Former Prime Minister Francois Fillon, the new front-runner in France’s 2017 presidential election, is offering voters an economic-policy revolution inspired by Margaret Thatcher.

Fillon, 62, vaulted from third position in most polls to win the first round of the Republican primary by 15 percentage points from the veteran Alain Juppe on Sunday with the most free-market platform among the seven candidates. They’ll face each other again in next Sunday’s runoff and the winner will be favorite to become president in May 2017.

Lifelong politician Fillon is pledging to lengthen the work week to 39 hours from 35, to increase the retirement age to 65 and add immigration quotas. He’s vowed to eliminate half a million public-sector jobs and cut spending by 100 billion euros ($106 billion) over his five years in office. And he proposes a 40 billion-euro tax-cut for companies and a constitutional ban on planned budget deficits.

“Who is Fillon? The classic conservative, right-wing candidate,” Bruno Cautres, a political scientist at the Sciences Po Institute in Paris, said in an interview. “He wants a deep reform of the French model: shrinking the role of the state and cutting the welfare system.”

Compared with the brash style of former boss, Nicolas Sarkozy, Fillon has a more low-key approach but he makes a virtue of telling it straight. When he took office as premier in 2007, he shocked even Sarkozy by announcing that France was a bankrupt state. Today he’s promising to reverse that, just like his role model when she became U.K. prime minister in 1979.

“Thatcher was elected after a long and worrying period of decline” in the U.K., Fillon said in a book setting out his candidacy. “When she left office, the U.K. was no longer the sick man of Europe.”

Like Thatcher, Fillon may also find an affinity with the new Republican occupant of the White House. Fillon says he’s ready to work with Donald Trump and the two men share an admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Fillon has said repeatedly that he wants France to have a closer relationship with Russia, and with Putin himself, who was prime minister during the period when Fillon ran the French government. While other European leaders have called for Putin to stop bombing Syria, Fillon described the attacks as “cold but efficient pragmatism.”

Polls, albeit six months before the vote, suggest that whoever the Republicans nominate is likely to face National Front leader Marine Le Pen and her anti-European platform in the two-way presidential run-off in May, since Socialist incumbent Francois Hollande is posting the worst approval ratings in French history.

David Fuller's view

With Holland and Sarkozy now presumably out of the running, politics in France have become more interesting. I prefer Francois Fillon but can anyone in France rightfully claim the mantle of Margaret Thatcher?  I think that would be good for France if they could but I doubt it because a majority of French workers appear to love their Luddite, closed-shop unions.