At this stage of an election campaign everything seems to stagnate. All the policies that interest people have been put forward, most know what the candidates stand for and if they don’t, well there’s a final debate on prime time television on Wednesday to find out. Clearly the two protagonists feel there’s nothing new to discuss, so while they wait, Sarkozy and Royal trade insults. Which is a terrible shame, because there are many important issues that have been entirely side-stepped, like the environment. In January that is what kicked off the campaign and everyone said it would be the key issue. Rubbish: a classic case of potential presidents fiddling while the earth burns. We are living, in France, through the hottest April on record, yet neither candidate refers to it, as though it were literally too hot to handle. Instead they get steamed up about whether or not it is constitutionally correct for François Bayrou to talk to Royal.

Royal was pleased with her debate on Saturday morning with Bayrou and it is clear that the two could form some sort of alliance against Sarkozy. This understandably makes Sarkozy furious, as he sees that even if he wins the battle for the Elysée the war is far from won. What he assumed would be his parliamentary majority could be reduced to opposition status if Royal teams up with Bayrou, thus seriously restricting his power. But the more he insults Bayrou, the more the country dislikes him – Bayrou after all representing nearly 7 million voters. This morning most polls show Sarkozy dropping and Royal rising and my email inbox is full of anti-Sarko circulars sent by friends: one of them is very good, a variant of the photograph of the president which has by law to hang in every mayor’s office. I’ll try to get a link.

Meanwhile the depressing news comes from a TNS poll for Le Monde, showing that 56% of the people voting for Royal will do so not for her or her policies, but simply to stop Sarkozy. That is similar to 2002, when the Socialists had to vote Chirac to keep out Le Pen. But the fact that more than half her voters say they are not really convinced by her or her vision of France is both a sad reflection on her and a condemnation of Sarkozy if he gets in.

Perhaps more surprisingly, 40% of Sarkozy’s potential voters say they are backing him only to prevent Royal. In all, nearly half Sunday’s voters will be voting negatively, simply to stop the other candidate. The first round was marked by an exceptionally high turn-out, which has been interpreted as a renewed interest in the way the country is run, but that will evaporate if people feel an election is about stopping someone rather than positively endorsing a candidate whose policies reflect your beliefs.

This negative voting is causing Royal to rise in the polls and Sarkozy to fall, and with nearly 40% of Bayrou’s voters still undecided, Royal must be starting to feel she has a chance on Sunday.
 

Sarkozy on television last night was disturbingly convincing. He was the guest of Arlette Chabot, a highly esteemed interviewer: the night before, she had interviewed Ségolène Royal. Royal had been all right – charming, convinced, clear in what she wants but rather dull. After an hour I left. Sarkozy on the other hand was almost compulsive. Informed, clear and reasonable, he lived up to Royal’s criticism of him that he has an answer for everything, while at the same time visibly trying to counter his wider reputation for nervy, anxious aggression. In both he succeeded - he was almost too good. A viewer asks a question about Alzheimer’s disease, Sarkozy proves he hasn’t got it by rattling out figures of the number of sufferers, the social cost, the medical origins of the disease is and where we are with research. In a similar exercise at the beginning of the first campaign, on the TV channel owned by one of Sarkozy’s pals, so pat were his answers there was strong suspicion he had been briefed beforehand about the questions. It felt like that again last night, though much better disguised.

For it was an excellent performance, and I quite see why anyone listening to Royal one evening and Sarkozy the next would say No contest. To be honest, there isn’t one – on present form Sarkozy is bound to win in 8 days’ time. But while the performance was good, the script was pretty ropey, for there are very worrying aspects in Sarkozy’s vision of power.

