FRANCE:The official campaign for the first round of the French presidential election will end at midnight tonight. The leading candidates held their final rallies last night: Nicolas Sarkozy in Marseille; Ségolène Royal in Toulouse, as is socialist tradition; François Bayrou on his home ground in Pau, and Jean-Marie Le Pen in Nice.
From midnight, opinion polls will be banned until the first results are announced at 8pm on Sunday.
The polls continued to sow confusion yesterday, when they showed first-round scores ranging from 15 per cent to 19 per cent for the centrist candidate Mr Bayrou, who is the main threat to the two front-runners, Mr Sarkozy and Ms Royal.
Only four days before the vote, 36 per cent of those polled by Sofres said they could still change their minds.
Former president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, who founded Mr Bayrou's UDF party, yesterday publicly came out in support of the right-wing candidate, Mr Sarkozy.
In an interview with Le Parisien newspaper, Mr Giscard indirectly insulted Mr Bayrou, saying the UDF "never had the vocation of maintaining uncertainty, floating in the void between policies that are obviously different and relying on impotent and fragile majorities".
Mr Giscard said that Mr Sarkozy, "by the choices that he proposes without ambiguity to the French, by his experience in the exercise of power and his ability to move things forward . . ." was the only "reasonable choice" for president.
Mr Giscard did not mention that Mr Sarkozy wants to strip the European constitutional treaty (which was drawn up under Mr Giscard's supervision) down to its institutional provisions.
In a triumphant rally attended by 17,000 people at the Bercy sports stadium in Paris on Wednesday night, Mr Bayrou retaliated for Mr Giscard's defection, and the earlier defection of Simone Veil, a former member of the UDF who also supports Mr Sarkozy.
"Look which camp all the dignitaries of past decades, without exception, are in," Mr Bayrou said.
"They're worried about defending their monopoly and their privileges. One more has just hastily joined their worried ranks. This really is proof that we embody change, versus these worn-out politicians."
An anti-Sarkozy book by Azouz Begag, the former minister for equal opportunity who this month resigned from the government and joined the Bayrou campaign, has reached the top of the bestseller list.
A Sheep in the Bathtub tells the story of Mr Begag's clashes with Mr Sarkozy during the year and a half they spent in government together.
When Mr Begag criticised Mr Sarkozy for calling delinquent immigrant youths "scum", Mr Sarkozy allegedly threatened to "smash [ his] face in".
Mr Bayrou often mentions the unsuccessful socialist candidate Dominique Strauss-Kahn, known for his moderate, social democratic policies, as someone he could work with. Mr Strauss-Kahn yesterday however quashed such speculation.
"It's getting ridiculous when over and over, his campaign appropriates men whose political line has never been the same as his," Mr Strauss-Kahn said, adding that he supported Ms Royal. "When you're on the left, you vote for the left," he said.