French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron has accepted an alliance with veteran politician Francois Bayrou.

With right-wing leader Marine Le Pen threatening in the polls, Macron confirmed the partnership with Bayrou on a platform "based on values and ideas".

Bayrou, who ran three times for president and won more than 18% of the vote in the 2007 election, was expected to join the race on his own ticket, but surprised many when the alliance with Macron was announced.

The 65-year-old was forecast to secure roughly 5% of the vote if he ran independently in this year's race, with a majority of those votes now expected to shift to Macron.

Macron had been polling roughly on a par with centre-right rival Francois Fillon, but is now expected to edge him out for the head-to-head showdown with Le Pen.

Bayrou said he wanted the alliance with Macron because Le Pen posed a "major and immediate threat for our country and Europe".

"I have two paths, to stand myself or to look for an unusual solution. I have decided to offer Emmanuel Macron an alliance," Bayrou told a press conference, reported the Guardian.

"Perhaps it's a sacrifice for me, but I feel there are times one has to rise to the seriousness of the situation and consider how to get out of it. It's not a time for me to think of myself, but of my country."

As a condition with his alliance for Macron, Bayrou demanded a clean up of the political system, which has been rocked by scandals across the spectrum. Both Fillon and Le Pen have been accused of separate "fake jobs" scandals – the former concerning the French taxpayers and the latter concerning European Union funds.

"French people feel politicians' words count for nothing. They have no confidence in the words and promises they hear ... we have to convince the French our actions can match our words. It's a good time to do it even if it is a sacrifice," Bayrou said.

"Perhaps this can be the foundation of a new approach in French politics," he added.</s>PARIS — Emmanuel Macron’s presidential campaign received a boost Wednesday after the leader of a centrist political party with a small but ardent following said he wouldn’t run in the election and proposed an alliance with the former French economy minister.

François Bayrou, leader of Mouvement Démocrate, said contesting this year’s election would have fractured the vote to the advantage of Marine Le Pen, the leader of far-right National Front party.

“Because the risk is immense, because French people are bewildered and desperate, I’ve decided to offer Emmanuel Macron an alliance,” Bayrou said.

Bayrou’s decision is the latest twist in a closely fought presidential election, fraught with setbacks for front-runners and surges in support for outsiders. With polls showing Ms. Le Pen winning the first round April 23, mainstream candidates are jostling for second place and the chance to go head-to-head with the National Front leader in the May 6 runoff.

An expanded version of this report appears on WSJ.com.</s>Self-described outsider and centrist take surprise step of joining forces as veteran of three elections says France is at ‘extreme risk’ and needs ‘exceptional response’

Emmanuel Macron’s presidential campaign has been boosted by a surprise alliance with veteran centrist François Bayrou.

Bayrou, the perennial “third man” of French politics, surprised supporters on Wednesday by offering to sacrifice a separate candidacy and join forces with the former Socialist economy minister, who is standing on a centrist ticket.

Shortly after the announcement, Macron told journalists he accepted the deal, including the demand for a law to clean up French politics, which he added would be a turning point in the presidential campaign and in “political life”.



“The alliance proposed by François Bayrou is based on values and ideas,” Macron told AFP.

Who is Emmanuel Macron? The 39-year-old was raised in Picardy, studied philosophy and was briefly a rising star in the the civil service before joining Rothschild as an investment banker. He served François Hollande first as senior adviser then as economy minister, before resigning and launching his campaign. Macron defines himself as an energetic outsider, 'of the left' and progressive on social issues, but economically liberal and pro-business. His youthful movement En Marche! (Let’s Go!) draws thousands to its rallies. Opponents say his crusade to reinvent the political system is presumptuous and have criticised his deliberately flexible approach to policy. Read our profile

“It fits fully into the programme of renewal and unity that’s been our aim from the beginning and that’s why I accepted.”

Macron said he would meet Bayrou, president of the Mouvement Démocrate (MoDem), on Thursday.

