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.

Ten days to go before the first round, the candidates, the press and perhaps even the voters seem to have run out of steam as they obsessively compare this moment in the campaign with its equivalents 5, 12, 19 years ago. Predictably they all conclude: ”Anything could happen”.

Nicolas Sarkozy, threatened by Le Pen, and Ségolène Royal, threatened by Bayrou, are both trying to shore up their own camp: Sarkozy, having veered hard right for the past month, is going back to a more reasonable line and asking ingenuously why would anyone be afraid of him? Soon he’ll have himself photographed with his son, to prove what a nice, ordinary guy he is and his son will say: “If I was old enough to vote, I ‘d vote for my dad!” Which will make the headlines because no one else has anything to say.

Royal, having tried to fight off the centrist threat of Bayrou taking her moderate voters, now faces the harder task of winning back the traditional and more intransigent left. Otherwise, with at least six left-wing rivals sucking out her votes, she won’t get enough to go through to the second round. The most recent poll has her rivals between them (but not counting the Green candidate) taking 10.5% of the vote to her 24% and Sarkozy’s 28%. But worse than the figures is the growing rumour that she won’t make it - that alone is enough to drive many of her moderate supporters to believe there’s no point in voting Royal, better to vote Bayrou in order to stop Sarkozy. So Royal is now back on firmer socialist ground, caring for those who find it hard to get work, particularly a first job.

From the start Royal’s campaign has muddled to traditional lines of left and right: she has promised military style camps for young offenders and suggested everyone hang out the French flag on national holidays, as they do in America. She wants to soften the hard-and-fast rule about school catchment areas, giving people more choice. But then on employment and the economy she keeps to the ideology of jobs guaranteed for life and high employers’ charges, insisting that these have no effect on unemployment. She also puts a lot of emphasis on education and equality of opportunity: at the moment there is a great difference between universities (which are not selective and rarely guarantee a job at the end of the course) and the grandes écoles (which demand at least a year’s preparation before a highly competitive entrance exam, but are much better suited to finding a well-paid job at the end). This mix-and-match policy may be her undoing, since three quarters of French people say they personally conform to the old left or right party lines. While many feel the Socialist Party needed modernising, evolving away from its Marxist origins, she may have taken it too far - which is why the far left can mobilise 10.5%. But then 42% of the electorate still haven’t made up their mind. So perhaps the only positive thing one can say is that “Anything could happen.”

More and more this election campaign resembles a piece of nineteenth century fiction. The two principal characters are a man and a woman: the man seems utterly sure of himself and appears to dominate, though this facade is undermined by suggestions of instability. The woman is more attractive, seeming to care for the human being hidden inside all of us, but from time to time she makes one of those inevitable gaffs to which women, we are told, are prone when they confront the “real world” e.g. how many nuclear submarines have we got? As in every good plot, there is another man, lurking just behind them, clean-living and Christian, rising and falling in our opinion: do we want him to triumph or is he really just a wet please-all? Is that rumour of a mistress going to take hold? Just as we think the author has put all his cards on the table, an elderly wicked uncle, rumoured to have died long ago, emerges to threaten all three characters. At first glance his ideas are outrageous but perhaps, after all, many readers are starting to see the sense behind them? Running thoughout the story in the background there is a large cast of minor characters, none of whom are very important, but they add colour and moments of drama (one rambunctious chap is threatened with gaol for wilfully destroying fields of genetically modified crops). Cleverly conceived, together they represent the full spectrum of human activity while never really impinging on the plot. You know you don’t have to remember who’s who because they will make no difference to the pitiful tale of a man and a woman at the forefront of the narrative. And with every day that passes, the end draws nearer, the outcome less certain

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.

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 CSA opinion poll published this morning says that the majority of French people asked do not want either José Bové or Jean-Marie Le Pen to get the 500 signatures necessary to become official candidates (for an explanation of this somewhat obscure system, take a look at the December 2006 France Profonde and/or Tomás Ruta’s comment and my reply to Le Pen Rising: Tomás Ruta has a very good and much praised blog on Europe). However, in the same poll a majority does want the Greens Dominique Voynet and Corinne Lepage, as well as the Trotskyist Olivier Besancenot to get their quota of signatures.

