FRANCE:French president Jacques Chirac announced his support for the right-wing presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy yesterday and also Mr Sarkozy's imminent departure from the interior ministry.
All three of Mr Chirac's former prime ministers have endorsed Mr Sarkozy, but Mr Chirac's support was lukewarm at best.
In an eight-sentence statement after the weekly cabinet meeting, the French president announced that Mr Sarkozy will leave the government from Monday to devote himself entirely to the election campaign.
Though he once promised to leave office at the end of 2006, Mr Sarkozy hung on as long as possible. The opposition socialists accused him of using government resources to campaign for the presidency, and pointed out that the interior ministry organises elections - an obvious conflict of interests.
Mr Chirac mentioned Mr Sarkozy's "work, commitment and results at the interior ministry". Having created the UMP (which Mr Sarkozy virtually hijacked in 2004), and because the UMP supported Mr Sarkozy, Mr Chirac said he will "naturally give him my vote and my support". Mr Sarkozy and his spokesmen seemed to read more into the presidential statement than was actually there.
"I am very touched by this decision," Mr Sarkozy announced, adding that it was "important for me on a personal level as well as a political level".
After 12 years as president, Mr Chirac "knows better than anyone else the demands of the office", so his words had "a political significance of the first importance".
A statement from the UMP press office called Mr Chirac's endorsement of Mr Sarkozy "a clear and resolute engagement", spoke of the president's "glowing tribute to his ministerial record" and claimed the president had recognised that Nicolas Sarkozy has "the qualities of a statesman required by the presidential office".
The UMP statement was apparently meant to fill in the blanks in Mr Chirac's terse speech. The president "recognised the ability of Nicolas Sarkozy to unite the French, to represent France and engage necessary reforms", it continued, concluding that "our political family awaits this presidential election closely knit and united".
There was no mention of the handful of Chirac loyalists who have defected to the centrist candidate François Bayrou's camp.
Mr Sarkozy boasts that more than one-third of crimes are now resolved, compared to little over one-quarter when he came to the interior ministry in 2002.
The overall number of crimes and offences has declined by 9.44 per cent, but violence against individuals has risen by 13.9 per cent in the last five years.
Yesterday's endorsement by the president did not end years of sniping between Messrs Sarkozy and Chirac.
At a rally on Tuesday night, Mr Sarkozy again called for a "rupture" with the Chirac years and promised to end the practice of rewarding political friends with government positions, as Mr Chirac has done in recent weeks.
In prefaces to two collections of his speeches to be published tomorrow, Mr Chirac implicitly attacked Mr Sarkozy for not recognising the importance of Europe's "Franco-German motor", for believing that "peace dividends" made it possible to reduce defence spending, for economic liberalism and for importing the "pernicious" idea of "positive discrimination" or affirmative action from the US.