Bayrou founds a new party but deputies join Sarkozy

The French centrist politician François Bayrou split with the majority of his own members of parliament yesterday and launched a new political party, the Mouvement Démocrate.

M. Bayrou, 55, who had once seemed capable of springing a surprise in the presidential election, said that he was creating a "new, independent political force" of "free men and women".

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By a show of hands at a conference in Paris, grass-roots members voted overwhelmingly to dissolve M. Bayrou's old party, the Union pour la Démocratie Francaise (UDF).

However, 21 out of the 29 UDF deputies in the national assembly repudiated M. Bayrou. They have bowed to pressure from France's president-elect, Nicolas Sarkozy, and agreed to join a "centrist" section of his centre-right party, the Union Pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP).

M. Bayrou, who took 18.8 per cent of the vote in the first round of the presidential elections on 22 April, portrayed the decision as the start of a historic re-alignment of French politics.

"Nothing can be more important" he said, than building a "free, anti-establishment force in France". M. Bayrou said that his new party would refuse all alliances with the existing power blocs of right and left.

This is precisely what worries M. Bayrou's former followers in the national assembly. They know that they owe their seats to electoral pacts with M. Sarkozy's UMP. Apart from a diehard bloc of eight (including M. Bayrou himself), they have decided to stand as part of the "presidential majority" in the two-round parliamentary elections next month.

M. Bayrou was unabashed yesterday. He said that his new party had been flooded with at least 20,000 demands for membership. "We are not interested in the outgoing members of parliament but the incoming ones," he said.

One opinion poll yesterday predicted M. Bayrou's new party would win between eight and 13 out of 577 members in the National Assembly - an excellent performance for a new party, but hardly an "anti-establishment force".

Yesterday's birth of the Mouvement Démocrate is part of a struggle for personal power on the centre-right of French politics going back to the 1970s. The UDF was originally created as a counter-force to Gaullism by ex-President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. Most of its members were gobbled up by the UMP - an alliance with the Gaullists inspired by President Jacques Chirac - in 2002.