After weeks of suspense, the 65-year-old Bayrou, a veteran of three previous presidential elections, had been expected to announce that he would join the presidential race.

Instead, he said he would not stand but offered to join forces with Macron, 39.



The announcement, described as an unprecedented move, took French political pundits and rival candidates by surprise.



Polls suggest the bulk, though not all, of Bayrou’s support – thought to be worth 5-6% of the vote in a race that may come down to two or three percentage points – will transfer to Macron, increasing his chances of advancing to the second round runoff ahead of his centre-right rival, François Fillon.

Bayrou said the country was at “extreme risk” and needed what he described as an “exceptional response”. What he was proposing, he added, was an alliance of partners and not a move for his centrist party to be subsumed by Macron’s En Marche! (Let’s Go!) movement.



Emmanuel Macron: the French outsider who would be president Read more

“I have two paths, to stand myself or to look for an unusual solution. I have decided to offer Emmanuel Macron an alliance,” Bayrou told a press conference.



“Perhaps it’s a sacrifice for me, but I feel there are times one has to rise to the seriousness of the situation and consider how to get out of it. It’s not a time for me to think of myself, but of my country.”

Bayrou said the French were “disorientated and despairing”, faced with the far-right Front National candidate Marine Le Pen – currently leading in the polls for the first round vote – who he said was the “threat and major danger for our country and Europe”, and Fillon, 62, hit by allegations over jobs given to his wife and children.

“Never in the past 50 years has the democracy in France known such a situation,” Bayrou said, adding that French politics was riddled with “practices that would not be expected anywhere else”. The presidential campaign, which has been rocked by scandals, had left him “stupefied” and “made a mockery of France”, he added.

“To the right, affairs have been uncovered that reveal not just the existence of privileges and tendencies but the tacit and almost unanimous acceptance of them. For a long time it has been repeated that ‘everyone does it’. But I can stand here and say it is not true and it is defamatory for the vast majority of elected representatives.”

Bayrou said one of his conditions for an alliance with Macron, whom he described as “brilliant”, would be a major clean up of France’s political life.

“French people feel politicians words count for nothing. They have no confidence in the words and promises they hear … we have to convince the French our actions can match our words. It’s a good time to do it even if it is a sacrifice,” he added.



Bayrou, who was an education minister in a centre right government in the 1990s, said he had spoken to Macron a week ago and insisted it should be an alliance and not a subjugation of the “French centrist movement”.

“Perhaps this can be the foundation of a new approach in French politics,” he added.</s>Theresa May is meeting the centrist French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron in London while continuing her policy of refusing to engage with his rival Marine Le Pen of the far right Front National.

The prime minister was scheduled to host the presidential hopeful in Downing Street on Tuesday after he requested a meeting while in the UK to speak to 3,000 French voters in Westminster.



May’s spokesman said they would speak about a broad range of issues, including Brexit, and dismissed the idea that it showed favouritism towards his candidacy. 



He confirmed it was still the government’s position that it does not have relations with Le Pen, one of the three main contenders along with Macron and François Fillon, the rightwing candidate.

The move is fairly unusual but not unprecedented; Tony Blair met the French presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007 during his campaign.

Macron’s London trip and his rally for supporters near Westminster comes as he attempts to get his campaign back on track after a troubled week. Polls show Le Pen with an increasingly solid lead in the first round of the election, with Macron slipping back to equal standing with the beleaguered Fillon. 



Fillon has vowed to continue his campaign despite a preliminary investigation into whether he gave his wife a fake parliamentary job from public funds.

All polls currently suggest Le Pen will be defeated in the presidential second round in May. But this week an Opinionway survey for Les Echos, showed the gap was narrowing – with Macron versus Le Pen on 58% to 42%, and Fillon versus Le Pen on 56% to 44%.

Macron, who is running a delicate balancing act with a platform that is “neither left nor right”, has been accused by his opponents of fleeing serious argument about policy by failing to set out a concrete list of policy proposals or how he intends to pay for them. Later this week, he will set out how he plans to cut French public spending while also committing to boosting police numbers, prison places and teacher numbers.

