Chirac's rival moves closer to seizing top job

FRANCE: Amid much glitter and pomp, Nicolas Sarkozy will tomorrow take over the President's party - but his plans don't stop there, reports Lara Marlowe in Paris

President Jacques Chirac is about to receive a dreadful present for his 72nd birthday on Monday. In a star-studded ceremony referred to by all as "the coronation", Nicolas Sarkozy, the pitbull of French politics, will take over Mr Chirac's party, the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), tomorrow.

For the first time in 30 years, Mr Chirac will no longer be able to rely on his own political party. In becoming president of the UMP, Mr Sarkozy (49) seizes the perfect launching pad for his probable campaign to replace Mr Chirac as president of the republic in 2007. As France's biggest party, the UMP received €33.4 million in government funding last year.

In the four days from November 28th until December 1st, the face of French politics will be determined for years to come.

Mr Sarkozy will resign from his job as France's Minister for the Economy and Finance on Monday. On Wednesday, the Versailles Appeals Court will hand down its verdict in the case of former prime minister Alain Juppé, who resigned from the presidency of the UMP after his conviction for corrupt party financing last January. If Mr Juppé's ineligibility for public office is lifted, he may return to challenge Mr Sarkozy.

Also on Wednesday, the French Socialist Party will decide in a referendum whether it will support the European constitutional treaty.

Mr Jean-Louis Debré, a Chirac loyalist and the Speaker of the National Assembly, has warned Mr Sarkozy against using the UMP's two-thirds majority in the Assembly to undermine Mr Chirac's authority. Mr Sarkozy's loyalty must be total, Mr Debré told Le Journal du Dimanche. "The UMP is not an organisation designed to put a man into presidential orbit," he said. "Trench warfare against the government, however subtle, will not be tolerated."

After trading insults for the past year, Mr Chirac and Mr Sarkozy are trying to put a civilised veneer on the challenger's takeover of Mr Chirac's party. On November 20th, they met for 90 minutes, then appeared relaxed, even chummy, on the steps of the Élysée Palace. According to the satirical weekly newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné, Chirac told his aides: "Sarkozy promised me his loyalty; I didn't believe him. I wished him good luck, and he probably didn't believe me either."

The sham unity on the right will continue tomorrow when Mr Sarkozy will read a message from Mr Chirac at the UMP congress at Le Bourget. After his "coronation", Mr Sarkozy and his wife, Cecilia, will go to the Élysée for an apéritif with Jacques and Bernadette Chirac.

"Sarko" and Cecilia, who doubles as his political coach and chief of staff, wanted to hang a huge photograph of Mr Chirac on the stage at Le Bourget. One puts up images of dead presidents, the response came from the Élysée; a Christmas tree would do instead.

Mr Sarkozy wants his "coronation" to be a Hollywood-style production. Christophe Lambert, the head of Publicis, France's largest advertising agency, and Renaud Le Van Kim, impresario of television extravaganzas, are in charge. A special lectern has been designed to rise up out of the floor for Mr Sarkozy's acceptance speech. Twenty thousand party members will be ferried by bus, train and plane from across the country.

The Socialist leader, François Hollande, was the first to speak out against the lavish ceremony, saying it was "almost indecent to see so much money spent at a time when they're asking the French to tighten their belts".

The "coronation" is expected to cost between €5 million and €7 million. Mr Sarkozy has already made known his intention to move party headquarters from the drab, functional building chosen by Mr Juppé to a place more worthy of his standing.

The rivalry between Mr Chirac and Mr Sarkozy has been the main feature of French domestic politics for the past year. Béatrice Gurrey, a journalist with Le Monde, recounts in her book The Rebel and the King that Mr Chirac aimed an imaginary gun and told his amazed friends last summer: "See Sarkozy? Bang! Bang! Bang!" In his Bastille Day interview, Mr Chirac tried to put "Sarko" in his place. "I decide, he executes," the President said. To which Sarkozy responded: "I propose, he opposes."

