Andreas Whittam Smith: Bayrou's object lesson in how to lead a third party

The French presidential election goes on being absorbing. In the past few days, for instance, François Bayrou, the leader of the centrist party, has been giving a masterclass in how to refuse a coalition and yet retain considerable influence. The outcome of next Sunday's final round of voting remains open.

If Ségolène Royal were to win, though she is currently a little behind Nicolas Sarkozy in the opinion polls, it would be a demonstration of the powerful appeal of freshness. Freshness is the flip side of inexperience, for it has the merit that the candidate carries no blame for current ills. Freshness in a political sense also pleasantly surprises because it means shedding doctrinal baggage.

David Cameron has been doing that, as Tony Blair did before him. And part of the appeal of Barack Obama, an early candidate for the American presidency, is that he makes his rivals look old-fashioned. Mme Royal has been the same. When she takes a tough line on crime and punishment, and admits the disadvantages of the 35-hour week, she is going beyond socialism in the strict French sense.

Look closely also at Mme Royal's methods. While she could not match the governmental experience of her rivals for the Socialist Party nomination, comprising two former prime ministers (Lionel Jospin and Laurent Fabius) and one former finance minister (Dominique Strauss-Kahn), she did something else that I suspect has been even more reassuring to the electorate. She conducted a large-scale, internet-basedconsultation on policy. She took this technique further than we have yet seen in this country or in the United States.

Until the morrow of the first round of voting - which gave M. Sarkozy, the leader of the right, 31 per cent of the votes, Mme Royal 26 per cent and M. Bayrou nearly 19 per cent - I hadn't liked the Socialist candidate. She appeared too authoritarian. But her speed in turning to M. Bayrou once the result was known showed admirable realism.

This was the arithmetic she faced. Add the support that the smaller parties of the right obtained to M. Sarkozy's tally and you come to 45 per cent of the votes cast. But putting the disparate parties of the far left and the ecologists together with Mme Royal's score gives a total of only a little more than 36 per cent. To win, therefore, she needs 73 per cent of those who backed M. Bayrou. She might have paused. Wasn't M. Bayrou a former ally of the right? Wouldn't she shock her militants, who anyway doubt her socialist credentials? Instead, on Saturday, she had an unprecedented policy discussion with M. Bayrou in front of the press. Neither side shifted their positions, but both got value out of the exercise.

M. Bayrou's problem is to turn his relatively high score in the first round into something that endures. His own party, the UDF, is weak. Some of its seats in the National Assembly result from an electoral pact with M. Sarkozy's UMP. Its leading members cheerfully betray each other. But since last Sunday's first round, M. Bayrou has done a remarkable thing. Although now excluded from the final round of voting, he has contrived to give the appearance of still being in the race. Some 400 journalists came to his press conference on Wednesday.

He accepted that he shouldn't tell his supporters how to vote in the second round. But he made an interesting distinction in his criticisms of the two candidates. While he continued to differ from Mme Royal on such purely policy issues as the role of the state, he made wounding remarks about M. Sarkozy's personality. He spoke, for instance, about his "taste for intimidation and menace". By this means he gave Mme Royal the status of representing the entire "anyone-but-Sarkozy" camp.

At the same time, M. Bayrou announced that he would found a new political party, "un parti démocrate", to contest the forthcoming elections for the National Assembly. This is not unusual in France. Only the Socialist Party has incarnated a political philosophy through time. The others are really supporters' clubs for individual political leaders. And as M. Bayrou's vote exceeded 20 per cent in 196 constituencies out of 577, he can at least entertain the hope of holding the balance of power in the new Assembly.

M. Bayrou cannot be the next president, but he is likely to have a big personal triumph. If M. Sarkozy carries the day, thanks to his sheer professionalism as a politician, M. Bayrou could play the leading role in forming a social democratic party out of his own followers and what would then be a divided Socialist Party. But if Mme Royal wins, then he would appear to have been the saviour of the left. All in all, an object lesson in how to conduct a third party - Sir Menzies Campbell, please take note.

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