Paris – They wooed him hard, even leaving messages on his cellphone, and on Wednesday he spurned them both.
Beaten but defiant, the third-place finisher in France’s first-round presidential ballot said he would not throw his 7 million voters behind either conservative front-runner Nicolas Sarkozy or Socialist Segolene Royal, the two candidates still fighting for the top job.
Instead, Francois Bayrou said he will form a new party in the political center, setting his sights on the next election in 2012.
France’s decisionmakers had long disregarded Bayrou as a one-time farmboy with a puny political voice. Yet his outsider image propelled him up the polls this year in a country sick of the political in-crowd.
He savored his moment in the sun Wednesday as France waited to hear whether he would endorse a candidate for the May 6 runoff. He said both Royal and Sarkozy phoned him Monday after the first round – and he ignored their calls.
“I will not give guidance about how to vote,” Bayrou said at a packed news conference that several TV channels broadcast live. His own ballot choice, he added, remained a question mark.
Bayrou described France as “fragile” and “hurting.”
“We are a country with a sick democracy, we are a country with a torn social fabric, we are a country that lacks growth,” he said.
Sarkozy and Royal, he said, would only make those troubles worse.
Polls show Bayrou’s voters split fairly evenly in three: those who prefer Royal, those who prefer Sarkozy, and those who will abstain in the runoff in protest.
Royal, in particular, needs Bayrou’s backers: She won 25.9 percent of the vote Sunday while Sarkozy took nearly 31.2 percent.
France’s chance for a new political landscape, with a powerful centrist movement like those that have sprung up across Europe in recent years, is now at stake.
Bayrou faces a tricky exercise in keeping his electorate behind him, however, and some UDF lawmakers deserted him to back Sarkozy.
