France:Some 50,000 people gathered yesterday to hear Nicolas Sarkozy tell them why he wants to be French president, writes Lara Marlowein Paris.
Nicolas Sarkozy never made a secret of his presidential ambitions, but his determination to seize France's highest office reached unprecedented heights yesterday when he was officially invested as the candidate of the right-wing Union for a Popular Movement.
"I want to be the president of a France that . . ." Sarkozy repeated at least 25 times in an hour-long speech. Eight high-speed TGV trains and 520 buses brought UMP supporters from the furthest reaches of the country to the Porte de Versailles exhibition centre. Some 50,000 attended the day-long congress, with speeches relayed on giant screens.
The investiture of the socialist candidate Ségolène Royal on November 26th, before 1,300 party delegates, was a far more modest affair. But by "Sarko" standards, yesterday's rally was sober; there were no dancing girls or rock videos.
For the first time, party members, not Gaullist "barons", chose the right-wing candidate. With Sarkozy's nomination a foregone conclusion, no one stood against him. The defence minister Michèle Alliot-Marie, the only right-wing politician who considered challenging him, backed out on Friday night.
In the event, Sarkozy won 98.1 per cent of ballots cast, with 69.06 per cent of the party's 330,000 members participating in the vote.
The only blot on Sarkozy's triumph was the absence of a message of support from President Jacques Chirac. Chirac said last week that he is still "reflecting" on whether to stand for re-election. After an opinion poll published earlier this month showed that 81 per cent of the French don't want him to try, another Chirac candidacy is unlikely.
Chirac, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, who made a brief appearance at the congress but refused to vote, and the speaker of the National Assembly, Jean-Louis Debré, are the last hold-outs against Sarkozy. De Villepin was criticised by his own majority in the assembly last week. "Get yourself elected!" one deputy shouted at the prime minister, who has never stood for public office.
De Villepin accused Sarkozy's camp of organising the confrontation and threatened: "If this continues, I'll stand [for the presidency] myself!" UMP supporters now view Sarkozy as the Man of Destiny, but feel awkward about his shabby treatment of Chirac. "The presence of Alliot-Marie and [the former prime minister Alain] Juppé [both Chirac loyalists] here signifies something," a medical doctor from Saint-Étienne said. "It reassures me."
Sarkozy paid homage to Chirac for opposing the US-led invasion of Iraq "which was a mistake" - perhaps Sarkozy's way of refuting socialist allegations that he's "an American neo-conservative with a French passport".
Now that Sarkozy has cajoled and bullied most of the French right into supporting him, he is casting a wider net. "Together, everything is possible," is his new campaign slogan. "My France is the France of all French people, without exception," he said yesterday, adding that he is "holding out a hand" to those who vote for extreme parties, as well as "the workers who believed in the left of Jaurès and Blum, and who no longer recognise themselves in the immobile left that doesn't respect work."
The left-wing newspaper Libération this weekend described Sarkozy as "a man whose energy, nerve and egotism are at least as great as his impatience and nervousness". Sarkozy sought to convey a warm and fuzzy image of himself in yesterday's speech, saying there were "feelings so powerful that words are insufficient to describe them". He wanted everyone present "to be convinced . . . of the infinite energy that I shall draw from deep within myself, to achieve the triumph of the cause that unites us . . ."
Sarkozy repeated the words "I have changed" 10 times. "For a long time, I thought politics had nothing to do with my personal emotions," he said. "I have changed because at the very moment you designated me [ as candidate], I ceased to be the man of a single party, even if it is the first party in France." The "trials of life" had transformed him.
"One cannot understand the pain of others if one has not felt it oneself," he said. At the close of the congress, he stood with tears in his eyes while a children's choir sang La Marseillaise.
Sarkozy and his socialist rival, Royal, have made a habit of blurring left-right lines in the campaign. He sounded almost left-wing in his advocacy of "enforceable rights" to housing, childcare and education for disabled people, and in his criticism of "golden parachutes" for undeserving bosses. And he sought to outdo Royal on one of her favourite themes: women's rights.
But the flip side of Sarkozy's social conscience is a right-wing discourse against immigrants who fail to respect French customs. "I passionately love the country I was born in," he said. "I don't accept people living in France without respecting and loving France. I don't accept people moving to France without bothering to speak and write French . . . If you live in France, then you respect the values and laws of the republic. The subjugation of women is contrary to the republic. Those who want to subjugate their wives have no place in France."
Nor was there room in France for polygamists and those who practice female excision, he added, exploiting widespread prejudices against African immigrants.
Sarkozy also criticised welfare addicts, saying everyone should receive "according to his merit or his handicap . . . The real republic is one that does more for those who try to improve their lot, and less for those who don't want to do anything. We cannot accept that they live by sponging off society."
Sarkozy's most passionate rhetoric was in praise of work and private property. "I'm not afraid of the words 'work' and 'property'," he said.
"The goal of the republic is to permit someone who has nothing to nonetheless be a free man, to enable those who work to possess something, those who start at the bottom of the social ladder, to climb as high as their abilities allow them . . . I don't believe in handouts, in bringing everyone down to the same level, in mediocrity."