Thomas Legrand*, the associate chief editor of the political desk at RTL, the most popular radio channel in France (9 million listeners daily), is currently covering the presidential campaign. We interviewed him on March 21, exactly one month before the first round.

How do you characterize this presidential campaign?
It’s a campaign that signals the renewal of our political leaders: we are changing generations. From De Gaulle to Chirac, French presidents since 1945 were of the post-war era; now it’s the baby boomers. The main candidates are around 52/53 years old, very young for us. Because in France, contrary to what happens in all other major western democracies, there is no such thing as a political retirement: a candidate can lose an election, come back the next time, lose again… François Mitterrand [1981-1995] and Jacques Chirac [1995-2007] both ran three times before being elected: if you are 35 today, you’ve seen Chirac in every presidential election of your life.
This time, the three main candidates either never ran before (Nicolas Sarkozy, Ségolène Royal) or never were in a position to win (François Bayrou). And they all want to change the country: Bayrou and Royal want to institute the VIth Republic and Sarkozy wants to modify existing institutions.

People are very interested in the campaign, yet they can’t make up their mind…
That’s the second characteristic of this campaign: the volatility of the electorate. We observe that voters hesitate between the right and the left: today, one month before the vote, about 50% of voters still don’t know who they are going to choose. This is a new phenomenon.

How come?
There is a sort of “de-ideologization” of the debate. We’ve tried the left, the right and both together [i.e., a president from the right with a prime minister from the left]. Our last leftist president, Mitterrand, ended up turning to the right, and his successor, Chirac, a rightist, turned to the left. In fact, in 1995, Chirac’s motto was “the social divide” and in 2002 he was elected by the left against the extreme right. The difference between the right and the left has become fuzzy.
This time, Sarkozy talks about creating a Ministry of Immigration and National Identity, a rightist concept, but he quoted Jean Jaurès and Léon Blum, two historical figures of the left. Royal stands on the left when she talks about social issues, but rather on the right in terms of safety and morality. Plus she differentiates herself from “the elephants,” the older figures of her party. And then Bayrou says he is neither on the left nor the right.

How come Bayrou is suddenly so popular?
Exactly for that lack of association: he has managed to look neither left nor right. Once people hesitated, they started paying attention to him. To say, “I’m voting for Bayrou” today is a way of saying, “I am hesitating.”
Bayrou also benefits from the others’ deficiencies: Sarkozy, tactically very good, managed to rally the apparatus of the right, which means that nobody opposes him openly within the party, but moderate voters are not happy with him. With Royal, it’s personal: she is hard to read, and as De Gaulle said, an election in France is a personal meeting with the people.

When did he move to the forefront?
He made a genius move about six months ago. He is a clever political animal! During the evening news he claimed the media and the two main candidates colluded so that he couldn’t expose his views to the people. Suddenly, he appeared like a protest candidate, and rebelliousness strikes a very strong chord among the French electorate. Previously, the dissenting vote was the property of the extremes, but now Bayrou could personify the outsider without frightening people.

What is the main theme of the campaign?
In 2002, it was crime, in 1995, the social divide. This time it’s purchasing power. The candidates don’t talk about safety anymore, because we saw how it helps the Front National [FN], the extreme right. And Sarkozy, as Minister of the Interior, can’t say that safety has been a problem! It doesn’t mean that people feel safer, but, they worry more about the perceived decline of their purchasing power, accusing the euro and salary stagnation.

How does the last election, with the extreme right in the runoff, influence this campaign?
The left is traumatised, and deeply so. Our system involves two rounds. Traditionally, the French vote for the candidate they feel closest to in the first round and eliminate the candidate they dislike the most in the second. Hence, people vote first for the green candidates, the extreme left, etc. But that turned out disastrous last time. So now they want their first vote to be useful and strategic, rather than to their liking.

How come nobody predicted what happened in 2002?
In 2002, one month before the first round, Le Pen [FN] polled at 10 percent. It’s not that the polls were wrong. In fact, the very morning of the ballot, 20 percent of the voters were undecided. So a poll cannot be a projection; you need to look at 10 of them and watch the evolution. This year, everything is possible: the four main candidates can all score between 20 and 25 percent. The only certain thing is that the future president will be either Royal, Sarkozy, or Bayrou.

What about the extreme right?
In the past 20 years, pollsters and observers have always underestimated Le Pen’s score before the election. Personally, I think he won’t be in the runoff. He is getting old; he just said monstrous things about September 11 and gay people, and we barely noticed, nobody cares anymore. He’s cast himself as the candidate for change, but in this election, the main candidates are newcomers who want to change the system.

*Thomas Legrand worked as a radio reporter at the political desk of RMC and RTL between 1988 and 1997, covering the 1995 presidential campaign. He was RTL foreign correspondent in New York between 2001 and 2005. He wrote two books, Plume de l’ombre. (Ramsay 1991) about political speechwriters, and La main droite de Dieu. (God’s right hand) (Le Seuil, 1994) about the relationship between President Mitterrand and the extreme right.