he still hates rampant, jungle-style capitalism, he is not against a softer form of capitalism. He even sees beyond the frontiers of his country, talking a lot about the ecological dangers facing the planet and saying that if elected he would go to the UN to set-up an inter-nations partnership which would manage what he sees as the four pillars of our world: water, food, basic medicines and teaching.

Does he have any chance of repeating his success in 2002? Possibly: the answer may lie in the opinion polls – not the ones about presidential candidates but the one about polls themselves. When people were asked whether they tell the truth to the person asking the questions, a large minority said No. They admitted to enjoying the tease. Particularly when it comes to the Front National: they say they would not admit to a stranger on the phone that they are going to vote Le Pen – so not only do they falsely diminish Le Pen’s score but they falsely swell someone else’s. Another consequence of those anti-Le Pen demonstrations and the martyrization to which he is subjected in the media. Does he have a chance of becoming president? Barring a bloody armed insurrection (nuclear?) from France’s illegal immigrants during the next 10 weeks, I cannot see 51% of the French ever choosing Le Pen in the second round of an election. But then remember Madrid on the 11^th March 2004, and the effect of that horror on the Spanish electorate. Almost as a nation they turned against the favourite Aznar and 3 days after the bombings voted the virtually unknown Zapatero into office.

Yesterday François Bayrou made his major policy speech about the French economy: it runs to 33 pages and I’m not going to catalogue it here. Suffice it to say that from the outset he distinguished himself from his two principle rivals, Sarkozy and Royal, by describing France as it is now, rather than, as they did in their equivalent speeches, painting a rosy picture of how France might be after 5 years under their control. Bayrou’s policy has always been to avoid making promises.

He kicked off talking about the national debt. It would be misleading to say that the debt is a forbidden subject in the election, but most candidates apparently consider it’s not nice to talk about it, or perhaps they think we simple folk would not understand it, or would be frightened if we knew the truth. Bayrou claims there are three debts: financial, generational and ecological, and we have a collective responsibility to address all three. The financial debt is sobering if not downright frightening: 1,200 billion euros plus a further 800 billion in pension commitments. “Every day the State spends 20% more than it generates,” he said, adding that there are economists who consider it normal for a country to function with a massive debt. He believes, on the contrary, that massive debt cripples a country, is a brake on growth, induces this state of febrile insecurity we see in France today and is particularly harmful for those on low incomes, the elderly, the disabled, those who can no longer fend for themselves. He would add a clause to the constitution making it illegal for a government to present a deficit budget – as I think it is in the UK. Unlike Sarko and Ségo, he does not invoke that litany of long-dead men whose recitation is like reading the street-map of any French town – Jean Jaurès, Léon Blum, Condorcet, Zola, Hugo, Clemenceau, Carnot, Jules Ferry – as if somehow they were going to get us out of this mess. Bayrou simply describes France as it is now.

One of Bayrou’s closest advisors is also one of France’s best economists – by ‘best’ I mean he not only talks the hind legs off a donkey with great wit, insight and deep experience (amongst many other things he’s a magistrate at the Cour des comptes) but he’s an iconoclast and fiercely independent, a chap called Charles de Courson. He and I discussed the state of France for an hour or so last week, and while we talked mainly of other things (the French elite and why it is responsible for the mess France finds itself in), I was pleased that he took on board and incorporated in Bayrou’s speech everything I didn’t say on the French economy simply because I couldn’t get a word in edgeways. That’s what I call clever. But certainly Bayrou’s whole approach to economics is De Courson orientated: being up-front about the problem and realistic about the possible solutions (One of the things M. de Courson told me in his monologue-fleuve was that there are always several solutions to every problem, and all of them can work – this flies in the face of conventional enarque thinking that, as in mathematics, there is only one “right answer” – and only a bona fide enarque has the skill to find it).