One is that his republic (and I think one can call it that, he will control it) will be based on results. While that’s an effective way of assessing athletes, it is a populist, naive way of judging most professions. It results in cheating, moving the goal-posts or covering things up. Unemployment is an obvious example – the present government is under fire for giving partial, flattering results. Sarkozy has promised to reduce unemployment to 5% by the end of his 5 year mandate, so Chabot asked him “And if you don’t achieve that, you won’t stand for re-election?” Ah well, madame, it’s not as simple as that. Indeed it isn’t, and she had missed the main, deeper point that in themselves statistics and simplistic better/worse results are a slippery slope. For example Sarkozy’s pressure on the police to reduce delinquency does two things. It assumes that delinquency is something that should be left between the police and certain young people – that educators, social workers, all those  —ists beloved of the left, have no place in Sarkozy’s republic. Secondly it pushes to police to cheat. In the past if 30 cars were burned in one night this was treated as 30 separate incidents. Now, according to police officers, they are wrapped up as a single event so they can say “Yes, delinquency is falling”. To massage the car burning statistics a little more, Sarkozy last year created a new category: “incendie par propagation”. In other words only the car actually torched by human hand is considered the object of a criminal act, any others destroyed subsequently are merely accidental victims.

The other aspect of Sarkozy’s vision which strikes me as dangerous and on which I feel it was the interviewer’s duty to get clarification, although Chabot did not push it, is the assumption that once he is president he has a free hand to enact all and everything he has said he will do during the campaign. That is to say the democratic moment is the presidential election – after that, sit back and keep your mouth shut because “le peuple have voted me in”. Take the 35 hour week. Sarkozy has made no bones about wanting to reform it, so, he says, if trades union leaders object (as they must), he will tell them “It’s part of my programme, voted by le peuple, you have no democratic right to object. There will be no further debate.” It is the method of the populist-turned-dictator, naive populism combined with twisted logic: last night he said that when he suggested a ministry of national identity all the press protested, but “clearly the press are wrong because last Sunday the French people voted for me”. Q.E.D. A majority brooks no argument: the people cannot be wrong. This is extremely naive because very few of those voting Sarkozy on May 6th will agree with everything in his programme. The logical extension is that anyone who disagrees with one small point in Sarkozy’s programme should on no account vote for him.

Again it strikes me as odd that his interviewers didn’t pick him up on the obvious inconsistencies of his answers: he is against treating railways workers as a special case for retirement – they can retire after 37 years rather than 40 for everyone else. Sarkozy says “In a country where the word Egalité is stuck up in front of every public building, we can’t have that.” Then when asked about encouraging private medicine that principle is forgotten and he is allowed to fudge over a very inadequate answer about freedom of choice. Anyone who uses equality as a justification for a social measure is freely giving away rods for his opponents to beat him with. Even on prime time television an interviewer has a duty to push her interviewee to the roots of his or her logic.

On economic policies he went one further than economic patriotism and state protection – he said the way to prevent companies off-shoring (or moving to Eastern Europe) is to have more family businesses (like Michelin? which lays off workers just like any other), because only family-owned businesses have a total commitment to their work-force and to France. There must be no more investment from foreign pension funds. Apart from the fact that France’s massive debt is serviced mainly from abroad, it is painful to contemplate the state of French industry at the end of his mandate if foreign investment were withdrawn.

As has become usual in this presidential campaign, all serious talk about Europe and international affairs is side-stepped. Never mind, last night’s show will have convinced many that Sarkozy knows what he wants where Royal, fluttering about with Bayrou, keeps changing the parametres. For most people, that is enough.

Given Sarkozy’s predeliction for thinking of the presidential election as a football match, this website sent by a friend is fun and useful. See if you can help Ségolène beat Sarkozy - it’s a great game!

Poor Sarkozy is furious: it’s just not fair! Bayrou is supposed to be dead - but he won’t lie down! He lost Sunday’s election but he still dominates French news and thinking. In fact the third man is playing a courageous game, which may prove suicidal.

Yesterday in his press conference, rather than capitulating with dignity as tradition says he should, giving his vote to one or other candidate, Bayrou fiercely maintained his independence: “In the endless stand-off between the endless right and endless left, Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal are not going to mend but aggravate the problems.” Profound problems, due to “an absence of democracy”, says Bayrou: “difficulties with the press, no separation of power, collusion between the worlds of big business, media and politics.” It takes a brave or foolhardy politician to attack those bastions of power.

