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.

“If Nicolas Sarkozy is elected in a couple of weeks, we shall have no excuse.” Thus writes former socialist prime minister Michel Rocard in Friday’s Le Monde, calling for an alliance between the Socialists and François Bayrou’s UDF party. As one of France’s elder statesmen, he sees nothing to stop the two parties joining forces - their policies on employment, housing, debt, education, Europe are essentially the same, he says. Well, not really. But the very fact that Rocard feels he has to say this shows how weak he believes the socialist position to be. He clearly believes that on her own Royal will not get into the second round and that if Bayrou gets through he will not necessarily hold out a hand to her. Better, says Rocard, to cement an alliance now. On Sunday Bernard Kouchner, another experienced socialist politician, founder of Medecins Sans Frontiers and Head of the UN administration in Kosovo in 1999, agreed with Rocard that an alliance is the only way now to save the socialists from a second defeat in a row.

Ségolène Royal immediately brushed aside any chance of rapprochement; initially Bayrou said he was pleased, that Rocard’s suggestion confirmed Bayrou’s main argument that to pull France out of its crisis the best of both left and right have to come together. Then this morning on the radio Bayrou changed his mind, saying it was too early to form an alliance with only the left. The UDF’s position was to be independent of both major parties and he could not suddenly join one or the other.

On Sunday, just one week from the first round vote, three polls showed Ségolène Royal climbing again, taking votes apparently from Bayrou, so maybe she is right and does not need that helping hand. But Sarkozy is still well in the lead and might still get a majority in the first round, which would cancel the second.

Rocard and Kouchner are not the first socialist heavy-weights to jump ship and swim to the centre. Presumably they feel that if Royal wins they will not get a look-in, so they may as well go to Bayrou who, if he wins, will be desperately looking for people to form a government. But their public defection has not caused much damage. It’s an fascinating aspect of this election that none of the oldies, left or right, carry any weight with the voters. As if the older and more experienced you are, the less people want to listen to you. In that sense there really has been a break.

The Bayrou moment may be over. With less than three weeks to go before the first round of elections, the candidate of the extreme centre is dropping in the polls, while Le Pen inexorably rises. If that fall continues it will be a shame, for although it is hard to see quite how he would manage with only a small party behind him, Bayrou is a better alternative than either the divisive Sarkozy or the irresolute Royal. In my view he is the only one who can lead France out of its present doldrums. But even if he does not make it into the second round, he has sown terror in the camps of the other two principal candidates and forced both of them back from their extreme views to a more consensual centre.
Perhaps to put himself back into the public eye Bayrou said over the weekend that if elected he would close the Ecole Nationale d’Administration. That doesn’t mean much, if anything, to most English observers, but since I am making a film about the school, it fascinates me. My film is also critical of the school, using an enarque of distinction, Charles de Courson, now one of France’s main experts in public finance, to balance the naturally gung-ho views of ENA’s director. The bright and entertaining De Courson is also one of Bayrou’s chief advisors.
The school forms administrators, which sounds terminally grey, but since the top 10% go into what the French call the Grands Corps, those bodies like the Diplomatic Service or the Prefectural Service which in turn dominate government ministries, a small percentage become very powerful in the country. Some of them, so close to the seat of power, become seduced into a career in politics, like Chirac, Jospin, Royal, Juppé. And they start at the top, parachuted into a constituency of choice, quickly becoming ministers and higher. Others leave the public domain and move into France’s largest companies, both nationalised, like Gaz de France or SNCF, and private. Like the political, they are parachuted in at the top with no real idea of how to manage, and certainly no idea how to manage a large, often multinational company. The appalling mess made by the aptly-named Jean-Marie Messier at Vivendi is the prime example of what happens when an enarque runs a private company.
But in a sense that’s not the main problem, it’s more the other end, the selection. To get into ENA you need two university degrees or a degree from a Grande Ecole like Science Po. Then a year’s preparation course for the entrance exam. Six out of seven will fail the written exam, and the few who pass go on to sit three orals. Two are technical, one, the mythical Grand Oral, is general: candidates have to talk to 15 minutes on a given subject (and not 15 minutes 5 seconds, they have to wind up their argument and conclude exactly as the bell rings) before being faced with half an hour of cross questioning from a panel of illustrious sadists. Less than 100 students are accepted each year, and in 60 years there have been just 5,600 graduates, la crème de la crème. In the same period Oxbridge has churned out well over a million.
As a school, it’s not hard to fault: very few people can afford to study for so many years, so the intake perpetuates a monoculture of a certain class of person: most students’ parents are either in the Grand Corps or teachers in higher education. Over the 60 years of the school’s existence they have created a Parisian caste, inter-marrying like the ancien régime and, according to De Courson, like the ancien régime they are turning their backs on the problems of their co-citizens, not necessarily consciously but because they don’t hear, perhaps cannot understand the cries from the street. “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.”
Bayrou sees clearly this “rupture profonde entre le pouvoir et les citoyens” and proposes a school for public service, like ENA, but taking students from mixed backgrounds, and without such high academic qualifications. He would make it impossible for the graduates to leak into the private sector.
The director of the school, in our film, accepts these criticisms but says they are no longer relevant: he was appointed 5 years ago precisely to put these things right, and although his reforms are not complete, he feels they are well on the way. And of course it will take a decade for his first graduates to percolate into the system, let alone make a mark on the public mind, so it may be that Bayrou is too late. The other thing the current director says is that whereas for years ENA generated great national pride, it has recently become fashionable to make the school scapegoat for France’s ills. Indeed many graduates now hide their diplomas in public.
Two things fascinate me from my brief experience with ENA and its students: one is their dedication to l’intérêt général, la chose publique. They call it a vocation, a noble calling, and the director confirms that public administration in France is seen as one of the nation’s highest careers. He too, like his students, often uses the word noblesse, which makes me think that (le comte) Charles de Courson is right when he compares them to the ancien régime. My impression is that in Britain the Civil Service is not seen as a noble career, fit only for the very highest minds and greatest souls. Rather the reverse. The other, non-related thing that struck me was that before the filming I contacted a recent graduate who had spent a weekend telling a mutual friend how irrelevant ENA is, how bad the teaching and inadequate the preparation for the real world. When I asked him whether he would say this on our film, he replied he was willing to tell me all his criticisms, but anonymously and not on camera. Clearly he is afraid of reprisals in his career. Which goes to show how tentacularly powerful ENA is.
As a solidly established member of the nobility, le comte Charles de Courson (his family is from Bayeux, his ancestors came over with the Conqueror) is not afraid to criticize, albeit with circumspection. He told me that unlike many of his class, his family have always shifted with the times, often as precursors. On his mother’s side, for example, one of his aristocratic forebears had voted for the execution of Louis XVI. Was that in the l’intérêt général or merely self-interest ?

