PARIS: It was billed as a fight to the death between egotists: a savage war of vengeful ex-partners, secret pacts, crash-diets and televised slanging matches.

But the French Socialist primary race to choose a leftwing challenger to Nicolas Sarkozy in next year's presidential election has surprised the nation. The battle has been polite and focused. And, crucially, it also appears to have caught the public imagination - the first live TV debate got better ratings than the country's hit version of reality cookery show MasterChef.

Francois Hollande, the wise-cracking rural MP and self-styled “Mr Normal”, is favourite to win the first round vote on Sunday. But because the party is making history with an open ballot that allows anyone on the electoral register to have a say - if they pay a euro and sign allegiance to the left - commentators are wary of pre-judging the outcome.

The French left is on a high. It has just won control of the senate for the first time in modern history and polls predict a Socialist win against the beleaguered Sarkozy, whose party and inner circle have been badly damaged by sleaze investigations. But the Socialists, who haven't won a presidential election since Francois Mitterrand in 1988, are wary of poll leads and know how often power has eluded them at the ballot box.

Hollande, 57, who calls himself the “ordinary guy”, is MP for Correze in south central France and was Socialist party leader until 2008. He has undergone something of a metamorphosis, shedding 15kg and changing from dull portly joker to streamlined, perma-tanned man of ambition who drinks diet coke and rides a moped.

In polls, French voters say he is the most presidential of the six candidates and the most likely to beat Sarkozy. He has said that if the Socialists don't win the 2012 presidential election the party will die.

Broadly centre-left, his two big themes are major reform of the tax system and stimulation that will provide jobs for France's depressed, unemployed youth. Unemployment among young people in the country currently stands at around 20 per cent. “The next president has to be someone who inspires confidence. Confidence is the word,” he told his final rally in Toulouse this week.

Behind Hollande in the polls is Martine Aubry, 60, the mayor of Lille. The most recent leader of the party and architect of France's 35-hour week, she has been portrayed as an “Angela Merkel of the left”, running a broad campaign on social rights emphasising housing, health and education.

Firmly on the left of the party, the former minister has been described as a technocrat and policy-wonk versus Hollande's political animal. But this week she hit back at Hollande's consensus-style, centrist politics saying a “soft left” would not beat the “hard right” in France.

Hollande and Aubry share similar ideas on tax reform, shrinking public debt and boosting growth and employment to save the French economy. Before the contest started French voters did not appear to trust the left to deal with the world financial crisis. But a poll this week for business magazine Challenges found people would trust Hollande or Aubry more than Sarkozy if faced with a financial crisis of the magnitude of 2008.

Segolene Royal, the failed candidate in the last presidential election, Hollande's former partner and mother of his four children, had been predicted to take third place. But she is facing competition from the young outsider Arnaud Montebourg, a lawyer and MP in eastern France whose agenda focuses on anti-globalisation and cracking down on speculation by banks. Another outsider, Manuel Valls, an MP and mayor in the Paris suburbs, is considered to be on the right of the party and has pushed a hard line on spending cuts to tackle France's public deficit.

The Socialist race was thrown wide open in May when the one-time favourite Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested in New York on charges of attempting to rape a hotel maid. The criminal case against him was dropped but his presidential hopes for 2012 are over; he still faces a civil case in New York and another accusation of attempted rape in France.

If no clear winner emerges on Sunday, a second round run-off between two candidates will take place a week later.— Dawn/ Guardian News Service