Bayrou did not mince his words about Sarkozy: “by his complicity with business and the media, with his taste for intimidation and threats, Sarkozy is going to concentrate power in a new [and dangerous] way. By his temperament, by the themes he has chosen to stir up, he is likely to aggravate the wounds of our social fabric. I think there are similarities between Berlusconi and Sarkozy.”

Ségolène Royal does not get off much better, Bayrou confirming that her policies are far from his: “she seems better intentioned when it comes to democracy….but her programme, multiplying the role of the State, perpetuating the illusion that it’s the State’s role to look after everything, and that it can look after everything, is going in precisely the wrong direction…..both candidates have promised to increase public spending in a way absolutely mind-boggling for a country as deeply in debt as ours….Sarkozy is going to exacerbate the problems of democracy…Royal is going to make the problems of the economy worse for years to come, and both are going to deepen our deficit and debt….” Not the way to make alliances with either of them.

But clearly and perhaps cleverly Bayrou is looking beyond the presidential election to the parliamentary elections in June. In a sense he is already dismissing the president, whoever he or she is, as irrelevant, for if Bayrou’s party with its 7 million voters can maintain its strength and unity through the next series of elections it may be able to sideline whoever is president into a parliamentary minority. If he were able to do that, holding the balance of power in that way would indeed be a real victory for Bayrou, as well as being the best way of democratically controlling Sarkozy’s excesses (Bayrou presumably betting like everyone else that Sarkozy will be president). To do this, Bayrou is forming a new party, the Democratic Party, broader than his present UDF, representing a wider electorate, perhaps even the far right and left.

Sarkozy’s undisguised fury is proof that at the moment Bayrou has the whip-hand. How can it be that the man who lost the election is being talked about everywhere? “In a football competition,” says Sarkozy, “the final is between the number one and the number two: the number three does something else but he’s not in the final.” There. That’s a message to the press barons: don’t talk about him, talk about moi! Like the upstaged prima donna he is, Sarkozy is now refusing a public debate with Bayrou. And of course, since Bayrou’s principal criticism of Sarkozy is his aggressive authoritarian manner, this only weakens Sarkozy’s standing. However it could all go pear-shaped for Bayrou if the new party does not have enough power, or if it is as leaky as the UDF: Sarkozy would now have no qualms about clobbering Bayrou from a great height.

Another scenario, equally plausible, is that Bayrou and Royal are reconciled so that in the parliamentary elections (again, assuming Sarkozy wins the presidential) the Socialists get the majority of seats and Royal becomes prime minister, forcing a co-habitation, with Bayrou continuing his role as go-between. but conventional wisdom says a co-habitation makes for weak government, and the last thing France needs is weak government. Very hard to answer: in France a strong government does not necessarily mean the reforms so vital to the country are accepted: the street plays a powerful – and usually negative – role, as two recent prime ministers have found to their cost. Would the vociferous street be quieter if it felt a wider representation in parliament? That is Bayrou’s bet, that is the game he has decided to play.

The French press this morning is galloping away in pursuit of the second round campaign, Sunday’s vote fast fading into the dust. Before it disappears altogether, however, the analysis of that vote is worth looking at, and I give a brief summing up on the Prospect website which should be posted on Wednesday morning – including the surprising news that more women voted Sarkozy than Ségolène Royal. Why? Readers’ comments are welcome.

Another surprise was that the abstention rate of French people living abroad was 60%, against a national average of 15.4%. Of the 1.37 million French people living outside the country, 941,364 put themselves on the electoral list, but the majority did not vote. As far as I know, no one has offered an explanation. I wonder whether it means most feel they are not going back to France. Any ex-pat French readers’ views more than welcome.

