Incumbent President, Nicholas Sarkozy, is running for his second successive and final term in office, but his rivals pose a great threat.

Francois Hollande is the leader of the French Socialist party and Sarkozy’s main rival. Born in Rouen in August 1954, he attended the ENA administration school and Sciences Po. Following involvement in student politics he became a member of the Socialist party in 1979, and has been an MP since 1988. Originally party leader from 1997, he stood down in 2008, due to difficulties in his personal life, but was nominated as the party’s presidential candidate after even greater personal scandals affected the popularity of his main opponent, Dominique Strauss-Kahn in 2011. Although his quiet demeanour contrasts sharply with Sarkozy’s more animated persona, it underlies a steely determination and is also symptomatic of his innate ability to reconcile groups with opposing views. Generally viewed as a moderate, rather than belonging to the ‘far left’, Hollande considers spending and expansion as the best method of extricating his country from its current economic difficulties.

Marine Le Pen is president of the Front National. The youngest daughter of French politician, Jean-Marie Le Pen, she joined the FN in 1986 and succeeded her father to become its president in January 2011. Objecting to others’ description of her party as ‘far right’, she is seeking to overturn the party’s xenophobic image and establish it as a portal for mainstream views. She sees immigration and over-liberal free-trade policies as the main causes of France’s current difficulties. Recent opinion polls, some of which have given her parity with Sarkozy, have lent credibility to her aims.

Francois Bayrou is president of the Democratic Movement. Born in 1951 to a wealthy farming family in the Pyrenees area of France, he was first elected to the National Assembly in 1986 and became president of his party in 2007. He gained substantial public support in his previous bid to stand for president in 2007, but failed to beat opponents Sarkozy and Segolene. Although an outsider, his strength lies in his provincial roots and the fact that his moderate, mainstream policies appeal to a significant sector of society who are disenchanted with both the current government and their main rivals, Francois Hollande’s French Socialist party.

Should Nicholas Sarkozy fail to win a second term, the implications on inter-European political relations will be immense. David Cameron and Angela Merkel have been involved in the French President’s re-election bid to an unprecedented degree, as they seek to avoid the political instability that a French government of a markedly different political persuasion would bring to the region, at a time when EU interstate cooperation, against the backdrop of an already troubled Europe, has never been more important.