This is hard to interpret: clearly the extreme left is OK (Besancenot) as are the Greens - yet Bové, who is both extreme left and green, is a far more popular and emblematic figure. So is it that the shadow of the 2002 elections still hangs over France? Is the electorate terrified that as in 2002 too many candidates will dilute the first-round vote? But in that case why allow the meat and two veg, sorry the Trotskyist and 2 Greens? If people wanted fewer candidates, Bové is the obvious amalgam of those three: better, surely, to get rid of them and keep him. Perhaps the feeling is that Bové, like the ultra-popular Green TV presenter Nicolas Hulot, should not sully himself with politics?

The idea that the French are still in shock after the 2002 election is supported by the finding that 55% of those asked don’t want Le Pen to get his signatures. That seems to me unfair. Like it or not there are a good many French people who vote Le Pen: this year, under the influence of his daughter Marine, his policies are aimed at reaching a broader public, fewer of them are the extreme ones of yesteryear and more are thought provoking. And surely it’s better anyway to let those who vote Le Pen fully express themselves that way, rather than pretending they don’t exist and creating a deep resentment which will only be expressed in another.

The two candidates who could have breathed a fresh spirit into this election, breaking it from the grip of professional politicians and pushing it towards a different form of democracy, have both disappointed. Nicolas Hulot, because he decided in the end not to stand, believing he can be of more use as a green goad, and José Bové because in the end he did decide to stand.

Like many media-made icons, in himself José Bové may have less real substance than he is credited for, it’s just that he has that about him which absorbs our dreams and reflects them back to us. We invest him with what we want to see. He may share that gift with Ségolène Royal – and perhaps the American Democrat, Howard Dean, in the last American presidential election. But anyone who has that quality and is compelled to reveal what they really stand for, as a presidential candidate must, can only disappoint.

Many thought that if he ran, Bové would be, like Nicolas Hulot, a genuine independent. A man who comes from the people and is prepared to go to prison for his ideas, blessed with a sense of anarchy, fun and a sincere desire to help the unrepresented. He is a paysan, who hold a powerful place in French sentiment, working the earth, that eternal (unfortunately now much-polluted) source of wisdom, and in Bové’s case a particular kind of earth, the Larzac plateau, harsh, unforgiving desert – “crossing the desert” is what every great Frenchman has had to do.

However, many who had hopes of this one were deeply disappointed by his first policy speech on Thursday. He launched straight into a piece of ancient dogma dragged from soviet text-books: “A big boss earns 300 times the minimum wage.” The vocabulary, the sweeping generalisation, it’s so…well, as George W. would say “It’s a shame the French don’t have a word for passé”. Playing on envy and our own greed, it brings the debate down to the base level of money before it’s even started. 300 times the minimum wage is a little over 4.5 million euro a year. Undoubtedly a handful do earn that, for a short time, but I would guess most of the men and women who run ordinary companies do not take home much more than the average lawyer or surgeon. And sometimes much less.

What were Bové’s concrete proposals? “Un plan d’urgence sociale”. The intention is good, but plans? More of the old top-down, soviet-speak. “Imposing strict regulations about making anyone redundant”. If M. Bové is honest with himself, he is the last person to want anyone else to “impose regulations” on him, why is his priority to impose them on others? Because, he says: “we need to fight financial speculation and counter-act the power of the shareholder.” In the next paragraph “We have to attack the all-powerful multinationals and the financial markets.” And later “With the countries of the South, we will end the major institutions’ capacity to do harm (the World Bank, IMF, WTO), institutions which reinforce inequality and provoke the suffering which results in war.”

And many hoped for something imaginative, a bit creative even, a new way of looking at democracy. Certainly Bové says “I am not the candidate of a party. I am not a professional politician….we want to be the porte-voix des sans-voix”, an elegant phrase, voix meaning both voice and vote: he wants to bring a voice and a vote to those who have neither. Excellent. But why all the tired old mumbo-jumbo? The far left already has three candidates (Marie-George Buffet of the communists, Olivier Besançenot of the Trotskyist LCR (whose opening salvo at the beginning of the 2002 presidential campaign, when he was 28, was far more inspired: “Our lives are worth more than their profits”) and Arlette Laguiller of Force Ouvrière), all of whom are in the doldrums at the moment. If he wants to do well he has to break clear of them, not swell their ranks.