The campaign enters its third and final phase. All the candidates are declared, they have all expressed their policies. They each know their rivals’ strengths and weaknesses, now it is a matter of convincing us that they are better than the others. A study showed recently that only 35% of the electorate are die-hard partisans of one party or the other, sure of voting the same way they have always voted. They rest wait to be convinced.

What is strange, for an outsider, is to see the political fragility behind all but the UMP candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy. This election is about voting for an individual not a party, but the political mess behind two of the principal candidates makes people wonder whether and how they will be able to govern. Take Segolene Royal, for example, the Socialist candidate: you only have to watch the leader of her Party, Francois Hollande, to realize that all is not well. He travels about the country addressing crowds, but nobody much takes any notice, wondering why: they don’t want him, they want to see the candidate, they want to touch the hem of her skirt as she passes, or be touched by her in some way. The leader of the Socialist Party is seen and treated as an irrelevance in this election.Francois Hollande is in a doubly odd position in that he is the father of Segolene Royal’s children and her party’s leader, yet there appears to be no rapport between Royal and Hollande at either level. They live separately, a very knowledgeable MP I talked to at length on Friday continually referred to Royal as Hollande’s ex, yet in the book she publishes this morning she tries to scotch that rumour by waxing lyrical about her love for Hollande and how much he supports her. But she doesn’t convince: “I realize that the situation is unusual,” she says, ”and I understand that it makes people curious. But outside the fact that it is my private life [which the French press does not talk about] I can, even so, tell you one thing: I find my children absolutely amazing. They support me, each one in his or her own way. Francois too.” A sort of appendage to her domestic thought as he appears to be in her political. But it’s very important, for how will she run the country if she has in two senses broken with the party leader, who is, one assumes, the party’s figure-head and principal policy chief. It is no secret that Hollande is far closer to the party elephants than Royal, yet to form a government she must rely on them. There was a much-publicized moment a week or two back when she went back to them, but they did nothing for her ratings so she moved away again, trying to recreate the excitement she generated last year. Voters are human beings, most have had to cope with relationship problems, work problems, they project their worries on to the candidates and ask perfectly normal questions such as Can it work? They also know that, under the 5th Constitution, the president of France is one of the most powerful positions in the world, the candidate has to be 100% convincing.
Francois Bayrou in the centre is the other candidate who fails to convince partly because of the political uncertainty behind him. Like Royal, what he stands for is perfectly fine, interesting and in its own way workable. But what about the rest? He at least is the head of his party, but he has a only a handful of MP’s. He needs 290 to have the slimmest majority in parliament. He talks blithely of working with the best on the left and the best on the right, cynically assuming that today’s rivals will drop their life-time allegiances in order to have a piece of power. He’s a clever man and he knows his colleagues, so he is probably right, they will, but it says little for them if the offer of a ministry will make them change their convictions. Will the public believe them in their new role? And how long will their conversion last? The point is, Bayrou has four weeks to convince us all that it’s possible. He really has to sell that as a water-tight workable proposition. Knowing how volatile and Machiavellian many French politicians are (compared to their rather staid British and American counter-parts), I think many doubt his capacity to hold them together. He is an interesting man, with good ideas, probably better than his rivals’, but he is not a born leader – in many ways like Gordon Brown.
That leaves Sarkozy. He is the leader of his party, which is huge, well-financed and solidly behind his ideas. He has the backing (albeit tepid) of Chirac, which most of us would consider a curse rather than a blessing. But interestingly with Sarkozy, while the party’s policies are reasonable, many consider the man is not. He is divisive, he rules by division, he makes more enemies than friends, whom he uses only for what they can give while they can give it. The same MP I was talking to on Friday, who knows Sarkozy well and is not entirely against him, said that if he is elected the country will be on the rocks within two years. Sarkozy’s ideas are not his own, he takes them from anyone who seems interesting, which means that he changes them the next time he meets an interesting person. He thinks that leadership is rushing about at top speed, gesticulating, shouting. He is intensely disloyal – one only has to look at the man who guided him successfully to where he is now, Brice Hortefeu, who a month ago was put firmly in a cupboard to which only Sarko has the key. It is precisely this histrionic and unpleasant behavior amongst the entire political class which the French want to change. They want their politicians to deal with (which means cure) the problems facing France – its massive debt, simply paying the interest on which (40 billion euro a year) soaks up all income tax and costs more than the entire education budget; unemployment; pensions; immigration and its corollary, integration; globalization which terrifies the French but is a fact of life; religion, which to everyone’s surprise has become an issue after 100 years’ lying low. The list goes on and on, but the candidates have less than 4 weeks to address them. Many voters feel that in the last two and a half months they have not even started…..which means they may give up in disgust before voting day.