On a trip to Algeria last week, Macron provoked a row after he said France’s history in the country was a “crime against humanity”. At the weekend he apologised if he had offended French nationals who had to leave Algeria in 1962 but said: “We must face this common, complex past if we want to move on and get along.”

He was also forced to clarify his position on same-sex marriage after saying conservatives who had taken to the streets to oppose its legalisation by François Hollande had been “humiliated” by the left.

Several French presidential candidates are currently working on their international status in campaign visits abroad. Le Pen, whose offices were raided on Monday as part of an investigation into “fake jobs” involving the misuse of European funds, was in Lebanon this week in an attempt to add to her international credibility on her first official visit to a head of state and her first foreign leader’s handshake, with the president, Michel Aoun, in Beirut. The Socialist party’s Benoît Hamon, currently fourth in the polls, was in Portugal meeting members of the leftwing coalition government in an attempt to show that warring factions of the left can be reconciled.

London has become a compulsory campaign stop for French presidential candidates seeking to boost their international credentials and court the growing expat vote. It is home to about 300,000 of the 400,000 French people in Britain, a population large enough that it would be equal to France’s sixth biggest city in voting terms.

Sarkozy started the trend for “Paris-on-Thames” campaign rallies a decade ago, urging expats to come home and saying: “France is still your country even if you’re disappointed by it.”

The stakes are even higher now that French expats are able to vote for their own MPs in overseas constituencies. The seat for northern Europe, which represents French people in the UK, Ireland, Scandinavia and the Baltic states, is currently held by a Socialist.</s>Emmanuel Macron's campaign for the French presidency received a key boost on Wednesday when he accepted to forge an "alliance' with veteran centrist François Bayrou against conservative and far Right rivals.

The offer from Mr Bayrou, 65, who has run for president three times and came third in 2007 with 18.5 per cent of the vote, came as a surprise; as many observers thought he would announce his candidacy once again.

But speaking at his Modem party headquarters in Paris, the historian of Henri IV, said the hour was too grave in France to think of self-interest.

"I have decided to offer Emmanuel Macron an alliance. The danger is too big we must change things," he said, describing his decision as a "sacrifice."</s>Emmanuel Macron is something of an anomaly in an era of Donald Trump and Brexit.

The former investment banker has taken the French presidential election by storm with a campaign that is decidedly non-populist. Mr. Macron strongly supports the European Union, open borders and the euro. He wants French Muslims to feel more at home and has called French colonialism a “crime against humanity.” And while he has never belonged to a political party or been elected, polls give Mr. Macron the best chance of becoming the next president in May.

In fact, polls show him slightly behind Marine Le Pen of the National Front in the first round of voting, on April 23, with Republicans nominee François Fillon in third. But in a showdown between Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen in the second round, on May 7, he would win easily.

“I have a very, I would say, classical or orthodox view regarding what the EU should be,” Mr. Macron said during a meeting this week in London with a small group of journalists. “I’m a strong supporter of the EU and the euro zone.”

Mr. Macron, 39, doesn’t shy away from being labelled pro-globalization, saying France cannot go it alone in the world. It needs the strength of the EU, especially when it comes to issues such as security, immigration and counterbalancing superpowers such as the United States and China. “In this current environment, France is not the right scale to defend your actual sovereignty,” he said.

And he has little time for people like former British prime minister David Cameron, who led the losing Remain side in Britain’s EU referendum campaign, and Hillary Clinton, who famously lost to Mr. Trump in last year’s U.S. election. They weren’t genuine, he said, pointing out that Mr. Cameron failed to make the Remain argument properly and Ms. Clinton’s message was unclear.

“In all the recent elections you had a lot of classical politicians, or classical positions, pushed and promoted by people who refused to endorse them very aggressively,” he said. “If you are shy, you are dead in this current environment.”