To reply to Wint Discontent’s comment about Bové’s destruction of the Millau MacDo: that gesture, romantic, visceral, unfortunately back-fired, as grand gestures often do. As Wint Discontent says, it seared the popular imagination, is remembered still. Indeed so well remembered that the MacDonald’s in question, which I drive past often, is one of the busiest and most profitable in France (the country alleged to have the highest consumption of MacDo’s per capita in Europe). After the new viaduct, it is Millau’s second-most visited tourist attraction. Bové did MacDonald, fast food (and bad health) a huge and lasting service that day!

A fillip for the far-right: Jean-Marie Le Pen rises a fairly spectacular 3 points, Sarkozy and Bayrou fall by a combined 3 points - that’s the result of the latest poll, conducted by IFOP earlier this week. Thus Le Pen becomes the third man in the race. Sarko is still in the lead with 31%, against Ségolène Royal, who has dropped half a point to 27.5%. Le Pen has now 13%, while Bayrou has dropped a point to 11%. Then there’s another big gap to the Trotskyist candidate, Olivier Besancenot, who has not moved with 3.5%, the other far left candidates, Arlette Laguiller and Marie-George Buffet have 3% each, then the two Greens unable to raise more than 2% (Dominique Voynet) and 1% (Corinne Lepage).

José Bové, who announced in this morning’s press that he is a candidate, makes his first appearance in an IFOP poll at 3%. Few of the above have their quota of 500 endorsements by elected representatives, so it is all still speculative: without them they cannot stand, although they still have several weeks to find them. “Smaller” candidates, who have no députés or senators in parliament to support them, have to rely on mayors, mostly the rural variety. In 2002 Le Pen got 90% of his signatures from places with less than 500 inhabitants. The problem is that the names of those who sign are published, and many mayors are afraid they will lose their own mandate once it is known they suported the Front National. Yet many French people, left and right, feel that if Le Pen does not get his 500 signatures, democracy will be failing. After all, last time he came in second, only 3 points behind Chirac: whether they like his policies or not they recognise democracy is best served by allowing all opinions to be aired and voted on.

José Bové, the charismatic, moustachioed, pipe-smoking sheep farmer, French to his finger-tips and educated in the United States, is due to tell us on Thursday whether or not he is running for president. The press and M. Bové assume he will. I can understand why he thinks he should: neither the extreme left nor the Greens are yet making any kind of mark in the polls (they each poll around 4%). He on the other hand is hugely popular: he has great charisma, he is French to his finger tips and he farms sheep. He goes to prison regularly for destroying GM crops and he smokes a pipe. What other qualifications do you need to be the most powerful president in the world?

Well, until about 10 days ago, one would have said “Not much”. But if Ségolène Royal’s gaffs and consequent drop in the polls have done nothing else, they have shown us that actually the French do want something else. They want someone who knows what they’re talking about and who carries within them a total awareness of what responsability means. And I think even M. Bové would agree that he has not got much of that. He is the champion of the anti-globalisation left, the left which believes that big gestures (destroying fields of GM crops, brandishing your hand-cuffed wrists to the TV cameras) replace big ideas. A CSA poll released yesterday shows that 71% of French people do not want him to stand: more importantly, 68% of those on the left said they do not want him to stand. His time has past. He was at the height of his popularity in the summer of 2003, and it was precisely then, at the fête de l’Humanité, the Communist Party newspaper, that he told the press he was not interested in politics. I can only hope he remembers that wise decision, for while it is true that the extreme left, and the Greens now that M. Hulot has taken his holiday, lack a credible voice, his husky, tobacco-stained tones are not what they need.

But it is equally true that if he does not stand, the extreme left will wither. Knowing that, there is considerable pressure on him from the internet begging him to run: in very few days 15,000 signed a petition. That has now been doubled. Bové says that touches him deeply, but as Ségolène Royal has found out, there is a world of difference between having the support of even a couple of hundred thousand well-meaning internet well-wishers, and facing the implacable efficiency of the Sarkozy machine. If the French information-gathering police, the Renseignements Généraux, had fun digging around the Socialist Party’s environment spokesman for his past with Greenpeace, just imagine what a field-day they will have with Bové! And as of today they’ll be watching his iconic pipe with an eagle eye: how can he give a press conference on Thursday without it? Yet if he has it, it will have to be unlit - and that would show how much he relies on sham stage effects. Will he smoke it to provoke? That’s probably the question which will grip France on Thursday morning. Which shows to what depths it has all sunk.

