As mayor of Bordeaux, he is aiming for the presidency – and a showdown with the far right

At a brasserie in Saint Pierre, the historic heart of Bordeaux, Alain Juppé’s supporters are settling down for an evening in front of the television.

On the screen is the crucial final debate in the centre-right Les Républicains’ primary race, before Sunday’s first-round vote. Juppé, the city’s mayor, is one of seven candidates, alongside former president Nicolas Sarkozy and several ex-government ministers, but the crowd in the Café Cajou only has eyes for him. He speaks and half the audience applaud while the other half tap frenetically on their phones in an attempt to out-tweet the opposition.

Two and a half hours later, the debate winds up and Juppé has his final word. The cafe crowd leaps to its feet. “JU-PPÉ PRÉ-SI-DENT”, they chant. “JU-PPÉ PRÉ-SI-DENT”.

In the hours to come, 71-year-old Juppé’s performance will be scrutinised, analysed, criticised. But here in the heart of a city that is his personal fiefdom, there is no time for pessimism or doubt. This is the man they believe should be, and will be, the next president of France. This is the man who can see off the far-right Front National’s Marine Le Pen.

“You know him, you’ve met him, it’s for you to go and convince people to vote for him. We’re counting on you,” a man in a grey suit says with evangelical fervour. Everyone cheers.

Interior decorator Jo Lescouran, 52, says she will be voting Juppé today. “He’s a good man. Since he has been mayor of Bordeaux it’s become France’s most popular city. Everyone wants to come to visit or to live here. Our hospitals are the envy of France. If he can do that here, I’m sure he can do this for the whole country.”

Alice Provost, 23, a politics student and organiser of the Jeunes avec Juppé youth movement, explains why a man old enough to be her grandfather appeals to voters her age. “He speaks to us. He is 71, but he is youthful in his head and more modern than all the other Républicains party candidates,” she says. “We know Alain Juppé, we know he will do what he says, and we think he is …” She pauses. “How can I say? We think he is great.”

Pierre de Gaetan Njikam, responsible for mobilising the African diaspora for Les Républicains, says Juppé is the barricade against a rising far-right tide. “Right now the [mainstream] right in France is seeing how far right it can go to pick up votes. The only man who can stop the right becoming far-right is Alain Juppé: that is my sincere belief.”

Each has different reasons for supporting Juppé, but even in the cold, grey light of a drizzly November day it is hard to find anyone with a truly bad word to say about the man who has been mayor of Bordeaux since 1995, not counting a two-year hiatus when he was forced to stand down after a conviction for corruption.

They love him in the dynamic, litter- and graffiti-free city centre, much of it pedestrianised and criss-crossed by squeaky-clean trams and buses with friendly drivers – all credited to Juppé’s administration. They love him in the grittier Capucins and Saint Martin districts, where middle-class liberals who complain of enforced gentrification pushing up property prices, live shoulder-to-shoulder with families under the poverty line, most of whom vote for leftwing candidates in regional and national elections.

Even the youths in hoodies and baseball caps, drinking beer on streets peppered with bottle tops, speak of Monsieur le Maire with respect, reverence and even affection. “Alain Juppé is king of Bordeaux,” says a young French-African lighting a cigarette outside the barber’s shop where he works.

His two smoking companions nod vigorously. “It’s a great city. There are very few problems here. Very little drugs or delinquency,” one adds. Is there anyone who doesn’t like Juppé? He frowns. “Not that I know of.”

This is what Les Inrocks magazine called Juppémania.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Juppé at a campaign event in Lille. Photograph: Denis Charlet/AFP/Getty Images

There are internet sites that label him Ali Juppé, claiming that he supports the Muslim Brotherhood, or Papy (Grandfather) Juppé, or “Hillary Clinton à la française”, with all the defeatist baggage that implies. The mayoral chief of staff Ludovic Martinez, whose office boasts a poster-sized magazine cover headlined “Juppé Superstar”, has two words for this: “What do you say in English? It’s total bullshit.

