BERLIN, April 10 (UPI) -- The critical phase of the French presidential campaign has begun, with the country's former security chief in the lead and two more candidates closely behind. Get ready for some potential reshuffling, however, as -- less than two weeks before the first ballot -- almost half the country is undecided.
According to a poll published in Sunday's Le Parisien newspaper, a record 18 million voters, or 42 percent of the total electorate, are still unsure which candidate they want as the successor of outgoing President Jacques Chirac.
Currently, former Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy -- the conservative politician retired from office to make room for his ambitious campaign -- leads the pack of presidential potentials with 29.5 percent, followed by Socialist leader Ségolène Royal with 22 percent. Far-right nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen, 14 percent, has been beaten to the No. 3 spot by François Bayrou, the leader of the centrist UDF party; according to the latest polls, he now owns 19 percent of the ballot.
Bayrou, a 55-year-old former teacher and education minister, in recent weeks has emerged as the candidate aiming to bridge France's traditional left-right divide.
"Bayrou is the inventor of the extreme center," Martin Koopmann, a France expert at the German Council on Foreign Relations, a Berlin-based think tank, told United Press International Tuesday in a telephone interview. "His ascendancy is the race's real surprise."
Bayrou has fired rounds at both Sarkozy and Royal, and said he wants to completely change the way politics has been run by socialists and conservatives in the past decades.
The French are quite taken by this approach and see in him a fresh alternative to the box-office favorites -- Sarkozy and Royal. Yet Bayrou has to be careful about all-too-radical visions: Although the economy in France is in far-from-perfect condition, the French are still unwilling to accept significant change; observers say the situation will have to get much worse -- especially in relation to neighbor Germany, which is experiencing an economic boom -- before the public would accept stringent reforms.
But what about the record 18 million undecided voters? Koopmann said people are increasingly unsure for whom to vote because of a general tendency in France to doubt its politicians.
"The crisis in the banlieus, which the established political scene failed to solve, has undermined the standing of politics," he told UPI. "Moreover, the differences between political parties and their candidates have become blurred. Neither Sarkozy nor Royal have clear, distinct profiles."
The proof is on the table: Socialist leader Royal has recently flirted with national ideas by proposing to equip every French household with the tricolor (the French flag) and have people -- finally, alas! -- memorize the text of the Marseillaise, the country's national anthem.
Even Le Pen, the far-right leader, has recently played the good guy. He paid a visit to a Paris banlieu, telling the migrant youths there that he was eager to undo the injustice done to them by the established political scene.
In a symbolic move, Le Pen decided to speak at the same spot where Sarkozy in 2005, then as interior minister, called the multi-ethnic banlieu youths "thugs" at the height of the riots. Sarkozy has not yet visited the banlieus again.
"You are the branches of the tree that is France," Le Pen said. "You are full-fledged Frenchmen."
Just to remind you of whom we speak: This is the same Le Pen who has advocated to isolate HIV carriers from the general public, accused Chirac of being "on the payroll of Jewish organizations" and who this past weekend told French voters in a radio interview not to vote for Sarkozy because he came from an "immigrant" background.
"It's obvious, there's a difference," Le Pen said. "There is a choice there which might be considered fundamental by a certain number of French people."
While Le Pen didn't lie (Sarkozy is half Hungarian and a quarter Jewish on his maternal French side), it remains a mystery how the outlandish xenophobia he has used in this and in past campaigns still gives him a realistic voter potential of roughly 15 percent.
With Le Pen's supporters, polls are usually not very reliable: Many of them publicly deny voting for his Front National, so the actual support could be even stronger -- although the chances for a late Le Pen presidency (he is now 78 and increasingly looks his age) are virtually non-existent.
Nevertheless, Le Pen needs to be taken into the strategic equation. In the last election he became the surprise runner-up to Chirac to enter the second ballot, at the time beating the favored Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin because the disunited Left voted all over the place -- for Trotskyite candidates, Communists and Greens with no real chance.
"This time, Le Pen won't be underestimated," Koopmann said. "But we'll have to wait and see whether the Socialists have learned from the mistakes made in the 2002 campaign."
