The crowd in Lyon cheered his promise to bring back school uniform and rewrite the history curriculum to tell the “national story” of France and get rid of an analytical focus on questioning history, which he said was about “doubting” France.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fillon addresses the rally in Lyon on Tuesday. Photograph: Guillaume Horcajuelo/EPA

Several figures from the right of the party were in the audience, including the former minister Nadine Morano, who was banned by Fillon’s Les Républicains party from running in last year’s regional elections after she repeatedly insisted France was a “white race” country.

Fillon’s sudden rise in popularity is in large part due to a book he published this autumn called Conquering Islamic Totalitarianism, which won him support on the right.

In it, he lambasted the currentspecial interests that reinforced itself in the decades that followed until it collapsed with a fiscal deficit of 15.6% in 2009.The lack of sound institutions and trust in the economy made Greece a characteristic example of a free-rider state. A state in which success was guaranteed through highly paid jobs in the public sector and hefty government contracts in the private sector created no real incentives for economic actors to contribute from their incomes to public goods and services. At the same time, employment for life and bad administration in the public sector never created incentives to employees and state enterprises to provide high quality services to citizens and corporations. As a result, free-riding extended across the public and private sectors and its key characteristic was distrust of