“After the attacks in Paris, there were marches here that included the mosque, the synagogue, the temple, the cathedral and even the Buddhists. This is a tolerant, calm, temperate city that avoids excess.

“Alain Juppé’s transformation of Bordeaux can be seen with the naked eye,” Martinez adds. “Everything was broken when he became mayor and look at it now. He’s a visionary and a doer.”

In Bordeaux, even Juppé’s political opponents afford him a respect that is far from grudging. Rather than criticise his administration, they talk of “reservations” about his leadership.

Michèle Delaunay, 69, a local Socialist party MP, beat Juppé in 2007 and 2012 to take the local parliamentary seat. She says that there is a paradox whereby the left wins local parliamentary and regional elections, but repeatedly fails to prise Juppé from the mayoral chair.

She has her reservations: Juppé has focused on prestige projects that have gentrified the city centre and drawn new residents and tourists, which is good, but this has been to the detriment of poorer, socially deprived districts, which is not, she says. She is also concerned that the public-private financing of major developments has plunged the city into decades of debt.

But the bottom line, she admits, is that “everyone agrees Alain Juppé has made the city better. It is the dominant view every time he is elected that he has done extraordinary things that have brought prestige to Bordeaux.”

British voters with Brexit, and Americans with Donald Trump, may have rejected political behemoths in favour of populist outsiders, but France is hoping to buck the trend. The three Les Républicains primary favourites – Juppé, former prime minister François Fillon, and ex-president Sarkozy – are all members of France’s ruling elite with almost 100 years of political experience between them. With French leftwing politics currently in disarray, one of them is likely to end up in the second-round presidential runoff next May with Le Pen.

But with Sunday’s first round open to any voter willing to sign a charter “sharing the republican values of the right and centre” and pay €2, nobody knows how far Juppé’s popularity extends beyond the city walls. After months of pollsters predicting a Juppé-Sarkozy runoff next Sunday, a last minute surge in support for Fillon – polls on Saturdaysuggested that he had overtaken both rivals – has made it an unpredictable three-way race.

For Juppé, who began his political career in the 1970s as a speechwriter for Paris mayor and later French president Jacques Chirac, the road to elder statesman has been as pitted as old Bordeaux’s cobbled streets. Twenty years ago the man once nicknamed Amstrad for his robotic efficiency and cold, grey image was widely loathed. In 1995 his controversial pension changes resulted in up to two million people taking to the streets, paralysing France in the worst strikes since 1968.

In 2004 Juppé received a 14-month suspended sentence and was barred from holding elected office for a year over a 1980s scheme that illegally put workers for Chirac’s party on the payroll of Paris town hall. It is widely accepted that Juppé sacrificed his own career out of loyalty to Chirac.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Juppé’s rival, François Fillon, speaking at a rally. Photograph: Etienne Laurent/EPA

Juppé’s manifesto concentrates on three priorities: reestablishing the authority of the state and the “pride and happiness of being French”; reducing unemployment and spending; and modernising the education system. If elected he says he will not hesitate to use the ordonnance – a means of sidestepping a parliamentary vote – to impose legislation. Aides say his greatest strength will be as a unifying, paternal force for change.

Virginie Calmels, his deputy mayor, says Juppé’s local success makes him more credible as a presidential candidate. “Bordeaux is not France, but there is method in the work Alain has done, and that method can be applied to the whole of France,” she says.

Writer Gaël Tchakaloff, who spent 18 months shadowing Juppé, agrees. “Everything I saw suggests he is a man of state. As a person, I don’t believe he is comfortable with himself, and he can be brutal with others, but he is a political animal and the decisions he takes are always taken for the greater good.”

The most repeated criticism Juppé and his fans cannot bat away is that of age. At 71, Juppé has pledged that if elected he will serve only one five-year term. In the Café Cajou, Jo Lescouran says being a veteran is no bad thing. “We have a very good saying in France: the best soup is made in old pans.”