-
-
PARIS |
Mon Apr 23, 2012 4:52am EDT
-
(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
Euroskeptical 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 program, 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.
N. Korea Threatens to 'Mercilessly Punish' South