Mr. Macron is far from reserved. He grew up the eldest of three children in the northern city of Amiens, where his father was a neurologist and his mother a pediatrician. At 16, he began a relationship with his high school drama teacher, Brigitte Trogneux, who is 24 years older and the mother of three children. Worried about the optics, his parents sent him away to Paris to finish his education, but Mr. Macron and Ms. Trogneux stayed in touch and eventually married in 2007.

Once in Paris, Mr. Macron excelled in school and business. He graduated among the top of his class at the prestigious École nationale d’administration, considered the preparatory school for the country’s elite.

After a stint in the Ministry of the Economy, he joined Rothschild & Cie Banque as an investment banker and made a fortune.

In 2012, President François Hollande recruited Mr. Macron to be his deputy chief of staff – to help put a more pro-business face on the fledgling Socialist administration. Mr. Macron became economy minister in 2014 but quit last year after a series of disputes with cabinet colleagues. He had mocked Mr. Hollande’s punitive tax on the super-rich, saying it would turn France into “Cuba without the sun.” He had also introduced a controversial set of labour reforms called the Macron Law, which also permitted some Sunday shopping.

Within months of leaving government, Mr. Macron started his own movement called En Marche!, or “On the Move!” He calls the organization neither right-wing nor left-wing and chastises all politicians for being consumed with self-interest. En Marche! has become a beacon for young professionals and those leery of the hard-right policies of Ms. Le Pen, the radical economic proposals of Mr. Fillon and the far-left platform of Socialist Party candidate Benoît Hamon.

“I was looking for a candidate like him,” said Bertrand Boucheny, who runs a small auto parts company in Paris. “I supported the right, but Fillon is too conservative for me.”

Mr. Boucheny joined about 30 En Marche! supporters one Saturday last month at a café in an upscale part of Paris to hit the nearby streets to hand out pamphlets for Mr. Macron. “We come every weekend, and when we started there were only a few of us,” said Laurent Saint Martin, 31, who is the local organizer for the Macron campaign. “Now look.” Mr. Saint Martin said he used to vote Socialist or Green but joined En Marche! last fall. “We need something fresh. We need something new.”

For now, Mr. Macron is benefiting from being an outsider and a fresh face. He’s also been boosted by the troubles plaguing Mr. Fillon, a former prime minister who was once well ahead of Mr. Macron in opinion polls but has been beset by allegations he put his wife on the public payroll even though she did no work. Mr. Macron also got a lift on Wednesday when François Bayrou, who leads a centre-right group called MoDem, announced he wouldn’t run and offered to back Mr. Macron.

“He has a good chance, but it’s early,” said Bruno Cavalier, the chief economist at Oddo Securities in Paris who follows the election closely. Mr. Cavalier said polls show Mr. Macron’s support is soft, with about 40 per cent of his backers saying they will definitely vote for him. That compares to 80 per cent for Ms. Le Pen and 70 per cent for Mr. Fillon. He added that Mr. Macron has yet to spell out many clear policies and that his recent remarks about French colonialism drew widespread criticism. “The support for Macron today could evolve significantly – for the better or the worse,” he said.

Mr. Macron insisted that he welcomes the naysayers. During the meeting in London, he talked at length about reforming France’s economy, enhancing protections for the poor and keeping the borders open. He said his comment about colonialism was misconstrued but insisted that France must come to terms with its past in order to deal with today’s issues. As colonialists, “we promoted, all of us, some legislation which didn’t respect human [dignity] and equality of rights, so we have to deal with that, it’s part of our history,” he said.

And when it comes to Brexit and Mr. Trump, Mr. Macron said he is hopeful France will buck the populist trend. Then he added with a smile: “In the current environment, where extremes – anti-European anti-globalization – win elections, I think that’s probably the best moment for France to decide to do the opposite.”</s>Emmanuel Macron is a former investment banker and economy minister who hopes his meteoric rise will propel him to the French presidency aged just 39.

The reform-minded pro-EU candidate got a potential boost Wednesday when the veteran Francois Bayrou joined him in a centrist alliance that Macron hailed as a "turning point" in the campaign.

