6 jours d'après - tour 2

Newspapers love love stories. And the love stories they love best are the stories about the editors' latest darling. To wit, the valentine press accorded François Bayrou after the 1er tour, which he lost with 18.57% of the vote.

But M. Bayrou was pronounced the loser who would determine the winner. Intoxicated by his flattering press, M. Bayrou played coy, eventually turning back overtures from both the "establishment finalists" -- although Sego got more play than Sarko -- and announced he would found a brand new party unbeholden to either establishment party. (All neatly recounted for you here.)

As we have argued, this leaves M. Bayrou with no constituency.

FRANÇOIS BAYROU BAPTISERA SON PARTI "MOUVEMENT DÉMOCRATE"*
5 mai 2007 (Le Monde)

BAYROU LAUNCHES NEW PARTY, VOWS TO KEEP SARKOZY IN CHECK
PARIS May 10, 2007 (AFP)

BAYROU FOUNDS A NEW PARTY BUT DEPUTIES JOIN SARKOZY

May 11, 2007 (Independent) - 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.

... 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).

Having been abandoned by the vast majority of his former deputies, M. Bayrou has yet to attract one elected official*** from any other party to his Mouvement Démocrate.

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".

"Excellent"! And without having yet taken one of these 8-13 seats (1%-2%). Coincidentally eight seats correspond exactly to the number of UDF deputies (including M. Bayrou) who have reinvented themselves in the Mouvement Démocrate and assumes the advantage of UDF incumbency. This is no gain at all, much less an excellent showing. But even 13 seats will be shy of the 20 needed to form a parlimentary group for committee appointments and fnancial support.

CENTRIST BAYROU RISKS FADING TO THE BACKGROUND IN FRANCE

PARIS May 11, 2007 (IHT) - [François Bayrou] has failed to persuade most of his legislators to stay by his side. The 22 defectors all won their seats with the help of conservative votes and were told that if they did not back Sarkozy, the conservatives would field an opponent. To run unopposed, they were asked to promise in writing never to vote a motion of censure against the government and never to oppose a budget throughout the five-year term.

Bayrou's prospects for another bid for the presidency in 2012 may depend less on his party's success in the June elections and more on Sarkozy's performance as president and the Socialists' ability to stop their internal divisions from splitting the party. As the right-leaning newspaper Le Figaro put it Friday:

"Bayrou is condemned to wait for the failure of the others."

* Shortened up to Le Modem.
** This number is given as 22 by AFP and IHT.
*** Azouz Begag, a deputy minister for equal opportunities in the Villepin government who quit his post to support M. Bayrou, has never held elected office.
† Sign up here.

PFFT (What is this?): Waiting on failure 3 | Rayonnement français 0