By Emmanuel Jarry and Yann Le Guernigou
PARIS, April 29 (Reuters) – Unease is growing in French
President Nicolas Sarkozy’s centre-right UMP party a week before
a presidential election over his lurch to the right in pursuit
of supporters of anti-immigration candidate Marine Le Pen.
Some mainstream conservatives have voiced public dismay at
his embrace of the campaign themes, language and even some
proposals of Le Pen’s National Front. In private conversations,
doubts are widespread about the morality and effectiveness of
the strategy.
In the last week, Sarkozy has repeatedly declared that there
are too many foreigners in France and vowed to reduce legal
immigration. Echoing a Le Pen proposal, he has called for police
to be given greater licence to shoot fleeing crime suspects.
He has accused his Socialist rival Francois Hollande of
being backed by Islamists and said Le Pen’s voters are
respectable and her party compatible with the French Republic.
“Even though I will vote for Nicolas Sarkozy on the second
round, it’s clearly my duty to ring the alarm bell about this
strategy,” Etienne Pinte, a UMP lawmaker, told Reuters.
He said former prime ministers Jean-Pierre Raffarin and
Alain Juppe, Sarkozy’s foreign minister, had made clear in
internal meetings their reticence about the rightward drift.
“All through the campaign, we felt there were misgivings
among a number of parliamentary colleagues and the two former
prime ministers about the exploitation of these extreme-right
themes,” Pinte said.
Sarkozy hardened his discourse as soon as the results of
last Sunday’s first round showed Le Pen, with nearly 18 percent,
had won twice as many votes as centrist Francois Bayrou. The
president needs to draw support from both sides to beat
Hollande, the clear frontrunner in opinion polls, in the May 6
second-round runoff.
Raffarin hinted at his distaste in an interview with the
newspaper Le Monde last week, saying: “If I were to express
reservations today, it would weaken my own side … but I remain
attached to the humanitarian values of our programme.”
Asked whether the strategy drawn up by Sarkozy’s political
guru Patrick Buisson, a former extreme-right newspaper editor,
had not strengthened the far right, Raffarin said the time for
analysis would come after May 6.
“We are in a battle now, and in a battle, the honourable
thing is to be loyal,” he said.
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Other stories on the French election
Factbox on the election procedure
Graphic on French polls http://r.reuters.com/was36s
French election online http://link.reuters.com/pyr27s
Interactive runoff calculator http://r.reuters.com/nym77s
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“CROSSING RED LINE”
Another former Gaullist prime minister, Dominique de
Villepin, a bitter rival of Sarkozy, deplored what he called
“crossing one republican red line after another (in a) shameless
seduction of extremist votes”.
Without mentioning Sarkozy by name, Villepin, who failed to
collect the required 500 nominating signatures from elected
officials for his own candidacy, warned the mainstream right in
an article in Le Monde against betraying its own values.
“One would think there were only National Front voters in
France,” he wrote. “As if there were not more important issues
than halal meat, legal immigration and (single-sex or mixed)
bathing hours in public swimming pools.”
Sarkozy has played up each of those issues in his quest to
win over Le Pen voters.
While Villepin’s assault came as no surprise, given their
mutual loathing, other dissent has been more damaging to the
president.
UMP senator Chantal Jouanno, a former karate champion whom
Sarkozy made his sports minister, irked him by saying that if
she had a choice between a National Front candidate and a
Socialist, she would vote for the Socialist.
Prime Minister Francois Fillon rebuked her publicly for
making “stupid and counter-productive comments”.
“THE SUN IS YELLOW”
Sarkozy has ruled out any parliamentary or government
alliance with Le Pen’s party, but he is keen not to close any
doors for recovering her voters.
Another UMP senator, Jean-Rene Lecerf, told PublicSenat.fr
website he “totally disagreed” with Sarkozy’s call to change the
law so that police officers who shoot suspects are presumed to
have acted in legitimate self-defence unless proven otherwise.
Privately, some ministers and pro-government lawmakers say
Sarkozy would do better to stress reviving economic growth and
employment, investment and training – themes on which Hollande
is dominating the debate for the moment.
Opinion pollster Gael Sliman of the BVA institute said there
was no sign that Sarkozy’s approach was paying off in voting
intentions.
“The latest poll is 54.5 percent (for Hollande) to 45.5
percent. Transfers from Le Pen are still very unsatisfactory,
indeed they are down since last Sunday, as if running after this
electorate too blatantly were counter-productive … Clearly, it
isn’t working,” Sliman told Reuters.
But the president is unrepentant about his strategy.
“When Marine Le Pen says the sun is yellow and the sea is
blue, do I have to say the opposite?” he asked on France 2
television when questioned about his embrace of some of her
ideas and proposals.
“Aren’t we entitled to talk about immigration? Don’t we have
the right to talk about the role of Europe and its function to
protect us rather than expose us to globalisation?” he added in
an interview published by Le Parisien daily on Sunday.
(Writing by Paul Taylor; Editing by Geert De Clercq and
Elizabeth Piper)
