/ 16 April 2007

Royal battles to stay in French presidential race

France’s presidential campaign entered its final week on Monday, with Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal struggling to stay in the race against right-wing favourite Nicolas Sarkozy.

With at least a third of the electorate still undecided ahead of Sunday’s first-round vote, the final stretch of rallies and debates is to play a crucial role in anchoring swing voters.

Opinion polls put Royal (53) in second place behind Sarkozy (52), but the Socialist faces a tough challenge from the centrist candidate, the 55-year-old former education minister Francois Bayrou.

Bayrou’s appeal on the left has been boosted by surveys suggesting that he — unlike Royal — stands a good chance of beating the former interior minister if he makes it to the run-off vote on May 6.

”For left-wing voters, the priority is to defeat Sarkozy,” said Roland Cayrol, director of the CSA polling institute. ”Their problem is finding the most effective vote to do so.”

”The centre-left is the priority target in this final phase of the campaign, because it can make the difference,” said Cayrol, who believes that ”everything is still possible” in Sunday’s vote.

Over the weekend, Royal was forced to slap down calls from three senior figures in her own camp for an electoral alliance between her Socialist Party and Bayrou’s Union for French Democracy, saying she had ”nothing to negotiate, no deal to strike” with his party.

Bayrou, who initially welcomed the suggestion of an alliance as a sign ”things were moving”, on Monday also ruled out any deal with Royal before the first round, while stepping up his attacks on Sarkozy.

Sarkozy’s opponents — on the left and centre — accuse him of veering to the far right to poach voters from National Front (FN) leader Jean-Marie le Pen, and say he is a divisive character with no chance of securing the unity needed to reform the country.

Bayrou said Sarkozy was ”dragging the republican camp towards words, phrases and acts that belong to the far right”, while Socialist leader Francois Hollande attacked what he called Sarkozy’s ”winks and complicity” with Le Pen.

Sarkozy’s governing UMP party hit back on Monday, charging that the ”violence” of the attacks against him ”conceal his opponents’ difficulty in carrying ideas for the country”.

”Nicolas Sarkozy upsets a system … he crosses boundaries, and that bothers the candidates of a system that they refuse to change,” said UMP spokesperson Valerie Pecresse.

Meanwhile, Le Pen, who beat the Socialist candidate into the run-off against Jacques Chirac in 2002, promised a ”big surprise” in Sunday’s vote, predicting that this time he could knock Sarkozy out of the race.

Le Pen is currently fourth in the race, but experts say that some of his supporters may be disguising themselves as Sarkozy voters in the polls.

At a rally in Paris on Sunday, Le Pen repeated an insinuation that Sarkozy — a quarter-Jewish son of a Hungarian immigrant — was not sufficiently French to become president. The veteran FN leader, a master of provocation, has also repeatedly said he does not believe Royal will make it to round two.

French commentators have warned that the PS, scarred by its failure to reach the second round in 2002, may not survive a second eviction from the race.

”There are fears the old [left-wing] alliance, which still represents roughly half of the country, will be kept out of the second round once again — and wiped off the national map in the process,” wrote the newspaper Liberation.

Royal called on Sunday for ”the left, but also all republicans in search of justice and social peace to mobilise behind my candidacy in the first round, so that this election is not wasted”.

France is choosing a successor to the 74-year-old Chirac, in an election widely seen as the most exciting and important in a quarter of a century.

Twelve candidates are in the running, including three Trotskyites, a Communist, a Green and anti-capitalist campaigner Jose Bove, a hunters’ rights campaigner and a Catholic nationalist. — Sapa-AFP