If a week is a long time in politics, ten days is an eternity. I have been rushing round France interviewing Marine Le Pen and her father Jean-Marie, then writing about the Front National for Prospect Magazine, at the same time setting up a documentary film about the role of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, France’s post-graduate school for high-flying administrators. Something had to wait, and it was the blog. I shall return to both these subjects at a later stage, but first try to get back into the election.

A milestone in the campaign has just passed: the 16th March, the day when each candidate had to present his or her 500 signatures to the Conseil Constitutionel. For the minor, independent candidates it is of course an important day, but for most of us it is a totally trivial event - simply because it is such a strange and in many ways unnecessary ritual, over-blown by the press. Most candidates, major and minor, have already been campaigning hard for two and a half months, one has sold his flat to raise funds for his campaign, all have invested enormous time, energy and naturally money. Then, as from today, some 35 candidates are told they have wasted their time, energy and money - and our time too – they must pack up their campaign stall with nothing to show for their effort.

The idea of getting 500 elected representatives to endorse a candidate is to prevent loonies standing for president. But why shouldn’t a loony stand if he or she wants to? Oh, because it dilutes the vote – instead of voting for sensible candidates, people will vote for loonies. Ummm – what? That says something very strange indeed about either how the elite see their compatriots (“they are so stupid they can’t tell the difference between a loony and me!”) or the quality of the serious candidates. The British parliamentary elections have, over the past 40 or so years, had candidates for totally impossible parties – such as Screaming Lord Sutch’s Monster Raving Loony Party. They attract a few votes, they lose their deposit and have no effect on the final result. In other words if an eccentric no-hoper is going to campaign for two and a half months, why not let him/her continue for just the remaining month and be done with it? Or prevent them standing at the outset.

Anyway, the day is past and we can get on with looking at the main candidates, who had no problem getting their signatures. François Bayrou has been climbing vertiginously close to Royal and even Sarkozy, but may have stalled. From the outset he has presented an intriguing programme, a Third Way in all but name. Both his main rivals have resorted to some pretty lousy tactics to discredit him. These are candidates who at the outset declared themselves to be a new species of politician, not wrapped-up in petty sniping and back-biting. But despite such good intentions, nothing much changes: the Socialist Party is, as always, riven by egos as their leaky ship lurches dangerously and threatens, like last time, to sink. Two of Ségolène Royal’s key advisors, Laurent Fabius and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, denounce each other in public, which bodes well for any government they might eventually form. Meanwhile Royal’s former economics advisor has published a book telling us what a self-centred, unappealing person the Socialist candidate is.

