French presidential campaign turns nasty

No sooner had Sarkozy officially declared himself a candidate than things started to get nasty.

His UMP party’s campaign upped a notch in the aggression stakes, with leaflets branding Hollande a liar because of alleged contradictions in his public statements, notably over just how much he wants to regulate markets and whether he hates the rich.

Presidential election 2012

And his two principal attack dogs, UMP national secretary Jean-François Copé and Interior Minister Claude Guéant, rallied their troops around their chosen themes – the Hollandiste peril for Copé, immigration, Islam and law and order for Guéant.

Although it could hardly be described as breaking the suspense, the official start of Sarkozy’s election campaign did seem to galvanise his supporters. Three opinion polls put the incumbent just one or two points behind Hollande in the first round of voting compared to the four or five point lead the Socialist had mid-February.

UMP members interviewed after his announcement were enthusiastic and have continued to be so at campaign rallies in Marseille and Montpellier.

But things didn’t go so well for Sarkozy on Wednesday in Bayonne, the main town of the French part of the Basque country, which is on the border with northern Spain.

When Sarkozy tried to do a walkabout part of the crowd booed, whistled and jostled him, accusing him of destroying jobs and defending the wealthy and pelting a bar where he had arranged to meet the people with eggs.

It was far from the first time that a politician has come face to face with boisterous opposition in public – indeed, Hollande was booed at the annual farming fair in Paris this week - and the CRS riot police quickly came to his rescue, but Sarkozy was visibly shaken and he took out his anger on the Socialists.

Socialist Party activists had connived with Basque separatists to intimidate the honest folk who wished to meet him, the president-candidate claimed. He went on to blame Hollande for the “violence”, accusing him of threatening to “purge” the civil service if he is elected and adding, “Obviously, that gets the rank and file all worked up.”

The Socialists have hit back, accusing Sarkozy of “losing his cool” now that, as a humble candidate, he no longer has “hundreds and hundreds of CRS to evacuate the population for hundreds of kilometres around” as Hollande aide Michel Sapin put it.

“Obviously we condemn violence,” declared Hollande’s communications chief Manuel Valls.”But if we can no longer demonstrate in this country and if Nicolas Sarkozy, every time there’s a bit of whistling, hits out at the Socialists accusing them of nothing less than working with a terrorist organisation and organising a purge as happened during the liberation, it’s time for him to come back down to earth.”

Saying Hollande wants a “purge” or a “witch-hunt”, as some UMP officials have, is just malicious gossip, commented the Grand Rabbi of France Gilles Bernheim on Friday.

But that hasn’t stopped dedicated Sarkozistes like Copé, who has demanded that Hollande condemn the Bayonne boisterousness, and Bayonne mayor Jean Grenet, who apologised to the chief and accused the demonstrators of being “anti-globalisation campaigners, anarchists, radical separatists, and, above all, Socialist representatives who were with them”.