The Bayrou bubble keeps expanding.
Now Le Monde reports that he'd beat each of the two front-runners, Sarko and Sego, if he reached the second round.
Fabulous. But just today Bayrou floated that he'd be open to naming someone like Dominique Strauss Kahn or the soft right Minister of Social Affairs, burly Borloo, as Prime Minister.
Up until that news, Bayrou had been free to represent the outsider, a softer Le Pen. But as Le Pen glibly put it in a recent interview, Bayrou "is part of the system".
It's going to be very interesting to see how Bayrou, a former Minister of Education for Chirac, tries to keep himself as an outsider for another 60-odd days, and floating Borloo and DSK definitely starts putting that status into jeopardy.
(And last week's Alain Duhamel quasi-endorsement definitely puts a cramp in his "outsider" narrative as well.)
According to the same pollsters who predict a Sarkozy (or, now, Bayrou) victory, no one should underestimate how angry and unstable the French electorate is. Segolene was the poll anointed gate crasher for all of 2006, and fizzled the day she was obliged, as the candidate, to represent a loathed establishment.
So Bayrou looks like he's the "not Le Pen" of the moment.
But will he be able to stay that way and succeed where Sego could not? Pas sur.
So I guess Sarkozy needs Royal to win for Bayrou to lose? Americans are really missing out on the fun of multiple candidates.
Boz
Posted by: Boz | February 19, 2007 at 08:43 PM