Francois Bayrou

Could this be the face of France's next president? It is a perfectly possible scenario. Francois Bayrou is now nipping at the heels of Segolene Royal in the first round of the vote (on April 22). It is perfectly possible to see him qualifying for round two against Nicolas Sarkozy. And what would happen then? All the left would rally round to "keep out Sarko" and the far-right would feel no inclination to help him. Sarkozy would be toast. So President Bayrou it would be. Is that good? Is it bad? Who the hell is this guy? Bayrou is a veteran figure of the political centre-right, who has brilliantly manged to pass himself off in this election as a rebel against the system. It is a ludicrous notion, because his party -- the UDF -- has been in more or less permanent alliance with the RPR/UMP, and Bayrou himself serve four years as education minister in the early 1990s. His greatest asset is that he is a man of the provinces. He grew up on a farm in the Bearn (see earlier blog), and worked originally as a Classics teacher. The oft-repeated story is that he mastered a delibitating stutter by constant practice in front of a mirror -- an early sign of his fierce will-power. His greatest problem is that he has no political party of any size. If he is elected, what happens then? In June the country votes for a new parliament, the theory being that the just-elected president gets a nice majority to work with. But where are these hundreds of Bayrou-ist MPs suddenly going to come from? The UDF has just 30 deputies, the rest having defected to the UMP five years ago. A president Bayrou could well end up with a parliament evenly divided between Socialists and the UMP, which would be a recipe for paralysis. That, or a majority for one party or the other -- which would mean more "cohabitation", and Bayrou relegated to a secondary role inside the country. So believe me: it is not a good idea. Bayoru is a nice man (though the one time I met him he had terrible halitosis) but the idea that he represents some radical alternative is perverse. People respond because the chimaera of national unity is always appealing. But it is doomed to fail.