Fillon surges in presidential stakes with appeal to Catholics

Former prime minister François Fillon took a surprise lead in France’s presidential sweepstakes last Sunday by winning the first round of the centre-right primary, in part thanks to his strong appeal to Catholic voters.

By surging to win 44 per cent of the vote, he moved into the run-off round this Sunday with another former prime minister, Alain Juppé, and helped end the comeback bid of ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy.

French pollsters cited his vigorous free-market economic policies and scandal-free past as reasons for his support.

Another factor was his appeal to the same family-oriented Catholics who surprised the political elite with their mass protests in 2012-2013 against same-sex marriage. They faded away from the streets but apparently turned up at polling stations in force.

Mr Fillon, whose wife is Welsh, is often described in France as a Thatcherite and his clear conservative economic policies stood out from the more mainline statist views of his competitors.
The run-off vote should be tight because Mr Juppé is seen as better placed to win centrist and even left-wing support agains the far-right National Front leader, Marine Le Pen, the presumed other main candidate next spring.

During the campaign, Mr Fillon wrote to the French bishops in response to their call last month for voters to “rediscover the meaning of politics”. He upheld the common good as a guiding principle and said that his free-market policies would shake up a “capitalism of connivance”, which had enriched the few but had ignored the weak.

He also proposed tight controls on adoption rights for gays, access to in-vitro fertilisation only for sterile heterosexual couples and a total ban on surrogate motherhood. He would not abrogate the same-sex marriage law itself because “one cannot unmarry people who have already married”.

Mr Fillon, who also wrote an appeal to the many Catholics who do volunteer charity work, would also raise family allocations and have state school curricula stress more traditional values.
Mr Juppé, who describes himself as an “agnostic Catholic”, opted for a large-scale email campaign to Catholic voters a few days before the vote. Many were annoyed by the gesture.