French left fears repeat of 2002 fiasco as Bayrou support grows

The centrist candidate François Bayrou is within striking distance of an upset victory over the Socialist hopeful Ségolène Royal in the first round of the French presidential elections, according to an opinion poll published yesterday.

However, the surge of support for M. Bayrou is unusually "soft", according to pollsters. The French electorate is always difficult to poll and seems to be in an especially skittish mood this year. Other recent polls have suggested that support for Mme Royal is strengthening.

With just under eight weeks to go before the first round of the election on 22 April, more than half of the voters have still to choose a firm favourite. This is an unusually high figure, even for the notoriously volatile French electorate.

A blizzard of opinion polls - 32 in six weeks, by six organisations - has shown rapid, and sometimes contradictory, shifts in support. Questions are starting to be asked by French newspapers about the accuracy, timing and motivation of some of the polling.

According to the Ifop poll for Paris-Match, to be published in full tomorrow, M. Bayrou - who was polling in single figures a month ago - now has the support of 19 per cent of first-round voters. Mme Royal falls two points to 25.5 per cent.

This suggests that, with another small heave, M. Bayrou - a pro-European Christian Democrat, campaigning for an all-party coalition for modest reform - could push Mme Royal out of the two-candidate run-off on 6 May.

This would be a catastrophe for the French left, which was similarly humiliated in the last presidential election in 2002. On that occasion, a collapse in support for the Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin, undetected by the polls, allowed the veteran leader of the xenophobic far right Jean-Marie Le Pen to reach the second round.

This year, if there is to be a dark horse, or "third man", it looks more likely to be M. Bayrou. Caution is advisable, however. It is common in French elections for relatively inoffensive outsiders to surge in the opinion polls and then collapse before election day. Much of M. Bayrou's support is uncertain and could melt away, according to the pollsters.

M. Le Pen, on the other hand, usually outpolls the polls. He is currently shown at around 12 per cent. This is almost certainly too low, despite generous upward adjustments of his "raw" figures to take account of the fact that Le Pen voters often lie to pollsters. For the time being, however, there is a clear trend in all surveys towards M. Bayrou. The latest poll was taken before his competent but rather stiff performance in a prime-time debate with a panel of 100 voters on the main French TV channel, TF1, on Monday night.

A good performance by Mme Royal on this programme the previous week reversed her collapse in the polls and re-energised her campaign. The Paris-Match poll is the first to suggest that she might be struggling again.

The centre-right Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, remains the clear favourite to be the next French president. After dipping in recent polls, he is shown by the Ifop survey comfortably winning the first round on 22 April with 29 per cent. In the second round, according to the survey, he would defeat Mme Royal by 52 per cent to 48 per cent.

The rise of M. Bayrou is ringing alarm bells in the Sarkozy camp, however. The surge in support for the centrist candidate - running as a provincial outsider, despite a lifetime in national politics - is coming partly from centre-right voters who are alarmed by M. Sarkozy's talk of "rupture" or radical reform of the French "social model". M. Sarkozy would prefer a second-round duel with Mme Royal, not M. Bayrou.