It’s also fascinating to see how France is divided by geography: the north, east, south and centre are mainly pro-Sarkozy, while Royal’s support comes mainly from the west and south-west – in fact an area suspiciously like the enlarged Aquitaine ruled by the English from 1369 to about 1415. Totally irrelevant, of course. Nobody would suggest the Black Prince and his cursèd cohorts of routiers introduced socialism to France! But more seriously it is intriguing that the ex-industrial north is no longer a socialist heartland, as I mentioned in the article on Le Pen in the April issue of Prospect.

Looking forward, much of the focus of the next 12 days will be on François Bayrou, or rather his voters. Both candidates, but particularly Royal, need him and/or them. He polled nearly 7 million, an impressive increase of 5 million since 2002. He scored above average with the young, particularly the 24-35 age group: less well with the over-60s where Sarkozy did well. Most of Bayrou’s supporters are from the middle-class professions – doctors and lawyers – and higher management, with a good number of self-employed artisans and shop-keepers. He also scores well in traditionally Catholic areas. The reason he failed to get second place, according to Pascal Perrineau, director of the Sciences Po’s research centre, Cevipof, is that he did not convince the couches populaires.

Roughly half Bayrou’s supporters are true centrists, which in France means they are basically leaning right. His party, the UDF, is associated with the right. But many of his new supporters come from the left. They are either Bo-bo socialists (bourgeois-bohemian), meaning the more reform-minded (Blairist) left or Trotskyists, according to André Santini, a UDF mayor who flipped over to Sarkozy a few weeks ago. They will almost certainly vote Royal on the 6th May. Bayrou himself will tell us tomorrow what he recommends, but he will probably leave it up to the individual conscience. He has come an enormous distance selling the line that France needs neither right nor left but centre – and any change of tune now will destroy his credibility for good. Some of his followers will probably abstain in the second round, but I guess roughly half will go for Sarkozy because he is more likely to help small enterprises, half will go for Royal because she represents the caring face of France.

But to win, Royal needs more than half, and already she has said “we need to invite another dimension to our gathering,” meaning Bayrou, But what can she offer that means anything to him? Prime minister? She wouldn’t dare – even if he agreed to take it, which would blow his independence. But she can afford to lean further to the centre than Sarkozy: he is afraid of losing Le Pen’s voters, won with such effort in the first round, but she knows the far left will be more forgiving because they will do anything to prevent Sarkozy. So she could ease her policies on employment, perhaps, offering a platform closer to Tony Blair’s. It will be fascinating to see how far she dares go.

France must be one of the only democracies which publishes the official estimates of election results while the polling booths are still functioning. The results are announced officially at 8.00 pm on election day, the same moment that the booths are supposed to close - but because of the long queues (up to an hour’s wait in some places), the prefects said that those caught in a queue at 8.00 pm would be allowed to shuffle on to the ballot box - even though the streets around them were full of screams of joy and pain.

In fact disappointment is the immediate reaction amongst most of the people I have spoken to. Disappointment of a promise unfulfilled, disappointment over the two candidates chosen. The result is so tame when so much was on offer – a real chance to change political attitudes and thus bring about the changes that France needs. A chance to upset the media who, since September last year, have promised us an election between Sarkozy and Royal, as though they were the only two candidates. The fact they have been proved right does not cover them with glory, but rather the opposite: a feeling that, as candidates like Bayrou and Le Pen have said from the outset, they are in cahoots with each other and the forces and sources of power in the country. Anything which wrong-footed the press, as for example the rapid rise of François Bayrou from 6% to around 20% at times during the campaign, was greeted with an extraordinary mix of ridicule, disdain and alarm. Many hoped that for the third time (after 2002 and the referendum of 2005), French voters would surprise the world and unsettle the over-confident media, so often accused of being out-of-touch. But no.

