HE WAS mocked by advisers to his former boss, ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy, as “Mister Nobody”. A month before the vote, he languished in fourth place in the polls. But François Fillon, a former prime minister and amateur racing driver, surged from nowhere to take a stunning lead in the French centre-right Republican primary on November 20th. He took 44% of the vote, next to 29% for the other qualifier and fellow ex-prime minister, Alain Juppé. Mr Fillon is now favoured to win the run-off on November 27th, and possibly become French president next spring.

Mr Fillon’s remarkable last-minute acceleration, which led to the eviction of Mr Sarkozy, was partly thanks to a convincing performance in the primary debates. He came across as measured, sharp and trustworthy—and, at the age of 62, a younger alternative to the disliked Mr Sarkozy than the 71-year-old Mr Juppé. The scale of Mr Fillon’s lead was not captured by polls, in part because many of the 4m voters made up their minds late: fully 53% of his supporters said they decided in the final days.

French centre-right voters now have a choice between two candidates who broadly share a liberalising economic agenda, which breaks with the more statist centre-right programmes of the past. Each promises to back businesses and revive the economy by shrinking the state, cutting taxes (and abolishing the wealth tax) and increasing the retirement age.

Yet they differ quite radically on how to do this. Mr Juppé wants to adjust existing rules: a slightly higher retirement age, a slightly lower level of public spending. Mr Fillon is more ambitious and, by his own admission, Thatcherite. He promises that he will curb the power of the unions and end the 35-hour working week rule to allow companies to negotiate working time within European legal limits. He vows to shrink France’s unique labour code from over 3,000 pages to just 150. The left caricatures this as “ultra-libéral”, the ultimate French political insult.

The pair diverge over foreign policy too. A former foreign minister, Mr Juppé sticks more closely to the existing French line of talking tough with Russia and refusing any dialogue with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. Mr Fillon, who is chums with Vladimir Putin, urges a rapprochement with Russia and a strategic alliance with Syria in order to defeat Islamic State. He also sounds readier to work with Donald Trump, America’s president-elect. “It wasn’t Mr Trump who installed...missiles on the frontier with Russia,” declared Mr Fillon during one debate.