Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption People have been queuing up to vote in one prosperous area of Paris

French voters have taken part in a US-style primary to choose the candidate of the centre-right Republican party in next year's presidential election.

With most votes counted in Sunday's first round, ex-Prime Minister Francois Fillon appeared to be in the lead.

Alain Juppe, another ex-prime minister, also seemed likely to make the run off.

The partial results suggest former President Nicolas Sarkozy could come third, which would rule him out of the second round next Sunday.

The winner of the conservative primary is likely to make the presidential run-off, where he or she will probably face far-right leader Marine Le Pen.

Polls suggest that the Republican candidate would win that election. With the governing socialists unpopular and divided, it seems unlikely that any left-wing candidate will survive the first round.

Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The seven Republicans vying for the nomination

Organisers said turnout was high. More than three million people were expected to cast ballots.

Voting is not restricted to party members. Those taking part have to sign a statement saying that they "share the Republican values of the right and the centre".

The candidates are: </s> Former French Prime Minister Francois Fillon has beaten Alain Juppé to win The Republicans primary nomination for the presidency.

Fillon, a conservative Catholic strongly opposed to same-sex marriage, positioned himself firmly to Alain Juppé's right.

Both Fillon, 62 and Juppé, 71, knocked their former boss, former President Nicolas Sarkozy, out of primary's first round. Mr Sarkozy then threw his support behind Fillon, who served as his Prime Minister from 2007 to 2012.

Juppé served as French foreign minister and defence minister under Mr Sarkozy and Prime Minister from 1995 to 1997 under President Jacques Chirac.

The two opponents disagreed on the best approach towards Russia with Fillon calling for greater ties with the Kremlin and working alongside President Putin in the fight with Isis.

Fillon insists "Russia poses no threat" to the West, while Juppe wants France to continue putting pressure on Putin on various fronts.

Both candidates promised similar free-market reforms while Juppé accused Fillon of plying a populist anti-Muslim, anti-immigration message.

They both pledged to cut public spending, reduce the number of civil servants, raise the retirement age from 62 to 65, end the 35-hour work week and cut business taxes.

Juppé tried to encourage conservatives to support a more tolerant approach toward France's ethnic, religious and social diversity.

Current polls suggest Fillon will stand a good chance of winning the Presidency in the April-May election - but will face a tough challenge in the form of far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, the leader of the Front National (FN).

In the first round of primary voting on Nov. 20, Fillon won 44.1 percent of the votes, Juppe 28.6 percent and Sarkozy 20.7. A second round was needed because no candidate secured a majority.

All French citizens over 18 — whether they are members of the Republicans party or not — were eligible to vote in the primary, if they paid 2 euros in fees and signed a pledge stating they "share the republican values of the right and the center." </s> France’s centre-right heavyweights were forced to realign their loyalties on Monday, after “third man” François Fillon claimed a surprise victory in the first round of his party’s presidential primaries.

The gloves are now off between Fillon, 62, who scored 44% of Sunday’s vote, and Alain Juppé, 71, who scored 28%, for the second-round vote next weekend.

Whichever of the two former prime ministers wins will become the candidate of the centre-right opposition party Les Républicains, and is expected to be the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen’s only credible opponent in the presidential election next spring.

In the wake of Fillon’s triumph, former ministers and losing candidates – including former president Nicolas Sarkozy, who once described his one-time prime minister as “Mister Nobody” – declared they would support him in the second round.

Sarkozy crashed out of the primaries with only 20.6% of the vote. Shortly after his defeat he called on supporters to throw their weight behind Fillon.

Among those who responded to the call were former prime minister and presidential candidate Édouard Balladur, and Sarkozy supporters Brice Hortefeux and Rachida Dati, as well as fellow first-round loser Bruno Le Maire.

On the other hand, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morziet, who came fourth in the primary has announced she will support Juppé, as have former prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin and former minister Valérie Pécresse.



The other first-round contenders, Jean-François Copé, former head of the centre-right party, and Jean-Frédéric Poisson of the Christian Democrat party, have yet to declare their second-round allegiance. François Bayrou, the president of the centrist party MoDem, has already called for his supporters to vote for Juppé.

For French pollsters and politicians alike, Fillon’s massive victory came almost out of nowhere. Just a week ago, polls had him rising in popularity but still relegated to third place, behind Juppé and Sarkozy.

But a strong performance in primary debates appears to have meant his programme, described as an “economic and social transformation” to the right of that proposed by the more centrist Juppé, cut through eventually.

Fillon’s key measures include increasing the 35-hour maximum working week to a 39-hour week for public sector workers, gradually raising the retirement age to 65, reducing unemployment benefits, increasing VAT by two points and reducing direct taxes, as well as cutting 500,000 public sector jobs and making €100bn spending cuts to reduce the public debt and balance the country’s books.



Juppé, who served as prime minister under President Jacques Chirac, has also pledged to do away with the 35-hour week in both public and private sectors, to increase the number of police and gendarmes to counter the terrorist threat, to create full employment by 2022, to make cuts in unemployment benefits and to reduce taxes, particularly for businesses, as well as cutting public spending.

Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, of the ruling Socialist party, which will hold its own primaries in the new year – most likely without the desperately unpopular François Hollande – said: “The right has chosen a candidate who is well to the right, he’s the ultra candidate: ultra-conservative, ultra-liberal, ultra-anti-gay marriage, ultra-antisocial, he ticks all the boxes. It’s the ultra-right and it’s also a straight bridge with the Front National in terms of identity and the idea of the family.”

Although Sarkozy’s final speech on Sunday advised followers to vote for Fillon, an avowed Thatcherite, there is little love lost between the two veterans of French politics. 