Macron's campaign events have been packed out for weeks and his pledge that he is "neither of the right nor the left" has gained currency in an election being watched around the world after the Brexit vote in Britain and Donald Trump's victory in the United States.

Polls show he is one of the three frontrunners, vying with far-right candidate Marine Le Pen and conservative representative Francois Fillon.

But Macron, who has never won elected office, has faced accusations that his candidacy carries little substance.

His personal life has also come under scrutiny.

Earlier this month, he poked fun at rumours he is gay despite being married to a woman he met when she was teaching at his high school. His wife Brigitte, who is 24 years older than him, is a highly visible presence in his campaign.

After a lucrative career as a banker for Rothschild, Macron served Socialist President Francois Hollande as an economic advisor before he was plucked from obscurity to join his cabinet.

In his two years in the government, he confronted Socialist orthodoxy head-on, questioning the 35-hour work week -- a totem of the French left.

Described as academically "brilliant" by his supporters, his business-friendly policies riled many leftist colleagues and activists.

During a public appearance in June last year, trade unionists pelted him with eggs.

But the swipes at the man dismissed by one veteran Socialist as a "start-up" politician have failed to dent his ambitions.

"If approval was a criterion in this country, nothing would ever get done," Macron said last year.

After week upon week of rising ratings, polls Tuesday showed Macron starting to slide -- on the very day he was granted an audience with British Prime Minister Theresa May in London.

The surveys showed him falling back to third in the first round of the election on April 23, behind Le Pen and Fillon, with the latter tipped to beat Le Pen in May's second-round runoff despite facing allegations he paid his wife hundreds of thousands of euros for parliamentary work she may not have done.</s>Emmanuel Macron has suddenly found himself as the new poster boy of Europe’s beleaguered political centre. The insiders’ outsider, if you like. From Marseille to London thousands have been flocking to hear this insurgent presidential candidate for the French speak.

But just as pundits began to accept the bid from the former investment banker and minister of economy during the first half of François Hollande’s presidency, a new controversy about the interpretation of colonial history has tested Macron’s electoral appeal, and demonstrated that France’s colonial ghosts are alive and kicking.

On February 15, in an interview with the TV channel Echorouk News during a visit to Algeria, Macron followed protocol and spoke about his desire to “build a bridge” between France and its former colony. But in doing so, he addressed the subject of colonialism. He backtracked on a previous comment about the “richness” of colonial Algeria to brandish colonialism a “crime against humanity”.

Losing no time, a choir of commentators from the right interjected to castigate Macron for his “shameful” lack of patriotism. François Fillon, the candidate for the centre-right Les Républicains, sensed an opportunity to divert attention from his own scandals to brandish Macron’s words as “hateful” of France, and demonstrating that he had “no spinal cord”.

To dramatise things further, Macron was on his way to the southeastern France, an area where there is substantial support for the right-wing Front National, led by Marine Le Pen. The region has a large concentration of pieds-noirs, or former European settlers from Algeria, who still nurture a sense of resentment over French “abandonment” of its colony. As scenes of a demonstration of pied-noir activists in the town of Carpentras reached the press, this latest spat turned into a full-on controversy and Macron suffered in the polls.

This chain of events reflects Macron’s volatile position as the centrist in this election campaign. The former-socialist-turned-independent has succeeded in detaching his public image from his record as a minister in the Hollande government. His forward-looking attitude stands in sharp contrast to the projects of political nostalgia of Le Pen and Fillon. He has succeeded in attracting a truly diverse coalition of voters from left and right alike.

This success, however, is fragile. Recent polls show that only 33% of voters who consider voting for Macron are sure they will do so on election day, while his centrist position has attracted comments on Twitter such as: “Trying to be everywhere, he ends up being nowhere.” In this context, remarks about colonial history seemed to be a way for Macron to appeal to a younger, left-leaning electorate by talking about social issues beyond his normal focus on economic reform.