Bayrou on business was also good news to me, and I would guess to the several hundred Brits who have set up businesses in France. While his rivals glorify the multitude of fonctionnaires (and implicitly the bureaucracy they uphold), he says clearly that small businesses will never flourish while they are buried under reams of Ubu-esque (actually more Ionesco-like) paperwork, describing exactly the situation of my neighbour, a plumber, whose wife spends all day every day battling the paperwork while her husband is out trying to earn the family income. Or indeed the situation I find myself in, wanting to pay a French cameraman for three days’ work with money from a UK-based production company: the quantity of forms and what they ask on them is simply mind-boggling, and will take me much more than three days to fill in. And we’re in Europe!

Associated with small businesses of course are French banks, which again Bayrou quite rightly identified as a disaster area – not a French exception as the current internet-based revolt in Britain against high-street banks shows. But in France they simply do not want to make small loans to a shop-keeper, say, to improve their premises.

At a more fundamental level he recognises that in France business is a dirty word, a mind-set that has to change if the country is ever to bring itself into competition with even its European neighbours. To set things straight, he took the trouble to point out the reality of the French business world: in fact of the country’s 2.7 million companies, fully 1.5 million are one-man bands, with no employees. A further 1 million companies employ between 1 and 9 people. Thus nearly 93% of all French businesses employ either no one or less than 10 people – a far cry from the stereo-type of slave-driving businessmen ruthlessly exploiting shed-fulls of workers. Like the inestimable Jacques Marseille (another iconoclast economist and historian whose recent book I shall be quoting soon), François Bayrou risks disbelief by telling his compatriots the way it is, rather than the way they think it was.

Bayrou proposes to allow every company, large, small or tiny, to take on two new people with no employers’ charges. The only thing the employer would pay on top of the wage would be something towards pensions.

Similarly with the electorally thorny 35-hour week. The problem at the moment is that often workers cannot work any overtime because every hour they work incurs even more charges for the employer. Bayrou suggests that they should work overtime at salary plus 35%, and their employer should pay 35% less than normal charges, so in fact the employer pays out the same amount as he would for a normal hour’s work while the worker gets 35% more. If you give the employer any more incentives to work his people overtime, he’ll do that rather than take on new employees, which has to be done as well – given, as M. Bayrou says, there are really 4 million unemployed and as many again under-employed.

He wants to introduce the idea of Business Angels and a French version of the American Small Business Act. To help young people start businesses he suggests that a “senior” be put over the company as a godfather for a year at least. Not sure who pays for him or her. In the same logic he suggests that people taking a first job should be paid by the state for the first year, since they are unlikely to bring much benefit to the company while they are learning. He also suggests a French VSO scheme where young people would do community service, either in France, Europe or in a developing country, and their work during these 6 months, officially assessed, would count on their CV’s.

As with much of what M. Bayrou says, the press do not give it much time, preferring to write about Sarkozy’s “improvised” visit to a deprived estate in Perpignan or Le Pen’s mega-meeting in Lille – about which I shall write later.

Another aspect of Ségolène Royal’s lack of vision is her attitude towards what the French call statistiques ethniques. At the moment it is illegal in France to ask on any official form, such as the Census, questions about racial origins or religious beliefs. In France there are only French citizens. Thus any figures about how many people of North African origin there are, or how many Muslims, are based on guess-work, and published totals vary according to the political views of the editor of each newspaper or magazine. It is simply not possible to say with any certainty how many North African, black African or Asian French people there are – nor therefore to get proper statistics about unemployment, housing, scholastic success, public health. There have been attempts to do so, initially by Michèle Tribalat, a researcher and more recently by other CNRS researchers, but their work remains unacceptable to many of their own colleagues, as revealed by a petition launched today to keep ethnic origins out of statistics.

At the moment, the only way to get figures about non-white French people is to assume someone’s racial roots from their name – which contradicts the idea of anonymity: you have to know his name is Mohammed Hamoun before you guess he has North African roots. But from there to say he is or is not Muslim (let alone whether or not he’s a practising or lapsed Muslim) is a mind-boggling leap into stereo-type. (It has always intrigued me that the French, who claim all immigrants leave their cultural baggage at the frontier and willingly adopt total Frenchitude, never wonder why couples of North African origin still call their children by North African names, and indeed talk in Arabic amongst themselves – on a train approaching Montpellier last week the air was full of Arabic as the French passengers phoned their families or friends).