In 2007, the newly elected president, Sarkozy, appointed Fillon to the PM’s post as a gesture of gratitude for a successful campaign, which the veteran politician had run. Those close to Sarkozy expected him to fire Fillon shortly afterwards.



The dismissal never came. Not because Sarkozy had changed his mind, but because Fillon’s popularity rose with the voting public, enabling him to doggedly cling to his post. The president then spent his five years in office humiliating his colleague, referring to him publicly as an underling there to carry out presidential orders and nicknaming him “Mister Nobody”.



On Sunday, Fillon served his revenge cold. “Fillon has signed Sarkozy’s political death warrant: this historical boomerang, a double surprise of the right and centre’s primary, will go down in history …” wrote Cécile Cornudet in Les Echos.

“On paper, François Fillon had no chance of finishing ahead in the first round Sunday … but the voters’ wishing to play with the predictions went in his favour,” she added. “History has shown us that nobody is ever dead in politics, and has added a nuance in this curious period where surprise has become the rule and when one can rise in the polls and reverse the table in less than three weeks.”



The French press agreed it was the ultimate humiliation for the former president who was declared the victim of a wave of “anti-Sarkozism”. Libération described it as “the Fillon miracle”.

“Behind the right’s primary was hidden a referendum over the return to business for Nicolas Sarkozy, but also a stupefying majority in favour of François Fillon,” it wrote.

Le Monde’s editorial said the second round would be a battle between the “Thatcher right and the Chirac right”. Fillon, it wrote, represented the “traditional right, solid, serious, provincial and Catholic, notable and well brought-up”. On the other side, it described Juppé as a successor to the former president Jacques Chirac, under whom he served as prime minister – unlikely to cause a social revolution after provoking three weeks of mass demonstrations over his proposed social security reforms in 1995. “He is the upholder of a more moderate, more careful and, he says, more realistic right,” it said. </s> PARIS (Reuters) - French voters defied expectations on Sunday by throwing ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy out of the race to be the conservatives’ nominee for the presidential election and propelling his ex-prime minister Francois Fillon to top spot.

French politician Francois Fillon (R), member of the conservative Les Republicains political party, arrives after partial results in the first round of the French center-right presidential primary election at his headquarters in Paris, France, November 20, 2016. REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

A social conservative with economically liberal ideas, Fillon will face Alain Juppe, another ex-prime minister, in a runoff on Nov. 27 which is likely to produce France’s next president in May.

Long trailing his rivals in opinion polls, Fillon goes into the conservative primaries’ run-off with a strong lead, the backing of defeated candidates including Sarkozy and a fresh poll that already tips him to win that second round.

“I’m telling all the French, no matter who they voted for, that change is on its way to lift France up,” Fillon, an admirer of late British prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, told supporters.

“My fellow Frenchmen have told me, everywhere, they want to break away from a bureaucratic system which saps their energy; everywhere they told me their desire for authority,” said 62-year-old Fillon, who is a rare economic liberal in largely statist France.

Juppe, a moderate 71-year-old conservative campaigning on an inclusive, “happy identity” platform, had for months been ahead in polls for both the primaries and the presidential election.

But he struggled to fire up voters as the election neared and seems to have suffered from constant attacks by Sarkozy calling him soft and branding him as being “hostage” to centrist allies.

Once Fillon, long considered a political has-been, saw his ratings improve just over a week ago after good performances in televised debates, Juppe lost some of the “anti-Sarkozy” tactical vote to him.

Sounding downcast late on Sunday, Juppe told supporters he would “carry on fighting” and billed himself as the best option to defeat far-right party leader Marine Le Pen, whom polls predict will make it to the second round of the presidential elections.

With the Left very divided and a majority of voters telling pollsters they are opposed to seeing the far-right National Front in power, the chosen center-right nominee is likely to defeat Le Pen in an expected election run-off next May.

But while polls have consistently shown Juppe would easily beat Le Pen, there are far fewer surveys on how Fillon would fare in such a match, in further evidence of how unexpected his top spot on Sunday was.

Polls have shown that Fillon, who had received backing by opponents of France’s gay marriage laws, is much less popular than Juppe amid left-wing voters, which could make it harder for him to get their vote versus Le Pen.

A BVA poll in September did however show him beating Le Pen with 61 percent of votes compared with 39 percent for Le Pen were they to fight off in the presidentials’ runoff, while Juppe would score 66 percent vs the far-right leader.

SARKOZY COMEBACK FAILS

Sarkozy, who was president in 2007-2012, was long considered a safe bet for the second round after campaigning on a hardline law-and-order platform that sought to tap into concerns over migration and security.

But that strategy, though popular among grassroots voters of Les Republicains party, alienated the centrist and leftwing voters who took part in the primaries and massively backed Juppe, a Harris Interactive poll showed.

Sarkozy conceded defeat and said he would now back Fillon in the runoff.

“It’s time for me to try a life with more private passions than public ones,” he said.

Slideshow (22 Images)

According to results based on 9,437 polling stations out of a total 10,229, Fillon was seen garnering 44.2 percent of the votes, Juppe 28.5 percent and Sarkozy 20.6 percent, with close to 4 million votes counted.

Fillon is seen winning next Sunday’s primaries’ runoff with 56 percent of the votes vs 44 percent for Juppe, according to the OpinionWay poll carried out amid 3,095 voters who took part in the first round of the primaries this Sunday.

The ruling Socialists and their allies are holding their own primaries in January. Socialist President Francois Hollande, who is deeply unpopular, has yet to announce whether he himself will stand again.
The Republicans hold a primary election to select a candidate for next year's election. Partial results indicate that a second round of voting will occur with François Fillon and Alain Juppé as the two candidates in the second round.