Perhaps the greatest disappointment has been the knowledge that before us we have five more years of the old left against right, both set in their predictable, unexciting policies, constantly bickering, automatically refusing the other’s propositions with knee-jerk lack of thought, simply to please their own vested interests. The country divided, at war with the other half. Us and Them. Reforms all but impossible. For both candidates have that within them and their policies to take France even further downwards in its present slow descent away from economic viability and full employment: Ségolène Royal, much like Britain’s Old Labour, promising to strengthen trade union membership, keep the Code du Travail intact and make it difficult for small companies to innovate. Sarkozy simply divisive, aggressive. Already the young in the tower-block estates are against him and he, during the three month campaign, only once dared set foot within them, knowing the bad pictures that could result. How will he, how can he, given his past, ease this terrible wound in France? But it’s not just the tower-block estates: elsewhere in the country there is a climate of fear about Sarkozy. Over the next couple of days on this blog I shall be writing about a book by Serge Portelli, a member of the magistrate’s union, called “Ruptures”, a balance-sheet up of Sarkozy’s time as minister of the interior. Accepted by a publisher, Michalon, and set for publication a month ago it was withdrawn at the last minute amid rumours of pressure from above, at the same time Michalon apparently refused to let the author take it elsewhere until after the elections. Of course those who write against Sarkozy, like the philosopher Michel Onfray or the weekly magazine Marianne are politically in the other camp, but they nevertheless express a real fear felt amongst many open-minded and reasonable French people.

But regardless of personalities, it is that old left/right black/white bi-polar vision of the world which disappoints me most, that 56% of the French electorate still believe the complexities of today’s world can be reduced to one of only two solutions, and the right solution can only be found in one of the two old, traditional parties.
 
The campaign will of course continue to fill the front pages for the next fortnight until the second round decides whether Royal or Sarkozy is going to rule us. In the scores of polls done before the elections, Royal has not once defeated Sarkozy. Everything hangs on Bayrou’s voters – a number greater than voted for Chirac in the first round of the 2002 elections but whose desire for national unity the system has now side-lined. Doubtless offers will be made to Bayrou: it will be a time of difficult choices for him. We shall finally learn what he is made of.

Then, immediately after the second round there will be the parliamentary elections. Aiming at unified government, they were put so close to the presidential election because it was assumed voters would be consistent, but perhaps this time the conflict will be so intense, the country so divided that whichever party gets their candidate into the Elysée will be defeated a month later, resulting in a cohabitation which will further weaken any chance for constructive change.

The last day of the campaign – as from midnight tonight we must all fall silent and let the voters ruminate. Still undecided who to vote for? Or who you would vote for were you French? Try one of the on-line tests to see which candidate most closely fits your vision of the world. Even if you’re not eligible to vote it’s fun and quite instructive. I spent a happy hour trying five sites, each offering multiple-choice questionnaires. Two of them were created by students of Sciences Po and most have tested the questions on all 12 candidates to see whether they conform to the questionnaire’s image of them. The five I tried are Politest; Sitoyen; Quel candidat; Pourquivoter; and Polimetre.

Your level of French has to be reasonable, particularly for Politest which was created by former students of Sciences Po and is perhaps the most serious. In most, however, the questions can be worked out with a modicum of vocabulary, and it’s always interesting to have a non-French take on these French issues – for example employment charges. I have the feeling that if you say the 35 hour week should be repealed you are automatically classified somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan, which you then have to rectify by saying you believe the frontiers should be closed to illegal immigrants, especially those coming en masse from Mongolia.

A disadvantage is that most questionnaires insist you give an answer to every question: not all give a Don’t Know option. It’s also quite hard to choose between 1) taxes should be lowered when the State can afford it, 2) taxes should be lowered so businesses can invest and 3) taxes which weigh heavily on the poor should be lowered: all three seem to me justifiable. Or again, 1) rather than assisting people, they should be taught responsibility, 2) the worst off should be helped by the state but people should not expect everything from it and 3) the state’s duty is to help everyone live decently. You can tell that those two examples come from the Sciences Po questionnaire. Another test asks you to make a straight choice of the most important issue in the campaign – they then ask you to choose between (French) unemployment and global warming. That is always the weakness of multiple choice questionnaires.

Having taken note of your political views, several then either ask directly which candidate attracts you most (I suspect many otherwise undecided French women will vote for Ségolène Royal through gender solidarity), or they offer a series of wider questions to see what sort of person you are, for example “Do you think Zidane was justified in head-butting Materazzi?” which is a simple test of nationality. There is no Have Never Heard of Either option.

