In a press conference yesterday, Bayrou (who got 18% of the votes in the first round) officially announced he would not give voting guidances to his electorate for the second round of the presidential election on  May 6th. His voters will have to decide by themselves how to split their votes between Sarkozy or Royal (or abstain).

Pointing out again the limitations he sees both on Sarkozy’s and Royal’s sides, and distributing bad grades to both of them in  his spirit of”no right,  no left”, he however did so in a very subtle way : according to Bayrou, and to make a long speech short, Sarkozy would be a dangerous president because of his relationship and approach to democracy which is supposedly all about concentration of powers; on the other hand, Royal’s political platform would only make France’s economic situation worse. Listening to him, it seemed pretty clear that the”personnality” issue Bayrou sees with Sarkozy as being a risk for democracy would be worse, in his mind,  than Royal’s controversial economic platform, which could be amended and refined.

Following this assessment, he accepted Royal’s invitation made on Monday April 23d to have a public, open debate on where do the socialists and the centrist meet and where they do disagree. Such a debate may take place on Friday April 27th.

Sarkozy’s team refused to have a similar public debate with Bayrou.

Bayrou’s also announced the creation of a new political party called the”Democratic party”, which should capitalize on his very good score in the first round and play on the centrist,”no left, no right” angle.

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