Debate offers incumbent final chance but gap remains wide

EVERY LAST detail has been agreed. The table between Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande will be 2.5 metres in length.

Each candidate will have a handset to adjust his own air conditioning and the height of his chair. The 900sq m television studio in northern Paris will have 20 cameras, and each campaign has been allowed nominate an assistant director who can veto unflattering angles during the programme.

At 8.30pm this evening, the two men vying to be France’s next president will take part in the only head-to-head debate of the run-off campaign.

The traditional 2½-hour event, to be broadcast live on TF1 and France 2, is expected to attract an audience of up to 20 million people – almost a third of France’s population. “Everything is in order,” said Hollande’s director of communications, Manuel Valls. “It’s not the eve of a Foreman/Ali fight.”

And yet the build-up on both sides has been intense. For Sarkozy, a skilled debater, this is his one and only chance to shine in a direct confrontation with Hollande, the socialist who leads in opinion polls ahead of Sunday’s ballot.

Given his lead, Hollande has more to lose, which is why it came as no surprise when he declined the incumbent’s offer of two additional debates.

The broadcast will be split into four themes: the economy, society, institutions and foreign policy.

The big question is whether the debate could shift momentum sufficiently, at this late stage in the campaign, to make a difference. Political scientists and pollsters are sceptical.

The one exception may have been the 1974 election between Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and François Mitterrand, which some argue propelled Giscard to the Élysée Palace, but both candidates were very close in the polls going into that year’s debate.

Hollande’s lead over Sarkozy is 54 per cent to 46 per cent – a gap that has never been closed by a candidate this late in the election cycle.

“The history of the Fifth Republic has shown that the run-off debate, closely watched as it is, has never allowed a candidate to shift the balance of power,” Jérôme Fourquet of the Ifop polling agency told Le Monde. “At most it can help the challenger to reduce the gap, a gap which today is very significant and which we believe Nicolas Sarkozy will have difficulty making up.”

ELECTION DIARY

Talking to the National Front

Although Nicolas Sarkozy’s UMP party is going to considerable effort to attract far-right voters before Sunday’s run-off, its red line has always been that it will refuse to engage in talks or agree an electoral pact with the National Front.

Yesterday, however, defence minister Gérard Longuet hinted that that policy could change. In an interview with the far-right magazine Minute, Longuet described Marine Le Pen as “an interlocutor” for the centre-right and called on all right-wing voters to join forces to “block Hollande”. The shift in rhetoric, seen as a signal of reassurance to undecided front voters, drew swift criticism from the left, but also within Sarkozy’s party. “No, Marine Le Pen is not an interlocutor for us, in my view,” said education minister Luc Chatel. A series of ministers appeared on television to distance themselves from Longuet. “I’m shocked,” said former justice minister Rachida Dati.

No job for Bayrou

The centrist François Bayrou, tipped by some of Nicolas Sarkozy’s allies as a possible prime minister if the incumbent wins on Sunday, can cancel any plans he might have had to redecorate Hôtel Matignon, the prime minister’s residence in Paris. “François Bayrou is a remarkable man, but what is a prime minister? It’s the head of the parliamentary majority,” said Sarkozy. “In the division of duties between the prime minister and the president, the president speaks for all the people and the prime minister for the majority. It’s difficult to have a minority prime minister in a parliamentary majority.” Opinion polls show Bayrou’s supporters, who accounted for 9 per cent of voters in the first round, are split evenly between Sarkozy and Hollande, with roughly a third planning to vote for each and the rest undecided or abstaining.

The numbers war

In the battle of the rival rallies, the first task for the political parties is to bring out as many people as possible and place them so to make the crowd look as big as possible on television. The second task is to pick a big number out of the sky and repeat it so often that it becomes the accepted attendance estimate for the rest of the day. Trade unions said 250,000 people attended the Labour Day march in Paris yesterday. Police put the turnout at 48,000. A few kilometres away, Nicolas Sarkozy said 200,000 people had come along to his rally at Trocadéro, near the Eiffel Tower – an estimate which, given the relatively compact space in question, raised quite a few eyebrows. The Socialist Party claimed no more than 50,000 people could have been at Sarkozy’s event. Alas, the police refused to act as arbiters, because they don’t want to be seen to interfere in the presidential election. To establish the true figures, The Irish Times carried out a straw poll of 734,398 people on the streets of Paris yesterday, but the results were inconclusive.