KEY POINTS:
CAEN - The hall is overflowing. The seats long since filled, there is no standing room left and the security guards funnel arrivals towards the video screens set up around the building.
"Four thousand," whispers an aide excitedly.
Perhaps a slight exaggeration, but there is no doubt that
Francois Bayrou, leader of the centrist Union for French Democracy (UDF), is packing them in.
A late arrival, Mathilde Glacis, a pharmacist's assistant studying accountancy, is at her first political meeting and stands bolt upright throughout the 90 minutes of speeches. Glacis voted Socialist last time, but says the current mainstream left-wing candidate, Segolene Royal, is not very convincing.
"Her programme is too vague," she says. "It's not clear how she is going to pay for everything that she promises. I'm here to learn about the alternatives."
Denis Saint-Colombe, 49, a council administrator, is sitting near by.
Like Glacis and a vast swath of French electors, he is unsure how he will vote in the presidential elections in April. Once a Socialist, he says he is not yet a Bayrou fan either.
"He is more honest, certainly, but that's no use if you haven't got any ideas," he says.
Last week Bayrou, 56, a rank outsider, notched up an astonishing series of poll results. A few weeks ago the former Education Minister was largely ignored.
Now, about 20 per cent of electors say they will vote for him in the first of the two rounds of the election, putting him five or six points behind Royal and nine points behind the favourite, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy.
He is also ahead of Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the extreme-right National Front.
Bayrou, a peasant farmer's son from the Pyrenees, has doggedly followed an independent course through the shifting sands of French politics.
He said: "I am moved and encouraged by the confidence that French people are now showing in me. They want a candidate with another approach and another style who will bring together the nation, not divide it. They want to turn the page on 25 years of a continual quarrel [between the left and the right] which has led to nothing but failures."
The packed Caen conference hall may not be repeated everywhere but few doubt a "Bayrou phenomenon".
"His spectacular breakthrough has completely overturned the campaign," said Eric Dupin, a political expert at Paris University.
"No other candidate has come from the margins in such a way in the pollsters' recent memory."
Bayrou's rise is explained by the disenchantment among voters with both mainstream parties. Coupled with a widespread sense of crisis, it means that, particularly in the first round, many voters make a protest rather than choose a President.
It was only a matter of time, analysts say, before that dissatisfaction coalesced around an individual.
"With Sego and Sarko, we are asked to choose between the plague and cholera," said one Caen hotelier. "Frankly, an alien would probably do OK if he spoke French."
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