However, moving in a more open direction, the Representative Council for Black Associations recently sent a questionnaire to all the presidential candidates, asking for their views on the principal of statistiques ethniques. Nicolas Sarkozy replied they are “necessary and useful”, in keeping with his sympathy for some discreet form of positive discrimination. François Bayrou replied that “Nothing is gained by concealing the diversity of our people,” which seems consistent with his honesty in other matters. Marie-George Buffet (Communist) and Dominique Voynet (Green) also said they are in favour of using ethnic statistics. Only Ségolène Royal demurred, saying interpreting ethnic statistics is “very delicate” because of “the risk of labelling”.

The fear of labelling people from other backgrounds is a hang-over from Vichy, when of course it became literally that, a label pinned to the chest. But that was a period when most “foreigners” had white faces and, without a star on their chest, could blend into the crowd. That is not the case today, when people from North and West Africa are rightly called the “visible minorities”. Meeting them, you don’t have to ask their names to know their roots lie beyond Europe. Denying on paper the evidence of your own eyes seems to me a glorification of blindness.

Ségolène Royal continues to lead her faithful back into the woolly depths of Old France. Having begun her campaign surfing on a wave of enthusiasm generated amongst the principally young blogging community, and used their votes in the primaries to defeat the ancient elephants of the Socialist Party, she yesterday confirmed the massive U-turn she initiated in her policy speech of the 11^th February. That major statement marked a return to the style and values of François Mitterrand, who came to power 26 years ago. Yesterday she went further, nominating her “new” team, consisting almost entirely of 13 figures from the past – most of whom have spent the past year telling everyone how awful she is. Her credibility plummets. Most disappointing of her choices is former prime minister Lionel Jospin (only a few months ago particularly vitriolic about her), who successfully led the party to crushing defeat in the last presidential elections. That the Socialist Party is doing badly in this election is very largely due to the fact it has failed to create a fresh identity for itself in the intervening 5 years. Royal’s initial call that she was going to change France, now, ten weeks away from the vote, rings sadly hollow. Change is indeed what France needs – I don’t mean only reforms, but a change of heart. Travelling round France last week, everyone I spoke to had the same message: they have had enough of the present bunch.

It looks as though Royal got her timing sadly wrong. Presumably she made her trunk call to the ancient elephants last week, when her ratings were dropping, despite (or because of) her February 11th policy speech. But at the beginning of this week she made a very impressive television appearance, on her own, and her popularity over the last couple of days has been rising again - but too late to cancel the call for help from her former enemies. That mis-timing may prove fatal.

Apart from anything else, Royal’s about-face bodes ill for the future if she is elected president. The incumbent is known as the weather-vane, changing direction with the slightest breeze. She seems ready to follow that tradition faithfully. Certainly nobody voting for her would know quite what they were endorsing – a new-look France embracing the 21^st century or more of the mid-20^th century dogma of control by state and unions.

It’s hard to remember that the French presidential election campaign has not officially started yet. It won’t begin until April 9^th. First, each candidate has to obtain signatures from 500 elected representatives (for an explanation of that see my comment on Tomás Ruta’s comment on my blog on Le Pen, or my December France Profonde in Prospect). They have until 6.00 p.m. on the 18^th March to get them, with the list of signatures, showing us who has signed for which candidate, posted two days later. Until that moment, for the petits candidats it’s all just messing about waiting and hoping – indeed most spend their energy simply trying to get the signatures. Today is the official start of their quest. Before today, each candidate has only been allowed to obtain a promise – which may or may not be respected.