The UMP camp is little better: Sarkozy with much pomp brought on board the venerable Simone Veil, former minister of health way back in 1975 (again, this is the man who said he would break with the past). After a public show of hugs, kisses and mutual congratulation, Mme Veil has more recently attacked her new leader for proposing a ministry of immigration and national identity. It is well known that Sarkozy has a terrible temper, sometimes hurling furniture across his office at his luckless assistants, that sort of thing. Recent reports abound of his screaming at his staff, calling them all the names under the sun because he is slipping slightly in the opinion polls and Bayrou is closing in. Again it bodes well if he elected president: it also says a lot about a man (or woman) if he blames his staff for the fact that the public are losing faith in him.

Bayrou still provides the enigma of the election. Is his popularity going to last another 36 days? It’s far from certain. In the last presidential elections Jean-Pierre Chevènement had a similarly heady experience, rocketing in the opinion polls during the campaign, but thenflopped terribly at the actual vote. People notoriously give deliberately misleading answers to pollsters – it’s all part of the fun. Anyway, a third of the French electorate cannot take part in these polls because they don’t have telephones – and all these polls are done over the phone. People either no longer have a fixed-line phone, depending instead on their mobiles, or their fixed line is for the internet only. So that at least provides us with suspense until the last minute, for always, in the background, is Jean-Marie Le Pen, who in 2002 surprised/shocked everyone by beating the Socialists. There is no reason why he should not do the same again. I spent a very interesting hour with him in Strasbourg last week: he was charming, witty and seemed remarkably full of energy for a man of 78. His policies, well, they please some and listening to him it is not hard to understand why. They follow a certain logic which is either yours or isn’t. But more of that, and his daughter, another time.

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.

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.

Where is it all going? Those who like to see patterns in history point excitedly to the 1995 campaign: at this stage in that election, with 4 or 5 weeks full campaigning behind them and 11 left to go, there were two candidates way out front and a third man languishing with an apparently hopeless 11-12%. Just like now! Ségolène and Sarko dominate the field and Bayrou, trails with a worthy but impossible 11%. Now look, say the history-watchers: in 1995 the two unassailable leaders were Jospin and Balladur, the third man was poor unloved Jacques Chirac. But he went on to win!

François Bayrou may pull off the same feat, but if he does it won’t be because of history. History does not repeat itself, journalists do.

The cause of this speculation is that indeed M. Bayrou is surging forward, gaining 4 points in a fortnight. Last week when he turned up to address 300 people in Aix he found 1,000 crammed into adjoining rooms. This is taken as the long-awaited sign, now is the time, cry the pundits, that irreversible things happen: we are on the cusp….. well, maybe.

As I read it, France has a large, perhaps huge, as yet uncounted number of people who are dissatisfied and disillusioned with not just the main candidates, but the whole existing political set-up, elitist, Paris-based. They are an electorate in search of a candidate, just as two years ago there was a huge number of people searching for someone who could express what they felt about the European Constitution. Then, they found their voice, it came from the Internet, Etienne Chouard posting his views, taken up literally by millions. Again, history does not repeat itself. I don’t think that will happen this time, or not in the same way, but there is that similar groundswell of intelligent, educated but dissatisfied people searching, waiting. The far left, whose anti-Europe stand in the referendum served them well, have not this time captured the imagination. I don’t honestly think enough people really believe in them. Bové might, Le Pen might – his campaign is aimed at working on that disappointment. This time he is more moderate, and the persistence of his message, unchanged for 30 years, is seen by some as a sign of reliability and sincerity in the face of the constantly pirouetting Chirac and his pupil Sarkozy.

The key question now is, can Bayrou get the better of Bové and Le Pen? In a sense Sarko and Ségo are irrelevant: with 11 weeks still to run, already they cease to surprise. Last night I switched off the “Sarko meets the people” TV discussion after 15 minutes, it was so utterly predictable. No, the interest is which of the poor relations, Bové, Le Pen or Bayrou, can seize the moment and do what Chirac did in ‘95 and Le Pen did in 2002: come up from behind and get through to the 2^nd round.

Probably only Bayrou, because he’s the only one who would have a chance of winning the 2^nd round. Protest votes make you feel good for a day, but in the end this whole exercise is about choosing a president for five years. Bayrou’s approach to campaigning is different: while Sarkozy organises giant media-orientated circuses from which most people are excluded, and Royal organises vociferous participative forums in vast halls, Bayrou simply walks the streets, often more or less alone. He talks to people. And he sticks to the provinces.

He says there is a genuine desire for what he proposes: a government of national union, formed with some from the left and some from the right (which could be seen as dangerously perpetuating the worst of the old system. But he has little choice, not having enough parliamentarians in his own party – a major credibility problem as well for Le Pen and Bové). He will write a 6^th constitution, giving parliament more power.

But going back to those who predict the future by examining history: in the 2002 campaign at this stage there were two candidates in the same position as Le Pen and Bayrou now – with around 13% each. In 2002 the two candidates were Le Pen and Jean-Pierre Chevenement. In the end Le Pen went forward to the second round and Chevenement collapsed to 5%. The future is not yet written.