PARIS: Could latex puppets of France’s top presidential candidates – depicting one as an aggressive dwarf and the other as a slow-speaking bimbo – determine the winner?Satirical daily television show ‘Les Guignols de l’Info’, a scathing spoof of French public life inspired by Britain’s ‘Spitting Image’, has been accused of tipping the balance before.

When outsider Jacques Chirac came from behind to win the 1995 election, many felt Les Guignols gave him a crucial boost by portraying him as a lovable rogue betrayed by his long-term ally turned presidential rival Edouard Balladur.

Asked about the programme in a television interview during that election, he told Les Guignols to “Keep talking about me”.

Now, the show features conservative candidate Nicolas Sarkozy guzzling tranquillisers to suppress the authoritarian interior minister within, then telling voters: “I’ve changed.”

His Socialist rival Segolene Royal, though less omnipresent in the show, is vacuous, spouting platitudes at half-speed.

Royal and Sarkozy are clear favourites to get through to a second-round runoff on May 6, with Sarkozy given the edge in most polls.

But the show’s producer Yves Le Rolland insists he and his team will not change the outcome of this spring’s vote.

“I think we have no influence on people,” he told Reuters at the show’s studio in a northern suburb of Paris.

“We generally reinforce their own opinions, so people who don’t like Sarkozy think that Sarkozy in Les Guignols is very accurate and very funny and people who don’t like Segolene Royal think the character of Segolene Royal is very accurate and very funny,” he said.

Speaking in an office above workshops full of mannequins’ outfits and rubber body parts, Le Rolland says the frequently held view that his show can sway voters stems from a bizarre set of circumstances that came together in 1995.

Mocking Chirac’s apparently meaningless choice of an apple tree as his campaign logo that year, Les Guignols gave his caricature the ridiculous catchphrase ‘Eat apples’.

But combined with Chirac’s portrayal as a plucky underdog, the slogan proved a hit and Chirac’s young supporters made it their own, printing it on stickers and campaign flyers.

The live show, which can draw more than three million viewers an evening, regularly takes a stand against far-right leader Le Pen and has been strongly critical of interior minister Sarkozy’s toughening of immigration rules.

But Les Guignols producer says Sarkozy’s omnipresence on the show is just a reflection of reality.—Reuters