Of the 46 candidates, only 5 say they are sure they of their 500 signatures: Sarkozy, Royal, Bayrou, Marie-Georges Buffet (Communist) and Arlette Laguiller (Force Ouvrière). I’m not going to list the 41 who don’t have 500 promises: go to pluralisme.org which gives names and details. 6 of them stood in the 2002 elections and got a combined 35.28% of the first round vote, including Jean-Marie Le Pen who got through to the second round. He is said to be concerned he has not got 500 promises. It is said that the main candidates, who with their party’s deputés, regional councillors and mayors command far more than the requisite 500 representatives, tell their sympathisers not to sign for other candidates who might weaken their vote, trying to limit the number of rivals. The main reason for the terrible mess in the 2002 elections was that there were too many candidates on the left, which enabled Le Pen to beat the Socialist Jospin.

Yet if 35% of the electorate are deprived of their vote, democracy cannot be said to be well served. Some may feel the debate is somewhat academic, because only two candidates can get through into the second round, so those who want to vote for the petits candidats will be frustrated later anyway. Indeed in 2002 many socialists felt obliged to vote Chirac to prevent Le Pen becoming president.

According to Libération, most of the major minors, the extremes of left and right plus the Greens, have around 450-460 promises each. José Bové seems to be doing less well with 330, but he started after the others and with many sympathisers has time to catch up. Jean-Philippe Allenbach says he has 792 firm promises and the charismatic Rachid Nekkaz, who is auctioning on the web his flat and campaign headquarters to finance his campaign, says he has firm promises from 521 mayors. If you want to bid for a pleasant two room flat in Paris’ smart 16^th arrondissement, the starting price is 1 euro and for 700,000 you don’t have to wait for the April 15^th closing date.

A week is a long time in politics and I have been away from my blog for a week – researching a documentary film about power in France. During that week, Ségolène Royal collapsed a bit further in the opinion polls, was given up for lost by many commentators but, since her television debate on Monday, has started to climb again. François Bayrou has continued his steady crawl upwards, but is still way behind the main two and for Sarkozy it has been yet another week at No.1.

80% of the electorate say they are still undecided, nevertheless there is something very odd about Ségolène Royal’s campaign. A year ago she was very much an outsider. Then, thanks largely to her use of the internet and participative debates, she rose spectacularly to be elected Socialist candidate last November, convincingly beating the old guard. Since then, as we all know, she has disappointed. But, given the way our democracy works, by definition a swinging pendulum, she should have been the front-runner from the outset. For although Sarkozy has distanced himself from Chirac, he is nevertheless identified as Chirac’s successor: he is president of the party Chirac created, he has been a minister in Chirac’s government for 5 years: despite himself he carries the can for the terrible five years at least of Chirac-inspired failings. Even though he wants a change, with his control of the media and so much else in France, Sarkozy represents the current rulers, so in our democracy it would be natural for him to go, as the pendulum swings left. But no. With the campaign now well established, he is ten points ahead of Royal.

Why is the electorate showing so little enthusiasm for the Socialist candidate, particularly one who is not associated with the policy failures of Lionel Jospin? As Françoise Fressoz says in Les Echos, Royal has learnt from Jospin’s mistakes in the 2002 elections, unlike him she spends enormous energy listening to people and then creating policies from a synthesis of what they say. Her problem is that as yet she has not managed to imprint these on the collective consciousness. She has also failed to decide on the Socialist Party’s identity. So she falls back on tired socialist mantras, but even so, tired mantra-repeating socialists like Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Laurent Fabius refuse to show the slightest flicker of enthusiasm for her. Nor do any of the newer, social-democratic European socialist parties. Last week her economic advisor walked out. It is no secret that Royal’s team do not get on at all with the official Socialist Party – whose president is Royal’s partner. But Royal needs them, not for their ideas but for their weight and logistics – she is not going to win this election without them. But they are not coming towards her, rather they seem to be leaning towards François Bayrou.