Only 18 months into Mr Chirac's five-year term, a television interviewer asked Mr Sarkozy whether he thought about standing for president when he shaves in the morning. "I think about it, and not only when I'm shaving," he replied. That same week he said that a French president should "know how to make room" for others and suggested that no one should serve more than 10 years in France's highest office. Such bald ambition constitutes a revolution in French politics.

When Mr Chirac founded his now defunct RPR party in 1976, he was called "the man in a hurry", recalls Michaël Darmon, a correspondent for France 2 television and the author of Sarko Star. "Now Nicolas Sarkozy is the man in a hurry," he adds.

Mr Sarkozy's boundless ambition may be rooted in his past. "What shaped me was the sum of humiliations from my childhood," he said once. "I have no nostalgia for childhood, because it was not a particularly happy time." His father, Pal Nagy Bosca y Sarkozy, is a tall, charming Hungarian immigrant from minor aristocracy. He divorced Mr Sarkozy's mother, Andrée, when Nicolas was five, and the boy grew up in the mansion owned by Andrée's father, Benedict Mallah, a wealthy Jew from Salonica.

The second of three sons, Nicolas was bullied by his brothers. As a child, he made the phrase "I'm not afraid of you" his mantra. Cecilia Sarkozy, who is taller than her husband, confided to a friend that "Sarko" tried to change his height on his driving licence.

Mr Sarkozy courts the press assiduously and his frequent television appearances seem to have convinced the public of his dynamism. "When he travels, he demands that something be scheduled for every moment - no free time," says Darmon. "It's a constant race, as if he were trying to fill some void, as if he were running after something." Mr Sarkozy learned early that there is no honour among politicians. In 1983, he stole the office of Mayor of Neuilly, a suburb of Paris, from his then mentor, the right-wing politician Charles Pasqua. "Sarko" was 28 when he became the youngest mayor in France.

Neuilly is the Beverly Hills of Paris, and he spent his long tenure forging friendships with the suburb's millionaires and film stars. In August, actor Tom Cruise visited him at the finance ministry and came away singing Sarkozy's praises.

In the 1995 presidential campaign Sarkozy supported Édouard Balladur against Mr Chirac. He had been an intimate friend of the Chirac family, and the scars of his "betrayal" never healed. "You have to walk on that guy. Apparently it brings good luck!" Mr Chirac allegedly told everyone who suggested a reconciliation.

As Mayor of Neuilly, Mr Sarkozy performed the marriage ceremony for the television personality Jacques Martin and Cecilia Ciganer, the daughter of a White Russian immigrant furrier and a Spanish beauty. "Why am I marrying this woman to someone else?" he thought to himself. "I love her. She should be mine." Nicolas and Cecilia eventually divorced their respective spouses and married in 1996.

In The Republic, Religions, Hope, published this month, Mr Sarkozy suggested that the sacrosanct 1905 law on separation of church and state be adapted to allow state funding for mosques to prevent France's large Muslim minority from relying on Saudi Arabia and other Arab states.

Mr Sarkozy believes France should allow ethnic and religious groups to maintain their identities, like blacks, Hispanics and others do in the US. This argument has strengthened his reputation as "Sarko l'Américain". Before "Sarko", French politicians' wives were often self-effacing. Nicolas and Cecilia are inseparable - American-style - and other political couples have begun following their example.

As ministerof the interior, Mr Sarkozy established a representative council for French Muslims. He abolished la double peine, under which immigrants were deported after serving prison sentences.

Many of his policies seem contradictory. He courted French Muslims, but passed crime legislation targeting young immigrants in the banlieues. He has also curried favour with France's Jewish community.

At the invitation of US Jewish groups Mr Sarkozy made a much-publicised visit to the US last spring during which he accused the previous socialist government of "making the United States of America believe that France was an anti-Semitic country". It may prove impossible to maintain the balancing act between Jews and Muslims on his first visit to Israel next month.

Mr Sarkozy and the UMP rank-and-file who have elected him head of the French Right think he has a good chance of winning the presidential election in 2007. Bernadette Chirac reportedly thinks he's too short, too foreign-looking and lacks the rural roots he would need to win. She may be right, but in the meantime French politics will be a lot livelier for his presence. The Sarko Show must go on.