Francois Fillon: France's right-wing frontrunner

Paris

FRANCOIS Fillon, the man tipped to win the French right-wing presidential nomination on Sunday, is a free-market reformer, devout Catholic and motor sport fan who has promised to transform France.

Mr Fillon, 62, has professed admiration for Britain's 1980s prime minister Margaret Thatcher and vowed to slash public spending to shrink the French state.

"You have to tear the house down to properly rebuild it," he has said.

His runaway victory in the first round of the centre-right Republicans party primary last Sunday was revenge on his former boss, ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy.

Mr Sarkozy, who crashed out in third place, had once dismissed Mr Fillon as a "Mr Nobody" when he served as Mr Sarkozy's prime minister from 2007 to 2012. But the man who himself admitted in a TV interv…