Finally the results may surprise or even shock. One (the Sciences Po one) had me voting for Generation Ecologique – not an option since the candidate didn’t get 500 signatures. Two had me voting Sarkozy and one Royal (neither of whom would I vote for if I had the vote). The fifth and most accurate had me voting……ah, but that would spoil it. Have a go yourself.

One third of all voters in France are still undecided how they will vote. I wonder whether in part that’s because their expectations were too high at the beginning and now disillusion has taken hold. It comes back to something I mentioned yesterday, that five out of the twelve candidates are not professional politicians. They are, we are led to assume, “like us”. Regardless of their true nature, many voters think of them as basically “nice people” who care about their country enough to stand up and defend or even improve it.

These ordinary people are in strong contrast with the “others”, the professional politicians well-known to the voter already, living in a different world, an elite. We know they live by horse-trading, making promises they have no intention of keeping and generally looking after their own futures.

Throughout much of the campaign the “small” candidates were presented to us as the key. One minute the press are making a great fuss about whether or not Bové will get his 500 signatures, with a resounding Hooray for Democracy when he does, then they dismiss him as an irrelevant also-ran, treating him with the legal minimum of respect. Worse, they put all their effort into reporting the main four candidates, who now do little but denigrate their rivals in their bald race for personal power. Voters, you might say naive voters, perhaps young, idealistic first-time voters, are a bit shocked by this sudden reversal.

For another difference between French presidential elections and their American counterpart, or parliamentary elections in Britain, is that French elections are treated as an opportunity not only to compare nitty-gritty policy issues such as tax increases and housing shortages but to mull over all the theoretical stuff as well. My desk is covered in special issues of magazines devoted to Liberté (one issue), Egalité (another whole issue) etc, each containing some 100 pages of heavy text written by academics taking us back to the writings of Voltaire, Diderot, Jaurès: reminding us in other words about the fundamentals. Beautifully (and expensively) produced, but who reads them? They fight for space on my desk with a quite extraordinary number of books published since January 1st on the same subjects. Most of the candidates, including the “small” ones, write a book - how the world would be if they were president. Some, like Sarkozy and Bayrou, have written two or three since January. They all contain things that the conscientious voter, or commentator, should read and retain.

All this space and effort given to high ideals is quite foreign to British or American elections, which are only about issues, for which read money, the bottom line: who gets it and who pays the bill? Please don’t misunderstand me, here too debates are about that as well, but underneath there is this current of deeper things. It’s easy to say they have nothing, or little to do with issues like job losses at Airbus, or income tax levels or even a ministry of national identity. But that would be wrong – they do. French job losses are about Fraternité (or solidarité, supposed by some to be a specifically French concept), income tax levels and proposed ministries of identity are about Egalité. These noble ideals become the benchmark by which we measure every candidate’s policies and propositions. For example, at the moment there is a heated debate over whether the very very few (half a dozen out of some 63 million people) bosses of major companies should get enormous golden handshakes. So seriously is this taken that the present minister of the economy, Thierry Breton, is threatened with losing his job (will that provoke solidarity?) because he supported one such handshake. The amount of money involved clearly transgresses some deep-seated but high-minded limit about how much any individual should be allowed to make (a limit that only applies to businessmen, not sportsmen, actors, writers or painters). But this current spat is only the tip of the iceberg: much of the campaign has been dominated by the same anti-profit debate in speeches and writings by the anti-free-market, anti-globalisation lobby. That is the extreme left, the moderate left, part of the centre and the extreme right. Their argument is that profit for one means poverty for another, whereas life (perhaps as described by Voltaire, Diderot and Jaurès), should be equal for everybody: that is fair, with a guaranteed secure, problem-free future for everyone for ever. Perfectly commendable, yet most of us learn quite early on it can never be obtained, for all sorts of reasons which can be resumed as human nature.

