France's 'Mr. Second Choice' Hollande edges toward the presidency

French presidential elections are first very long, and then very short. Then they do it again, two weeks later. Sunday night it was, to all intents and purposes, over at 8 p.m., Paris time. Eight of the 10 candidates vying to rule France like a monarch for the next five years were immediately consigned to the political garbage bin.

Only the top two, the current president Nicolas Sarkozy and his Socialist party challenger Francois Hollande, carry on for the second, decisive round on May 6.

On paper, Sarkozy could still win. He trails Hollande with just under 27 per cent of the vote to Hollandes just over 28 per cent. But that small margin does not tell the full story.

On Sunday, the far-right National Front candidate, Marine Le Pen, polled 18.6 per cent of the votes cast, a record for her party, and five years ago Sarkozy picked up most of the National Front votes on his way to his second-round victory.

Whats more, he is not the first candidate of the right to come second in the first round. Jacques Chirac in 1995 trailed the socialist Lionel Jospin before beating him in the second round.

But Sarkozy is the first incumbent president to come second in a vote. Even Valry Giscard dEstaing, the sitting president in 1981, won that first round against Franois Mitterand before losing in the second.

And the exit polls Sunday evening showed Hollande winning the second round with 54 per cent, as have many of the opinion surveys over the past several weeks. For much of France, it seems, he is the favourite second choice.

Mr. Runner-up

As for the length of the campaign, think back to a year ago. Then a man named Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund, and a former French finance minister, seemed the inevitable candidate of the left, indeed the inevitable winner of the election.

But in May, the man known as DSK was pulled off a plane in New York, arrested and charged with the rape of a hotel maid. The case eventually collapsed but so did his candidacy.

Enter Franois Hollande.

The key to Hollande is that he has always been his partys second choice.

He had been the second choice five years earlier when, in a galling twist, it was his erstwhile partner and mother of his four children, Sgolne Royal, who won the nomination for the socialists.

Hollande had been the first secretary of the party for eight years. A mediator by temperament, he laboured to keep the so-called "elephants" three former prime ministers and a collection of former ministers, all nursing enormous egos from tearing the Socialist party apart.

He even went along with the farce of pretending that he and Royal were still a couple during the last presidential campaign.

They werent, and she lost.

Takes a gamble

This time around the second choice saw his chance. With Strauss-Kahn mortally wounded he took drastic action. He went on a diet and lost 25 pounds and his nickname, Monsieur Flamby, a reference to a squishy French caramel pudding.

He also took speaking lessons, not so much to improve his style as to replace it with a carbon-copy imitation of Franois Mitterand, the Socialist who won the French presidency twice.

Armed with this new non-flabby persona, Hollande won the Socialist partys primary with more than 56 per cent of the vote. In a political gamble that paid off, the party opened the primary to everyone and almost 2.9 million people voted, giving Hollande the national political legitimacy that he had lacked.

Although he had worked as an adviser to president Mitterand and run the Socialist party, he had never held a ministerial post. But he has almost turned that to an advantage.

Since winning the party nomination in October, he has been campaigning as "the ordinary man," a normal guy who would replace the loose cannon that is Nicolas Sarkozy in the presidential office of the lyse palace.

Forget the euro consensus

Hollande is, in fact, not "ordinary," but rather a graduate of the cole Nationale dAdministration, Frances elite faculty that selects and trains the brilliant minority who have dominated the countrys politics for at least 60 years.

He also possesses an acerbic wit, which hes been under orders to keep hidden during the campaign.

Hollandes strategy was based on the idea that the election would be a referendum on one man Sarkozy. After five years of the high maintenance "Sarko," as the French call him, Hollande would be the welcome second choice.

In this campaign, Hollande has said little that is new. But what he has said has made him the second choice elsewhere as well.

Germanys Chancellor Angela Merkel made it clear early in the year that she would much prefer Sarkozy to Hollande as president.

Thats because Hollande has called into question the dominant European approach to the euro crisis, saying he would tear up the austerity-driven economic pact just negotiated by 25 European Union countries.

More stimulus is needed, he believes. He would also tax the rich, particularly those with incomes over one million euros a year (approximately $1.3 million).

Outsiders, not to mention Sarkozy himself, are already muttering about a run on French bonds and banks if Hollande wins outright on May 6.

Both Sarkozy and Hollande know that their country faces a difficult financial future.

They also know that disaffection with the French elite and with Europe is reaching crisis proportions among the citizenry.

For this, they merely have to look at the scores of the third and fourth-place candidates, one from far-right National Front and the next carrying the banner of the far left and backed by the French Communist party.

Together these extremes won 30 per cent of the vote on Sunday, and each has made it clear that Europe, or at least the European Union, is the enemy of France.

But those are problems for the morning after the second round. For the morning after the first round, the "second choice" has become the first choice.