* Sarkozy steps up right-wing rhetoric after Holland edges
first round
* Le Pen, third, records highest ever vote for National
Front
* First time a sitting president fails to win round one of
vote
(Adds Sarkozy statement, Hollande campaign manager, pollster)
By Daniel Flynn and Brian Love
PARIS, April 23 (Reuters) – President Nicolas Sarkozy
hammered home pledges to get tough on immigration and security
on Monday as he sought to win over record numbers of far-right
voters and whittle down Socialist Francois Hollande’s narrow
first-round election lead.
The centre-left Hollande pipped Sarkozy in Sunday’s
10-candidate first round by 28.6 percent to 27.1 percent, but it
was National Front leader Marine Le Pen who stole the show by
surging to 18 percent, the biggest tally a far-right candidate
has ever managed.
Her performance mirrored advances across the continent by
anti-establishment Eurosceptical populists from Amsterdam and
Vienna to Helsinki and Athens as the euro zone’s grinding debt
crisis deepens anger over government spending cuts and
unemployment.
Sarkozy, the first sitting president to be forced into
second place in the first round of a re-election bid, faced a
difficult balancing act as campaigning restarted on Monday to
attract both the far-right and centrist voters he needs to win
the May 6 runoff.
“Today, I return to the campaign trail,” Sarkozy said in a
statement. “I will continue to uphold our values and
commitments: respect for our borders, the fight against
factories moving abroad, controlling immigration, the security
of our families.”
After five years of leading the world’s fifth economy, a
nuclear power and activist U.N. Security Council member, Sarkozy
could go the way of 10 other euro zone leaders swept from office
since the start of the crisis in late 2009.
Opinion polls on Sunday said 57-year-old Hollande, who has
vowed to change the direction of Europe if elected by tempering
austerity measures with greater social justice, would likely win
the decider with between 53 and 56 percent of the vote.
But Le Pen’s strong showing offered Sarkozy an unexpected
ray of hope. “The breakthrough by Marine Le Pen throws the
second round wide open,” ran the headline in right-leaning Le
Figaro newspaper, while left-of-centre Liberation wrote:
“Hollande in front. Le Pen the killjoy”.
HIGH TURNOUT
On a strong turnout of 80.2 percent, more than a third of
voters cast ballots for protest candidates outside the
mainstream, foreshadowing a possible reshaping of France’s
political balance of power at parliamentary elections in June.
“Nothing will be the same again,” Le Pen, 43, daughter of
former paratrooper and National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen,
told cheering supporters on Sunday.
The gravel-voiced blonde, who wants France to abandon the
euro currency, said she would give her view on the runoff at a
May Day rally in Paris next week. But she wrote Sarkozy off as a
departing president that would leave his party “in ruins”,
seeking to pick up the pieces in any recomposition of the right
and carry the Front into parliament in June.
National Front Vice-President Louis Alliot suggested on
Monday that Le Pen would not formally endorse either candidate
as things stand. “Based on the ideas in our programme, neither
one defends or develops them, so it seems unlikely,” he said.
Financial market analysts say whoever wins in two weeks’
time will have to impose tougher austerity measures than either
candidate has admitted during the campaign, cutting public
spending as well as raising taxes to cut the budget deficit.
Hollande’s campaign manager said victory was within reach,
but the Socialist candidate was aware of the financial
constraints that would face a future left-wing government.
“He wants to offer a dream, but he doesn’t want to sell
illusions to the French people,” Pierre Moscovici told BFM TV.
“Undeniably a first step toward change was taken yesterday.”
INVESTOR JITTERS
Markets were a little dyspeptic after the French results and
the Dutch government’s failure to push through an austerity
budget made elections there almost unavoidable. The euro
retreated from two-week highs, European stocks opened lower, and
safe-haven German bonds opened higher, increasing the premium
investors demand to hold French and Dutch bonds.
“We’ve got a vote that is much more uncertain than we
thought it would be,” said Dominique Barbet, economist at BNP
Paribas. “There’s going to be some pretty hard campaigning, and
the markets aren’t going to like that. It’s not going to be a
very pro-European campaign.”
Sarkozy challenged Hollande to three television debates over
the next two weeks instead of the customary one. But Socialist
aides said Hollande, who has no ministerial experience and is a
less accomplished television performer than Sarkozy, had made
clear he would accept only one prime-time live debate, on May 2.
Communist-backed hard leftist Jean-Luc Melenchon, who polls
showed at one stage challenging Le Pen for third place, finished
a distant fourth on 11.1 percent, ahead of centrist Francois
Bayrou with 9.1 percent.
Political pundits said Hollande appeared to have larger
reserves of second-round votes than Sarkozy, who would need to
pick up at least three quarters of Le Pen’s supporters and two
thirds of Bayrou’s to squeak a wafer-thin victory.
Polls taken on Sunday by three institutes suggested that
between 48 and 60 percent of Le Pen voters planned to switch to
the president, while Bayrou’s backers split almost evenly
between the two finalists, with one third undecided.
“The game is getting very difficult for Nicolas Sarkozy,”
Jerome Saint-Marie of CSA polling agency told i>TELE. “There’s a
genuine demand for social justice, precisely because times are
hard and voters see sacrifices will have to be made … What
they want is that this pain is fairly shared.”
Melenchon, whose fiery calls for a “citizens’ revolution”
drew tens of thousands to open-air rallies, urged his followers
to turn out massively on May 6 to defeat Sarkozy, but he could
not bring himself to mention Hollande by name.
Greens candidate Eva Joly endorsed Hollande, who can also
count on the modest votes of two Trotskyist also-rans.
“Sarkozy is going to be torn between campaigning in the
middle ground and campaigning on the right. He’ll have to reach
out to the right between the rounds, so he’ll lose the centre,”
said political scientist Stephane Rozes of the CAP think-tank.
If Hollande wins, joining a small minority of left-wing
governments in Europe, he has promised to renegotiate a European
budget discipline treaty signed by Sarkozy. That could presage
tension with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who made the pact
a condition for further assistance to troubled euro zone states.
The prospect of friction is causing some concern in
financial markets, as is Hollande’s focus on tax rises over
austerity at a time when sluggish growth is threatening France’s
ability to meet deficit-cutting goals.
(Additional reporting by Catherine Bremer, John Irish, Nicholas
Vinocur, Vicky Buffery, Alexandria Sage, Brian Love, Matthias
Blamont and Daniel Flynn in Paris, Anirban Nag in London;
Editing by Will Waterman)