It is the enormous contrast between these two elements in the election, the utopic and the real, which causes the initial high hopes and then growing disillusion amongst some. Reading commentaries on 18th or 19th ideals is not a good preparation for choosing which of the four major candidates you should vote for this Sunday – and that is the only question which will make a difference to France in the next five crucial years.

Are we going to see a Bayrou/Royal contest in the second round of this presidential election? Is that going to be this year’s surprise? After all, in the past two votes, in 2002 and 2005, the French have surprised and shocked the world, surely they are not going to let us down for the hat-trick? And what a shock that would be, knocking Sarkozy, who has led oh-so comfortably from the beginning, into third place at the final moment.

It seems hardly likely, but Sarkozy is in trouble. As we reach the end of three months’ campaign (or in his case 25 years), the electorate – as well as those organs of the media not owned by Sarko’s buddies - is less than convinced by him. Quite simply, more and more people are afraid of him. This week’s “Marianne” magazine, for example, has a cover story “Sarkozy: what the big media don’t dare or don’t want to say.” Marianne has talked to those who know him and come to the conclusion “In some ways the man is mad. And the nature of his madness is the same which in the past fuelled plenty of apprentice dictators.” Well, pace my correspondent of yesterday, that is true scaremongering, although as “Libération” says this morning, none of it is new. But within 48 hours all 300,000 copies of the magazine “Marianne” had gone from the newsagents – probably bought by Sarko’s boys.

Part of what people are afraid of in Sarkozy are things beyond his control, they way he looks, for example (although Ségolène apparently had a jaw-job last year to improve the way she looks on camera). As exhaustion and tension become more evident on his face, his pointy ears and eye-brows do make him look more and more like the little devil which has been his caricature in “Le Canard Enchainé” for years. Indeed recently “Le Monde” has taken to publishing photos of him that support that diabolic, or perhaps simply Machiavellian impression. Is that why, suddenly in these final days, he is trying to convince us of his devout Christianity? Of course he may be, but why bring it out now in a rather saccharine way? The secular French do not like their politicians to mix religion into their professional life, the way Tony Blair does.

Another thing he can’t do much about is his nervous, staccato manner, his facial tics and grimaces. A president has to have enormous energy, yes, but at the same time a certain serenity to cope with crises. Stories of Sarkozy’s short fuse, angrily throwing things at his advisors, abound, as do his over-hasty use of words like “scum”. Chirac did himself and France great harm by his ill-considered use of words, as when he tried to teach eastern European countries how to behave, or told Tony Blair that he was badly brought-up. Now, as the vote approaches, Sarkozy is desperately trying to show that underneath it all he is Mr. Nice Guy – but it looks as though it’s too late. Ironically it is Sarkozy who gets more dictator-like moustaches on posters than Le Pen.

People who have worked with him have told me that he is his own worst enemy. Amongst other things, Sarkozy’s battles with Chirac have left their scars – on the public’s memory. We all know he’s betrayed his mentors (not that they were worth much either), that Chirac hates him. Now he himself is close to the top, he’s equally ruthless with those who, for years, have helped and supported him, like Brice Hortefeu, cast into Outer Darkness for speaking out of turn. The public don’t care about Hortefeu, but they see the brittle tension, the undisguised stress, and they worry if that’s what Sarkozy’s like now, what will he be like in a few years’ time? Will he really be able to cope calmly with the delicate problems we know Brussels is going to throw at him? Then they look at Bayrou who remains relaxed, smiling, helpful despite the reverses of the campaign.

With only three more days for the press and media to discuss the election, emphasis quite naturally is on the four candidates most likely to succeed, their solutions to today’s problems weighed up and analysed in great detail. The eight other candidates are treated like children, with nodding condescension. The media have to give them all equal air-time, but nobody really cares what the eight also-rans have to say because no one believes for one moment they’re going to be president, which, in the end, is what this story is about.