Meanwhile, as the possibility of Bayrou’s becoming president gains ground (the latest IFOP poll says that if he makes it into the second round, he will win it) so the glaring weakness of his position is becoming apparent. Who is he going to ask to form a government? He has let it be known he might ask a Strauss-Kahn-like figure to be prime minister. But within weeks of his election there will be the parliamentary elections: while the presidentials are about individuals, parliamentary elections are about parties. Can Bayrou’s UDF party field enough candidates to constitute a majority? No. So if the Socialist party does well, what kind of mess will that make? The Socialist president, François Hollande (Royal’s partner), would become prime minister, elbowing out Bayrou’s choice, and he will appoint his team of ministers, with whom Bayrou will have to work. If the right-wing UMP do well, Bayrou will have to work with Sarkozy as prime minister. By voting Bayrou you are inevitably voting cohabitation. Bayrou himself has said that he wants to rule with a national union, but to be credible he would have to have enough senior politicians from the left and the right commit to him (by leaving their own party) before the election, so his voters know who they are voting for. Yet if he does that, he will also alienate some – who like him but don’t want to be governed by a Strauss-Kahn or a Jean-Louis Borloo (currently with Sarkozy).

English-speaking readers might be forgiven for thinking that there is only one paysan standing as candidate in the French presidential elections – the Roquefort cheese producing MacDonalds-basher, José Bové. But there is another, higher in the opinion polls and much more likely to get at least into the second round: François Bayrou. Born in the foothills of the Pyrenees, both his father and mother worked the family farm (Calixte and Emma, names that seem as old as French farming). When François Bayrou was 23, studying at Bordeaux university, his father was killed in a farming accident and overnight the young man became a farmer, later a teacher as well. Politics was the last thing on his mind.

Last Saturday at an agricultural fair in the Gers he made a major and delicate speech about the future of French farming. As you will see if you look at the video, his audience was not studded with rappers, left-bank intellectuals or any other Paris-Match favoured pipole, but some 500 farmers, a sea of white-haired, thick-set ruddy-faced men. Indeed, the second-most-noticeable-thing about Bayrou is his avoidance of big razzmatazz meetings, so beloved of his two principal rivals. He prefers to talk like an ordinary human-being at ordinary human-being-sized events. The most-noticeable thing about him is his spectacular rise in the opinion polls.

A farmer addressing farmers deep in farming France: a recipe, you’d think, for more of the “change the CAP over my dead body” stuff dealt out so often by Jacques Chirac. But no. Bayrou is the first French politician I have heard admit that the [French-inspired] CAP policy, based on production, is wrong for all sorts of reasons. One of these, says Bayrou, is that French farmers hold not only the “tissue agricole francais” in their hands, but “le tissue agricole de la plantète”. World agriculture, Bayrou says quite plainly, is endangered by the (French) agricultural policy. European subsidies on production have ruined African agriculture: “We have assassinated the African farmer,” he said “And this policy will be changed, so that we cannot be held responsible. We cannot let the African countries die of hunger.” For years the theory, pushed by Tony Blair, The Economist and their ilk, that the Common Agricultural Policy is actively harming African farmers, has been pooh-poohed by Chirac and those who want to maintain the pampered status quo of their dwindling agricultural voters. Bayrou’s stand is as brave as it is clear-headed.

Another consequence of the European agricultural policy, says M. Bayrou, is that whereas 20 years ago French farmers were independent, now they are totally dependent on subsidies (around me that is certainly true). At the same time the image of farmers has gone from being defenders of nature to nature’s principal polluters. Bayrou’s quiet but insistent message to the farmers was clear: be independent of Brussels with its stifling bureaucracy, live by and with the market. He suggests “new” markets such as growing cereals for biofuels. At the moment cereal-produced alternatives to fossil-fuels are almost unknown in France, whereas in the UK Tesco has been selling a bioethanol mix at its pumps for over a year. In France such an initiative could only come from the government: an announcement of future intent was made last June, but quietly forgotten, like so much else, during the long summer lunch-break.

Sunday 11^th February was the date Ségolène Royal set to pick herself up, shake herself down and start all over again. After rocketing to success throughout 2006, to be overwhelmingly elected the socialist candidate in November, she went into a stall throughout December and January. She said she was listening to her compatriots cries of despair. Her compatriots, losing faith, said she has no ideas. The 11^th February was the day she fixed to convince the world that she is right.

