Outre Atlantique, François Bayrou est vu comme un manipulateur. Il utilise une stratégie bien connue lors des campagnes électorales américaines.
Demain, une traduction et des commentaires. A suivre.
L'article est disponible sur nytimes.com, pour les abonnés au journal. Pour les autres, je me suis permis de le reproduire ci-dessous.
A 'Neither/Nor' Candidate for President Alters the French Political Landscape
By ELAINE SCIOLINO; ARIANE BERNARD CONTRIBUTED REPORTING.
Published: March 8, 2007
In the final weeks of the French presidential campaign, dominated by a nurturing Socialist and a crime-busting conservative, a third candidate has upended the race with a very American theme: put partisanship aside and end the false promises of the big parties.
The candidate, François Bayrou, a 55-year-old politician, farmer and former classics teacher, is campaigning as the ''neither/nor'' option. Remarkably, the strategy seems to be working, in part because of rising disillusionment over the two main candidates.
The percentage of undecided voters is higher than before any presidential election in 25 years. Between 17 and 20 percent of voters say they will choose Mr. Bayrou in the first electoral round on April 22, according to France's major polling organizations. Suddenly, he is a contender.
Mr. Bayrou is no maverick, but is portraying himself as a tried and true centrist and as a fresh face.
After a year in which the right's Nicolas Sarkozy and the left's Ségolène Royal got most of the news coverage, papers across the political spectrum have now moved ''the third man'' to their front pages. It now seems possible that he could edge out Ms. Royal and make it to the second round of voting on May 6.
''The French people want a president who brings them together rather than one who divides them, a president who reassures them rather than one who worries them,'' Mr. Bayrou said in an interview on a private plane en route from Paris to campaign in Épinal, in the northeastern Vosges region. ''The profound truth is that my election -- because I believe that I can be elected -- will be the expression of the will of France to rediscover itself.''
The oddest thing about Mr. Bayrou's swift ascendancy is that he has been around for so long. He ran for the first time in a local election in 1978 and landed a job in the Ministry of Agriculture the next year. He was first elected to Parliament from his native Pyrenees-Atlantic region in 1986 and was education minister in the 1990s. Since 1998 he has headed a centrist party, the Union for French Democracy, which his political mentor, former President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, founded in the 1970s.
Unlike both Mr. Sarkozy and Ms. Royal, Mr. Bayrou has even run for president once before, in 2002, when he received only 6.8 percent of the vote in the first round.
Yet he is succeeding in presenting himself as a vessel for the hopes of the disaffected -- a healer and a realist.
''I am a democrat, I am a Clintonian,'' he said. ''I am a man of the 'third way,' '' he added, a reference to a much earlier vision of Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain.
Mr. Bayrou's campaign has rattled the political machines of both Mr. Sarkozy and Ms. Royal, which rail about what they call Mr. Bayrou's naïveté that the main parties of France could somehow join hands. Political commentators of both the left and the right criticize his attempt to scuttle leftward as misleading and his platform as vague.
The right is trying to lure him back into the fold. Mr. Bayrou's party was weakened, first by President Jacques Chirac's competing Union for a Popular Movement in the 1990s and then by Mr. Sarkozy after he became head of the party in 2004.
The left, meanwhile, is portraying Mr. Bayrou as a fraud. Former Socialist Prime Minister Laurent Fabius calls it imperative to ''demystify the Bayrou operation'' and expose him as a man of the right. Mr. Bayrou has distanced himself from Mr. Sarkozy, saying his opponent sits down with millionaires while he sits down with farmers. As for Ms. Royal, Mr. Bayrou said, ''The Socialist model doesn't work.''
His platform promotes job formation, educational standards, improved conditions in the troubled suburbs, reduced government spending, a balanced budget and a stronger European Union, with France as its de facto leader.
Certainly Mr. Bayrou has a lot to learn about campaigning. At a round table with professors and students at a technical institute in Épinal, he barely disguised his boredom as he listened to arcane explanations of the industrial uses of wood. He scratched his left ear with his pen, slumped in his chair, yawned and pushed buttons on his mobile phone.
When the director of the institute addressed him by name at one point, he politely asked him to pronounce his name correctly: bye-roo, the way it is said in his native Béarn, not bay-roo, the way it might be said in Paris.
Mr. Bayrou's campaign has a seat-of-the-pants quality. The total staff around the country is 60 people, many of them volunteers.
On the plane back to Paris, Mr. Bayrou spoke in fluent English, noting that he had traveled throughout the United States, and that part of his wife's family is American. (His wife's aunt married an American soldier in China after World War II and settled in Des Moines. The families remain close.)
If he could live in the United States, Mr. Bayrou said, he would live in the open spaces of Montana; if he could vote in the 2008 American presidential election, he would hope to vote for Al Gore.
But Mr. Bayrou called the American-led war in Iraq ''the cause of chaos'' in the region and criticized the United States for what he called its ''survival of the fittest'' model, where people are driven to make as much money as possible, colleges are horribly expensive and middle-class families find it hard to make ends meet.
An observant Catholic and father of six, Mr. Bayrou wants to be recognized as an intellectual, and is particularly proud of his biography of the popular French king Henri IV. ''It was an enormous best seller! Best seller!'' he said on the plane.
Elisabeth, his wife of 35 years, maintains a private life on the farm totally separate from politics.
Indeed, in a profile of Mr. Bayrou broadcast in February on France 2 television, Mrs. Bayrou explained bluntly: ''I don't like the practice of politics. It's not my personality.''
Mr. Bayrou, whose father was killed when he fell from a hay cart, also goes to great lengths to cultivate his image as a farmer and a horse breeder. In the France 2 report, he was filmed driving his green tractor across a field, the Pyrenees mountains in the background.
The strategy seems to be working. ''I come from the land and I like that Bayrou comes from the land as well,'' said Hervé Thieblemont, the 41-year-old owner of a cigarette and newspaper store in Épinal. In 2002, Mr. Thieblemont voted for the far-right candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen, but this time he is leaning toward Mr. Bayrou.
Others remain unconvinced.
''They are all a bit too pretentious,'' said Sandrine Colson, a 36-year-old employee in a food shop in Épinal who said she would submit a blank ballot. ''It always seems all great, all easy with them. But well, that's all talk. Bayrou -- is he on the right or is he a centrist?''
The outcome may hinge on the undecided vote. According to a CSA opinion poll published Feb. 28 in Le Parisien, 45 percent of French voters have not decided whom to support. It is the highest level of undecided voters since the 1981 election, and double the level of undecided voters in 2002.
''The left-right division no longer works like it used to,'' Stéphane Rozès, the director of CSA, told Le Parisien. ''The rise of Bayrou is an expression of this.''