Regardless of media condescension, however, the eight outsiders are working their socks off, knowing that in just a few days they can put their feet up, take a long cold drink – and think about paying the bills. A candidate polling 5% or less will automatically receive 685,000€ campaign expenses from the state, calculated as 5% of the official spending limit, 13.7 million. If they poll more, they can get up to 50% of the spending limit, but not more than they have spent. All remaining bills must be paid either by a political party or individuals. Private businesses are not allowed to contribute towards election campaigns, and individuals cannot pay more than 4,574€ each.

Some of the eight are proper politicians, like Marie-George Buffet of the Communist Party and Dominique Voynet, the Green candidate, who has been a minister, but most are not. I’m thinking about Arlette Laguiller, 68 years old running her sixth and final campaign or Olivier Besançenot, another far-left candidate, who I imagine going back to the Post Office on Monday morning to resume his round. José Bové, who Le Monde calls the Don Quixote of the Larzac, will go back to his sheep on the Larzac plateau. Although it’s easy to raise an eyebrow at the idea of so many candidates who don’t stand a chance of winning, it is rather wonderful that the system allows them to have their moment, for unlike the American system, personal wealth does not come into it, these are not rich men and women. Unlike the British system they don’t have to be hardened smoothies counting sound bytes. They run ramshackle campaigns with mates, they talk about matters they care passionately about (as oppose to the Sarko’s and Ségos of this world who tackle society’s problems with clinical solutions culled from professional experts in each field - which is why they are so often essentially similar) and they talk to ordinary people as equals: no hopers on a six week roll.

Bové has received a sympathetic press, not for his ideas but for his person. Journalists arrive at his somewhat chaotic campaign headquarters to find that no one knows where the candidate is: “He’ll be here in a minute…well, he usually arrives about this time. What is the time?” No one is quite sure what José will do today. He has his fixed meetings, which are well attended by the already converted, travelling round France by rail because unlike the main candidates he cannot afford a private jet. He has spent a lot of time in the tower-block estates talking to the unemployed, whose problems, he has found, are similar to those who live in rural France: neglect. He listens. I am not sure he spends much time with the leaders of industry or the head of the employers’ organisation, which is a shame for they might learn about a different aspect of France from talking with him quietly. He shares with George Bush a simple view of the world, that it is divided into the good and the bad. For Bové the good are the workers, the bad the bosses. Like a fair percentage of his compatriots, he is utterly convinced that globalisation is a bad thing.

“Bové is much less of a revolutionary than he seems,” says Eddy Fougier for Telos, a French think-tank. Fougier compares Bové’s programme to that of the Socialists back in the 1980’s and earlier. His 125 propositions, which came out of the anti-free-market collectives after the rejection of the EU Constitution, are remarkably similar to Mitterrand’s 100 campaign propositions of 1981. Well, that’s hardly surprising: faced with unemployment what else is a candidate going to say but “We’ll create more jobs”, faced with a shortage of housing, what else would he say but “We’ll build more houses”? Fougier’s argument is that Bové appeals to the left which is nostalgic for the programme they voted through Mitterrand but which Mitterrand was forced to abandon, two years into his presidency, realising it was unworkable and ill-adapted to the real world. All Bové has done, according to Fougier, is dress yesterday’s theories in today’s language, dropping the 1970’s vocabulary of class struggle, bourgeoisie and proletariat. Which again is all any politician does, though perhaps Bové, like Besançenot and Arlette Laguiller, not being politicians in the smooth sense, are a bit more obvious about it. But the combined support for these three, let’s say around 10% of the electorate, shows their ideas are far from redundant and if they are the same ideas put forward by Mitterrand 26 years ago, that mirrors Le Pen hammering home his pet theories unchanged over the same length of time. There is something honourable about that.

Bové is apparently not at all bitter about his lack of success in the opinion polls so far – around 2%. On the contrary, he is happy and relaxed, still unable to believe that he got his 500 signatures from the mayors of France. That alone, he says, is a sign that in France anything is possible. He also hints that he’ll be back next time, still quixotically dreaming of a better world, doubtless tilting at the same windmills. For if one thing is certain, there will still be plenty of them about in five years’ time.