Her initial instinct to listen to the electorate was a good one, it marked her out from her predecessors and some of her rivals. But her second instinct seems to me highly dubious. Rather than continue to surge forward with new ideas and new technology to conquer new voters, she decided to fall back on the methods used by Mitterrand in 1981: in January of that year he announced his 110 Propositions, in February 11^th of this year she has announced her 100 propositions. Today’s speech was written for her by Erik Orsenna, one of France’s most distinguished writers, but too well-known as Mitterrand’s speech-writer. Copying Mitterrand to that extent, falling back on things that worked 26 years ago, is a misjudgement. Surely? Particularly since Mitterrand’s 110 Propositions, having got him elected, notoriously failed him miserably in practice. Two years into his presidency he realised his nationalisation policies were leading France to ruin, increasing unemployment and the national debt. In 1983 he had to devalue the franc and operate the infamous U-turn which alienated millions of his supporters, who still feel betrayed. Surely Royal can’t want to tread that same path? Yet having worked so hard to throw off the heavy-weight “elephants” of the Socialist Party, exactly those people who had worked under Mitterrand, having succeeded in doing that against all odds, her first independent gesture is…..to fall back under Mitterrand’s shadow. It’s a quality I mentioned the other day: seeing the future through the eyes of history, of using history as a small child uses a security blanket. Objectively, Mitterrand was an extremely dubious figure but his shade holds a large part of France in thrall.

What are her 100 propositions? For French readers, Royal’s own site is the best place to see them. Clearly no one can make 100 propositions that are all going to be water-tight – notice she does not call them promises. Generally speaking the smaller the proposition the more sensible it is, and the more likely to be adopted – at least for a while. She wants to prevent the accumulation of mandates – that is, prevent an individual being at the same time a mayor, sitting on the regional council, perhaps being the regional president and being an MP, minister or senator. She also proposes preventing one person or group owning and controlling several branches of the media. She also wants to allow foreigners who have been full-time residents for at least 5 years to vote in local elections, by which she presumably means regional and general (departmental) councils.

Some of the propositions are based on her own experiments in the region over which she resides: people’s juries to watch over elected representatives, participative budgets in local affairs. Anything local, it seems to me, has a greater chance of being adopted.

But most of her propositions are too vague to convince any but the most naive: “To put in place an industrial policy capable of preparing the future and reducing the risk of off-shoring by creating a National Agency of Re-industrialisation.” Or “Reform the State: a euro spent must be a useful euro.” Many were already on the Socialist Party’s programme, wooing the left with promises to scrap last year’s labour reform which helps small business, and with a certain sad inevitability the State must still meddle in the way managers do their job and risk-takers are rewarded: “Companies will be charged a lower rate of tax if profit is ploughed back into the company and a higher rate if the profit is given to share holders.” Exeunt omnes.

She makes a number of guarantees, which almost by definition are untenable non-starters, for example that absolutely everyone will be guaranteed a lifetime’s housing security, or that no young person will be out of work for more than 6 months, or that those made redundant will be kept on 90% of salary, guaranteed by the state for a year. Does that apply to the nefarious bosses to whom José Bové referred, who are “making 300 times the minimum wage”? That is 4.5 million euro a year. Will she pay them 90%?. She also promises to increase the minimum wage, increase pensions and “consolidate the 35-hour week”. I have not read any proposals about reducing France’s colossal debt.

Any candidate faces that unanswerable dilemma: do I thrill the crowd by promising the moon? Or do I remain sensible and perhaps bore? François Bayrou has chosen the second option, refusing to make any promises since he recognises the impossibility of knowing whether he will be able to carry them out. Royal has taken the Sarkozy route: pile up the promises, treat the electorate as suckers. Of course some are; those who are voting for the first time have every right to expect that things will be different. All of us at 18 were certain that it was our generation that would finally change everything, that we were heralds to a new era. Hélas!