English friends, bemused that I say there are 38 candidates for the presidential election, have been asking me who they are and wondering why nobody talks about them. The answer to the first question is relatively simple: I give the list below. As for the second, well until they get signatures from 500 elected representatives (mayors, regional councillors, members of the Assemblée Nationale or the Senate) they are not officially candidates. The closing date for the signatures is the 16^th March.

My thanks for this list to Nicolas Voisin, creator of the excellent Nues newsblog

Those who could get through to the 2^nd Round:

• Nicolas Sarkozy (51) Union pour un Mouvement Populaire
• Ségolène Royal (53) Partie Socialiste
• Jean-Marie Le Pen (78) Front National
• François Bayrou (55) Union pour la Démocratie Française

Those who are highly unlikely to get through to the 2^nd Round

• Philippe de Villiers (57) Mouvement pour la France
• Marie-George Buffet (56) Parti Communist
• Arlette Laguiller (65) Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ struggle)
• Olivier Besancenot (32) Ligue communiste révolutionnaire
• Dominique Voynet (47) Verts
• Corinne Lepage (55) Cap 21
• Antoine Waechter (57) Mouvement écologique indépendant
• Nicolas Dupont-Aignan (44) UMP souverainiste

Those whose names are not listed in opinion polls, thus we must assume they will sink without trace

• Jacques Cheminade (64) Solidarité et progrès
• Stéphane Pocrain (33) Green ?
• France Garnerre (64) Génération écologique
• Nicolas Miguet (45) Rassemblement des contribuables (those who pay taxes)
  
• Rachid Nekkaz (34) Club des élus Allez France
• Roland Castro (64) Mouvement de l’utopie concrète (an architect)
  
• Christian Chavrier (40) president of Parti fédéraliste
• Jean-Philippe Allenbach (58) former president of Parti fédéraliste
• Jean-Marc Governatori (47) France en action
• Gérard Schivardi (56) Parti des travailleurs
• Yves-Marie Adeline (46) Alliance royale (not the Ségolène sort)
  
• Alain Mourguy (58) Union droite-gauche
• Edouard Filias (27) Alternative libérale
• Frédéric Nihous (39) Chasse Peche Nature et Traditions
• Eric Taffoureau-Millet (43) Attention ! Handicap.
• Jean-Christophe Parisot (39) Collectif des démocrates handicapés
• Michel Baillif (62) Fédération nationale de l’invalidité
• Leila Bouachera (45)
• Soheib Bencheikh (45) former grand mufti of Marseille
• Yvan Bachaud (67)
• Michel Martucci (75) Conféderation nationale des syndicats CID (short contracts) artisans commercants
• Jean-Michel Jardry (56) Centre national des indépendants et paysans
• Robert Baud (57) Majorités des minorités en souffrance morale et sociale
• Romdane Ferdjani (59)
• Lucien Sorreda (64) les revenus bas tirés vers le haut
• Yves Aubry (38) permettre aux Rmistes (those dependent on social security), aux pauvres de vivre décemment
• Jean-Paul Le Guen (63) apolitique
• Armand Galea : Pour l’honneur de France
• Jean-Philippe Allenbach : fédéraliste candidat de la province
• Christian Garino : Esperanto liberté
• Daniel Lacroze-Marty: Cesprimer

The undecided:

• Nicolas Hulot (51) very popular TV presenter of ecological issues.
• José Bové (54) firmly against globalization.
• Dominique de Villepin (53) UMP, but if he stands presumably independent right.

The figures in brackets refer to the candidate’s age, not, as it would in France, the département where he/she lives.

I leave you to calculate the average age, sex and skin-colour.

As you see, there are 43, with another few perhaps to come. Given high days and holidays that is enough to have a fresh president every Monday morning of the year, an entirely equitable system and since we won’t remember any of their names, they would slip quietly into the sort of quasi-anonymity of the Irish, German and Italian presidents.