In Texas, it is said, there is nothing in the middle of the road except yellow lines and dead armadillos. In France, the political middle ground is more like a giant amoeba: constantly splitting and re-forming and splitting once again, reports The Independent.
The two most powerful centrist barons in France are announcing the creation of an alliance to fight the municipal and European elections next year and, implicitly, the presidential election in 2017.
François Bayrou and Jean-Louis Borloo - once friends, later enemies, now wary allies - will call their movement "L'Alternative". They plan to fill the vacuum between Francois Hollande's unpopular, governing Left and a main centre-right opposition party, the UMP, increasingly drawn towards the populist rhetoric of the far right.
If they succeed, the main beneficiary could, paradoxically, be Marine Le Pen's face-lifted National Front. A powerful centrist presidential challenger in 2017 could take enough votes away from the main centre-right candidate, or from President Hollande, to allow Ms Le Pen to reach the two-candidate second round.
Friends of former President Sarkozy, who has undeclared ambitions to run in 2017, have been begging Mr Borloo to abandon his negotiations on a new centrist alliance. He gave his response on Sunday evening when he sent a double tweet with Mr Bayrou to announce an inaugural press conference today.
The "Alternative" will be pro-market economically, liberal on social issues, cautiously green and enthusiastically pro-European. Its creation marks - for the time being at any rate - the death of Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy's efforts to create a single mass party of the right and centre.
That party, the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP), was founded in 2002 from two allied but quarrelsome formations of the centre-right, the Chiraquian neo-Gaullists and a centrist federation, the UDF, created by former President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in the early 1970s. Mr Bayrou, 62, a former education minister from the French Basque country, refused to join Mr Chirac's new movement. He ran for president in 2007 and 2012 as the leader of his own centrist party, the Mouvement Democrate (MoDem).
Read more of this report from The Independent.