Eurosceptic Philippe Seguin, leading conservative contender for the premiership if the right scrapes through in Sunday's parliamentary election runoff, was given little time to try to reverse its first-round fiasco.
Socially-minded Seguin and militant free-marketeer Alain Madelin were thrust into the limelight as the right's improbable dream team only after Prime Minister Alain Juppe took the blame for last Sunday's left-wing upset, saying he would bow out no matter who won in the runoff.
Time. This obsessive time...that we need to tell the French how well we understood their message, said Seguin with a hint of desperation as he ended his campaign by begging voters not to recall ghosts of the past to power.
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He insisted he would heed the voters' warning, vowing to give precedence to the fight for jobs rather than to budget austerity geared towards qualifying France for the single European currency, the euro.
Employment must be at the centre of the action of all authorities, above any other priority, he said. Cutting the budget deficit is obviously indispensable...but it must not be achieved at a pace which prevents the resumption of growth.
Opinion polls have long shown Seguin, a recent convert to a single European currency, as the favourite for premier if the right wins. Madelin would be finance minister.
But analysts said the bizarre last-minute tandem could just as easily alienate voters by further blurring President Jacques Chirac's unclear message about what policies he wants his government to follow.
Seguin, the outgoing National Assembly speaker, has recently toned down his anti-Europe campaign and shifted closer to Chirac's drive for the single European currency.
Voters narrowly endorsed the Maastricht Treaty for European union in a 1992 referendum and France signed it. This signature must be honoured. This problem is therefore behind us, Seguin said.
I pledge to work relentlessly for a united Europe, a democratic Europe...devoting all its immense energies and imagination to creating wealth and jobs, he said.
His social Gaullism, with its emphasis on the role of the state in protecting the weak and jobless, has been a useful electoral counterfoil to the Juppe government's record of austerity, tax increases and record unemployment.
Seguin has also sought to distance himself from state economic dirigisme, advocating a tempered liberalism.
But European partners and financial markets may wonder how far the anti-Maastricht leopard has really changed his spots. And political sources say Chirac may have serious misgivings about a man of such political unpredictability, robust temper and presidential ambition.
Seguin defied the Gaullist RPR party leadership and came within a whisker of turning voters against EU economic and monetary union in a 1992 Maastricht Treaty referendum.
A former law lecturer and an outstanding orator, Seguin spoke for the anti-Maastricht camp in a crucial live television debate with Socialist president Francois Mitterrand who was ill with cancer.
He chose to be respectful rather than confrontational, disappointing some supporters but earning respect for his statesmanship. The treaty was passed by just 51.05 percent.
Hoping to silence him with a largely ceremonial job, the RPR made Seguin National Assembly president in 1993 after the centre-right won legislative elections.
Instead, the rebel became an authoritarian and active speaker, trying to build up the Assembly's role, punishing absenteeism and reforming the parliamentary calendar.
His huge bearlike figure and deep voice became familiar to viewers as he scolded deputies like schoolchildren for rumpus in the twice-weekly televised question time.
He used his high-profile position to become the coalition's social conscience, accusing then premier Edouard Balladur of capitulating to unemployment just as the West sought to appease Hitler before World War Two.
When Chirac became president and made Juppe prime minister, Seguin continued to warn that indiscriminate budget cuts would fail to pull France out of recession and advocated a more expansionary economic policy.
The popular satirical television show Les Guignols depicted Seguin in the speaker's chair behind and above Juppe, taunting the infuriated premier by repeating It won't work as he outlined his platform to the assembly.
Born in Tunis in 1943, Seguin never knew his father, who was killed in World War Two when he was a baby. Like many politicians, he attended the Ecole Nationaled'Administration and joined the office of centrist premier Raymond Barre in 1977.