At first glance, Macron’s initial comments align with condemnation of colonial history that has become a marker of France’s political left in recent years. In 2005, the then left-wing opposition belatedly united to oppose a government bill, initiated by pied-noir associations, which ordered schools to stress the “positive role” of France’s “overseas presence”. The law was eventually dropped but the debate that emerged created new political fronts.

The right wing UMP (which has since changed its name to Les Républicains) ignored its history as the party of Charles de Gaulle, the president who had signed the 1962 Evian Agreements and retreated from Algeria to support the law. At the same time, the socialists skirted over their party’s historical support of colonialism and the Algerian War to portray themselves as a party of inherent anti-colonialists.

This same dynamic continued in 2012. Shortly after winning the presidency, Hollande organised a state visit to Algeria, in which he expressed his regrets over the “profoundly unjust and brutal” colonial system. Left-wing reactions to his speech back in France celebrated him as a part of the “left without complexes or compromises on the subject of the country’s colonial past”. Meanwhile, the same right-wing politicians who had initiated the 2005 law deplored his act of “repentance”.

Even Macron’s use of the term “crime against humanity”, which many observers denounced as inappropriate, goes back to a series of legislative actions to re-define France’s colonial past, most notably the 2001 law brought forward by the socialist Christiane Taubira that defined transatlantic slavery as a crime against humanity. In this context, it is unsurprising that France’s current minister for families, Laurence Rossignol, declared that Macron’s words were a way to “declare his affiliation to the left” by stressing his “anticolonial” credentials.

Macron’s reaction to the controversy suggests he had not intended to take a stand on a decidedly anti-colonial platform. On February 18, in Toulon, another pied-noir centre in southeastern France, he paraphrased an old speech of De Gaulle in Algeria as he backtracked and apologised to those offended by his first analogy: “je vous ai compris” (I understood you).

Macron’s foray into the politics of memory was ill-conceived at best. Over the last decade, the debate about colonialism has exacerbated the polarisation of French politics and left no space for a search of any middle ground. In entering this quagmire, Macron was destined to be pulled into a barren debate about a “balance sheet” of colonialism where politicians express political allegiances by addressing France’s historical past as simply “good” or bad".

Nonetheless, there might be another reason for Macron’s initial stance: his age. Unlike most voices in these loud fights about colonial history, Macron is too young to have experienced any of the events of decolonisation and its aftermath first-hand. He grew up in a society that engaged with the memory of colonialism rather than with its actual violence. As such, he is comfortable speaking about “facing up to history”, thinking that colonialism truly is consigned to the past. This could be the position of a true centrist in 21st century France.</s>Theresa May is having a meeting with the French presidential hopeful Emmanuel Macron, as the charismatic independent candidate comes to London to speak to expat voters.

Downing Street confirmed the unusual meeting was taking place following a request from Mr Macron, now seen as a favourite to win the presidency amid disarray in the mainstream French parties.

Number 10 said the pair would discuss a “broad range” of issues, but Ms May is unlikely to pass up the chance to press her case on Brexit with the man who could well be heading France’s approach to Article 50 negotiations in a few months’ time.

It also comes as Downing Street became caught in a war of words with sitting President Francois Hollande over the UK’s obligations to refugees in Calais.

Ahead of the meeting with Mr Macron, a Number 10 spokesman said: “Emmanuel Macron is already in London to meet French ex-pat voters. Having been in London he requested the meeting.”

Such a meeting is not unprecedented, with Tony Blair having met Nicolas Sarkozy before he won the presidency in 2007. But it is unusual, particularly given that Mr Macron is not standing for any of the major parties.

Downing Street confirmed that no such meeting would take place with another leading contender, Marine Le Pen of the Front National, with whom there is “long standing” non-engagement approach.

Mr Macron was to address more than 3,000 French citizens in London hoping to persuade those registered to vote abroad to back his bid for the power.

The meeting in Downing Street allows the former investment banker and French economy minister to be seen with a key foreign leader, while allowing Ms May the opportunity to make her case for a beneficial Brexit deal with the pro-EU French candidate.

