FRANCE:Nicolas Sarkozy already sees himself as president of France, writes Lara Marlowein Paris. After all, the outgoing interior minister and right-wing presidential candidate told staff at his farewell extravaganza yesterday: "I'm just trying to cross the street."
The interior ministry, which Mr Sarkozy has ruled with Napoleonic energy for four of the past five years, stands opposite the Élysée Palace.
The transfer of power between ministers is usually a simple formality, carried out in a few minutes.
Mr Sarkozy yesterday turned his departure (to devote himself full-time to the campaign) into a Hollywood production.
Journalists and ministry staff waited, standing, for an hour and a half in the cold courtyard, where more than 100 policemen, republican guards and firemen stood to attention.
The police wore the new operetta-style dress uniforms designed by the candidate's wife, Cecilia: blue-plumed caps, silver-fringed epaulettes and striped trousers.
The national police band played La Marseillaise four times.
Mr Sarkozy must have been trying to outdo his chief rival, the socialist candidate Ségolène Royal. Last Friday Ms Royal told a rally in Marseille she wanted every French person to hang a tricolour flag in the window on Bastille Day. Then she sang the Marseillaise - twice.
Trying to look presidential, the short man with the tall ego laid wreaths before memorials to policemen, gendarmes and firemen who died in two World Wars and in the line of duty.
White tents were set up in the garden behind the ministry, and tables were laden with canapés and champagne; a foretaste of "la garden party" which Mr Sarkozy hopes to host across the street less than four months from now, on Bastille Day.
The candidate delivered his farewell address from the top of the stairs, looking down on the audience of civil servants and security forces.
He had been "faithful to my duty, faithful to my contract with the French, who wanted the state to exercise its authority with greater resolution", he said.
"I never confused the youths from the [ immigrant] neighbourhoods with louts," he claimed.
In reality, his inflammatory promises to wash the suburbs "with a power hose" and to "get rid of scum" helped ignite the 2005 riots. However the minister who bid farewell to staff yesterday was the touchy-feely "Sarko", the one who told his UMP party in January, "I have changed".
Being of mixed blood himself, he said, he understood the youths in the housing projects.
His most melodramatic reminiscences were of the funerals of dead members of the security forces, of the five-year-old son of a motorcycle policeman who allegedly begged Mr Sarkozy to "Take daddy out of that box."
"I shall not abandon you," Mr Sarkozy said, perhaps unwittingly quoting the dying president François Mitterrand.
In his new job as president of France, he would make sure that security remains a top priority.
The next month (of the campaign) would be exciting; the subsequent two weeks (before the run-off) even more so. "Send me good vibes," he said, laughing.
So, if Mr Sarkozy is such a nice guy, why do opinion polls show that the frontrunner still scares more than half of the French population?
In another country, Mr Sarkozy would probably have been driven out of office for abuse of power.
Last year he had the director of Paris Match magazine fired for publishing a photograph of Cecilia with her lover on the streets of New York.
In January, it emerged that Mr Sarkozy's cabinet asked the domestic intelligence agency to investigate Bruno Rebelle, Ms Royal's adviser for the environment and the former head of Greenpeace in France.
Then the satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné revealed that as mayor of the rich suburb of Neuilly, Mr Sarkozy gave the property developer Lasserre a €775,000 reduction on a plot of land, then enjoyed a €300,000 break on the duplex apartment he bought from the same developer.
Mr Sarkozy, who speaks often of the "irreproachable republic" he intends to establish, said property prices were down at the time.
When Libération newspaper devoted its front page to "suspicions" about the accuracy of Mr Sarkozy's tax declaration, the interior minister insulted and threatened Edouard de Rothschild, the paper's main shareholder.
More recently, he threw a tantrum at France 3 television station because there was no make- up studio immediately available for him and his personal make-up artist, and because the director of the station failed to greet him when he arrived.
The expulsion of record numbers of illegal immigrants has been one of Mr Sarkozy's proudest achievements.
Last week a Paris school principal was held for seven hours after she tried to prevent police arresting a Chinese man who had come to fetch his grandchild. Police used tear gas outside the school.
But Mr Sarkozy is unapologetic. Illegal immigrants must be arrested wherever they were, he said at the weekend. It made no difference whether they were streets away or in the same street as a school, he added.