KEY POINTS:
"At the moment, I feel rather like Cyrano de Bergerac," said Francois Bayrou recently while on a tour of the annual Paris students' fair.
"In every move they make, the other candidates give credence to my campaign with their displays of jealousy, their trickeries."
With less than three weeks to go until the first round of the presidential elections on April 22, the 55-year-old "third man" from Bearn in the Pyrenees is holding his own as the script and plot writer of the race for the Elysee Palace.
Last month an Ipsos Mori poll for the Parliamentary Monitor suggested he could become President.
The survey looked at how voting intentions would be affected should Segolene Royal be knocked out on April 22, just as Lionel Jospin was in 2002.
In a May 6 run-off between Bayrou and Nicolas Sarkozy, 53 per cent of respondents said, they would opt for the third man, who likens himself to the quintessential anti-hero of French drama.
Born into a humble farming family and blessed with a brain, Bayrou has been easy for the French to fall in love with. (In opinion polls, he has shot from 6 per cent to as high as 24 per cent of voting intentions since January.)
He is described as the sexiest candidate. He quotes poets and knows them, yet eschews Parisian pretensions and still lives in Borderes, a quiet village in the southwest.
His home is nicknamed the White House by locals because of Bayrou's stated ambition, from a young age, to go into politics and defend rural people. He now breeds racehorses and, in his part of the world, that is considered well-earned social ascension.
His campaign centres on what he is not (elitist, rich) and what he won't do (spend, make false promises).
His key pledge is to handpick a future government from the ranks of the right and left, though he may yet fall foul of the electoral reality that the plucky party he presides over, the Union pour une Democratie Francaise (UDF), can scarcely hope to garnish a majority in the June parliamentary elections.
Bayrou says this does not matter. Only recently, he proclaimed himself a fan of Romano Prodi's coalition government, until the debacle last month which saw Italy in crisis.
Of late, Bayrou has turned to the German model which, under Chancellor Angela Merkel, works, but which was the result of compromise rather than a deliberate coalition plan.
Nevertheless, according to Le Monde commentator Jean-Baptiste de Montvalon, Bayrou may have hit upon a timely idea.
"The right-left divide has lost its lustre since the 1980s. Surveys find that more than 60 per cent of the French electorate have lost faith in the mainstream parties."
Bayrou could benefit. At this stage in the campaign, having driven his muddy tractor through the ideological wasteland left by Sarkozy and the compromised Royal, Bayrou is now pushing them to define their positions.
The socialist candidate's swing into red, white and blue mode gave him, on a visit to Reunion Island, his latest opportunity to play the sensible arbiter: "This campaign must not slip into the themes of immigration and the nation. It's dangerous when you start pointing fingers at a certain category of people, thus digging trenches of hatred between us.
"The two [main] candidates have a problem with this nationalistic obsession. It is as though the ideas of Jean-Marie le Pen are beginning to invade their minds. Well, they won't invade mine."
He said Royal's call for the French flag to be more visible "doesn't sound like my country. It sounds like the United States".
What is certain is that while the socialists remained frozen in the Mitterrand era and while everyone was watching Sarkozy brazenly transform the right wing by moving it away from President Jacques Chirac's timid imitation of Gaullism, Bayrou was carrying out a far more subtle revamp of the Christian-Democrat-based UDF.
Twice education minister under the right-wing governments of Edouard Balladur and Alain Juppe (1993-1997), Bayrou has led the UDF since 1998, when he refused to merge the party with Chirac's now-defunct Rassemblement pour la Republique and consequently lost many members to Sarkozy's Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP).
In the past seven years, the 30 UDF MPs in the National Assembly have repeatedly voted with the socialists against the UMP. What has emerged is often described as a social democrat party. His campaign, he insists, is based on common-sense proposals, such as making it unconstitutional to present a Budget that leads to deficit; creating private child care collectives; allowing people over 60 to chose retirement dates; and encouraging job creation by freeing two jobs in every small business from social charges.
Bayrou says he would raise minimum pensions and reduce wealth tax, reduce agricultural subsidies "which are murdering African countries", increase overtime pay to disband the 35-hour working week and allow gay couples to adopt children.
The question is not whether Bayrou appeals - he does - but whether he is simply the product of a bad campaign. Sarkozy frightens the French almost as much as does le Pen. Royal inspires few adjectives - "On ne la sent pas" (We can't gather a sense of her) say many French people - other than chilliness.
Given the bitter and overpowering memories of Jospin's disgrace in 2002, which saw le Pen run off against Chirac, the gentleman farmer from Bearn feels like an honest, safe bet.
He has been able to go along way with his promise of, "I will be a people's President, working for farmers, teachers, workers, nurses and small businesses, not for the rich companies of the stock exchange."
As for this reformed stutterer being another Cyrano, we shall have to wait and see.
Bayrou may well be writing the script - even setting down the plot lines of the French presidential campaign - but will France allow a great political victory to go to a poet of the soul? Cyrano, you might remember, did not have the happiest of endings.
The Bayrou lowdown
* Born: 25 May 1951.
* Has six children with his wife Babette (Elisabeth), 12 grandchildren and three cats.
* Has a PhD in classical literature.
*When his father died in a farming accident, he helped his mother run the family farm while still teaching Latin at the local school.
Best Of times
* Now, thanks to opinion polls showing he could make the second round of the French presidential elections and beat Nicolas Sarkozy.
* Previously, as the author of a best-selling biography of King Henry IV, who promised to "put a chicken in every pot every Sunday".
Worst Of times
* Scoring an embarrassing 6.8 per cent in the first round of the 2002 presidential election, after making the mistake of declaring early on in his campaign that he would be prepared to vote for Jacques Chirac in the second round.
What he says
* "We are the tractor set, not the jet set."
What others say
* "He told me he ran the Education Ministry in consultation with the trade unions. That's why no one remembers his doing anything when he was there." - Nicolas Sarkozy
- OBSERVER
