John Lichfield: France is tempted into another cul-de-sac

A joke is doing the rounds in France about François Bayrou, the centrist presidential candidate who threatens to upset all the confident predictions for the April-May elections. Question: Why does François Bayrou encourage people to leave their mobiles switched on at his public meetings? Answer: When the telephones ring, they wake up his audience.

Bayrou has no power base. He has no original ideas. He is a decent man but a dull speaker and personality (imagine John Major, without the sparkle.) He was an unmemorable - some say cowardly and lazy - education minister in the 1990s. This is his only experience of national office.

All the same, six weeks before the first round of the elections, there is a definite movement towards Bayrou. In one poll yesterday, he reached 24 per cent, just behind the "principal" candidates of left and right, Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy. If Bayrou were to sneak into the second round on 6 May, he would - according to the polls - unite the Anyone-but-Sarko, or Anyone-but-Ségo, majority and become the Next Big Thing across the Channel.

Bayrou is attractive to many voters because he is an "outsider"; a farmer's son, who wears denim jackets and raises horses; and because he has never been to the finishing schools of the French political élite. He is attractive, above all, because he is not "Ségosarko", the candidate of "the Paris-media establishment". He promises to transcend the ideological "cleavages" of left and right; to form a centrist "government of all the talents"; to create a new Democratic Party of the sensible centre.

There was a similar voters' revolt in the 2002 election and during the 2005 European referendum campaign. Those rebellions benefited first the loathsome Jean-Marie Le Pen and then the disparate left and far-right opponents of the proposed EU constitution.

There is an evident, and absurd, paradox in the new fad for Bayrou. He is opposed to all that Le Pen stands for. He is the most enthusiastically European candidate in the elections. Is Bayroumania a sign that the French electorate is growing up? Is France determined to put aside its left-right, shake-it-all-about, hokey-cokey politics of the last 25 years? Is France suddenly more European again?

No. The fad for Bayrou is another way of evading change, not embracing it. After the cul-de-sacs of extreme left and extreme right, France is now tempted by the cul-de-sac of the extreme centre. For 24 years, since François Mitterrand gave up socialism in 1983, France has been governed by consensual, muddle-through governments with alternate left-right labels. Ideological "cleavages" are hardly France's problem.

M. Bayrou has one or two mildly sensible ideas, on the national debt and the job-killing burden of social security taxes. He has some antediluvian, corporatist ideas, on agriculture and education. He does not have the power base to deliver the economic and social change that France needs and says that it wants. His UDF party - the rump of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's anti-Gaullist coalition of the right and centre - is too small, under-funded and disorganised to give him a parliamentary majority in the legislative elections in June.

For more than two decades, the French electorate has pleaded for "change" and then opposed most changes. It has punished successive governments for "changing nothing" - even though the real causes of government unpopularity have been the limited changes that they have tried to introduce.

A couple of months ago, it seemed that both centre-left and centre-right had found candidates who could raise popular fervour for reformist politics. Both "Sarko" and "Ségo" have their faults, but both have newish ideas (Mme Royal's "Scandinavian" social-democracy; M. Sarkozy's rather Blairist, "humane" liberalism).

"Ségo" fervour has faded. More surprisingly, so has "Sarko" mania. Partly, this is the fault of the candidates. Partly, it is a resurgence of the unthinking "anti-Paris", anti-media mood which characterised the polls of 2002 and 2005.

A thoughtful centre-right, regional politician told me: "I would happily go along with Bayrou if I thought that he represented a real movement for pragmatism and reform. He doesn't. The movement towards him is just another example of our electorate refusing to grow up and face the future. They still want to vote against everything, not to vote for anything. Some say France is stuck in the 1970s. Actually, we are stuck in the 1790s. We just want to cut off heads."

Better Bayrou than Le Pen. But he offers no future for France. A Bayrou presidency risks being a Chirac III: another five years of drift. Having lost patience with the mushy centre, France would inevitably turn back to the destructive extremes. The Bayrou bandwagon would rapidly turn into another tumbril bound for the guillotine.