French election frontrunners turn on "third man"

PARIS, Feb 26 (Reuters) France's election frontrunners, the right's Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist Segolene Royal, turned on Francois Bayrou, the ''third man'' in the race, today calling his centrist platform dangerously unstable.

''I think it's very dangerous,'' Royal told France Inter radio. ''It's trying to stop the French choosing between two models of society, two opposing political visions.'' Sarkozy said Bayrou's policies would lead to chaos like that of France's Fourth Republic, when makeshift coalition governments rose and fell repeatedly.

''Democracy is a majority and an opposition and the French have to choose,'' he told RMC radio.

Bayrou is on 17 points in the latest opinion poll, still well behind Sarkozy and Royal, both on 28, but his steady advance over recent weeks has raised the outside possibility of an upset in the first round of the vote on April 22.

Another recent opinion poll suggested he could beat either of the two leading candidates if he got through to the second round run-off on May 6.

Bayrou, dubbed ''the third man'' in the French press, has run on a centrist ticket that he says would transcend the left-right divide, pledging sound public finances, aid for small business and jobs as well as support for research and the environment.

But both Royal and Sarkozy said voters had to make a clear choice and rejected talk of a coalition uniting right and left on the lines of the ''Grand Coalition'' governing Germany.

Bayrou is due to appear on television later on Monday taking questions from the public on the programme ''I have a question for you'', the forum credited with allowing Royal to get her once-faltering campaign back on track.

While the Socialists regularly attack him as a conservative in disguise, Sarkozy pointed to the political turmoil in Italy where Romano Prodi was forced to resign as prime minister only months after coming to office when his fragile coalition failed to back him in a foreign policy vote.

''Look at what's happening in Italy,'' Sarkozy told RMC radio.

''The Prodi government, 109 ministers, 11 parties in coalition.

Where does that lead? Resignation after three months.'' REUTERS SAM RK2101