An opinion poll on Monday put the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen seven points clear of Mr Macron and his conservative rival François Fillon, who are tied on 20 per cent, in the first round.

But Ms Le Pen would lose to Mr Macron and Mr Fillon in the May 7 run-off, the poll predicted, by margins of 16 and 12 points respectively.</s>Emmanuel Macron has emerged as undisputed king of the French centre ground, but shifting sentiment and alliances make predicting this year's presidential election as difficult as ever.

Macron, a 39-year-old former economy minister, was given little chance when he launched a new political movement "En Marche" last year ahead of a vote that was billed as a fight between conservatives and the far-right.

But the pro-European progressive is now a frontrunner to become France's next leader and will draw fresh strength from Wednesday's announcement of a potentially vital alliance with veteran centrist Francois Bayrou, who decided against mounting a rival presidential bid.

The two were to meet on Thursday afternoon with Macron hoping the tie-up can boost his chances after a tricky 10 days that have seen him lose momentum just as far-right candidate Marine Le Pen picks up speed.

Bayrou acknowledged that Macron was in a "bit of a difficult spot" on Thursday as he spoke about their alliance aimed at ending the post-war lock on France's politics enjoyed by mainstream parties.

"The feeling he had, I think, was that it was an important moment for him, but not only for him, for changing the political life of France," Bayrou told RTL radio.

Macron's unforeseen rise illustrates the difficulty in forecasting this year's two-stage election on April 23 and May 7 which is being widely watched by governments and investors around the world.

Polls currently show anti-EU far-right leader Le Pen winning the first round with around 25-28 percent of the vote, but losing in the second round where she needs more than 50 percent.

The ultimate winner is therefore currently seen as Macron or Francois Fillon, the long-time favourite and conservative candidate for the right-wing Republicans party.

But the unstable international background -- from Donald Trump and Brexit to the surge of right-wing nationalists in Europe -- is mirrored by an anti-establishment and angry mood in France.

Unpopular Socialist President Francois Hollande decided not to run for re-election in December after a five-year term marked by a series of terror attacks and high unemployment.

Both the Republicans and the Socialist parties overlooked the most obvious candidates when choosing their nominee in primary votes.

And Le Pen and Fillon both face serious legal investigations into their use of allegedly fake parliamentary aides which could have consequences between now and election day.

Fillon was described as "completely lost" by former rightwing president Nicolas Sarkozy after the two men lunched together last week, according to a report in the Canard Enchaine newspaper.

A final election twist, largely overlooked until recently, is the potential for a tie-up between the splintered leftist candidates which would produce another political earthquake.

Polls show that Socialist candidate Benoit Hamon, Communist-backed Jean-Luc Melenchon and environmentalist Yannick Jadot have enough supporters to mount a serious challenge together.

"Benoit Hamon has reached out to Jean-Luc Melenchon, he's even reached out to Yannick Jadot," the spokesman for the Socialist government, Stephane Le Foll, told France 2 television on Thursday.

Le Foll urged Hamon to make a deal quickly, adding: "Personally I'm in favour of alliances."

France's splintered Socialists are still haunted by the 2002 presidential election when their divisions led them to be knocked out in the first round, with far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen -- Marine's father -- going through to the run-off.

A leftist alliance would make Macron's route to the presidency more difficult, but he could still -- thanks to Bayrou's decision -- claim to be the only centrist in the race.

His platform -- which critics say is still too vague -- is more pro-business and reform-minded than his leftist rivals who have large tax-and-spend programmes.

He is also instinctively pro-European and is at ease with multiculturalism in France, whereas Fillon and Le Pen have both railed against the threat to French identity posed by Muslims in particular.

But Macron remains inexperienced, having served only two years as an economy minister and the same amount of time as a political advisor to Hollande.

He was forced to backtrack last week during a visit to Algeria where he talked about France's 130-year colonial rule there as a "crime against humanity," leading to fierce attacks from his rightwing rivals.
François Bayrou drops out in an effort to boost Emmanuel Macron.