FRANCE: It's just the two of them now: Ségo and Sarko. Eleven months before the French presidential election, the interior minister and head of the right-wing UMP party, Nicolas Sarkozy, has implicitly acknowledged the socialist deputy and regional president, Ségolène Royal, as his only rival for France's highest office.
With Ms Royal surpassing him in opinion polls, Mr Sarkozy called a press conference yesterday to convey the "eloquent figures" attesting to his record as interior minister for most of the past four years. He referred to "Madame Royal" a half dozen times, always with irony.
"I've been overtaken on my right!" he joked, alluding to Ms Royal's proposal that policemen be required to join a union. He was delighted that she'd rallied to his view on reviewing welfare payments for negligent parents, "but I see she has a hard time convincing the Socialist Party".
It seemed to Mr Sarkozy there wasn't "a single salient idea" in the Socialist Party programme, hammered out in a tense nine-hour session on Tuesday night. Raising the minimum wage to €1,500 a month and renationalising the electricity company was "the usual demagoguery", he noted, accusing the socialists of "conservatism" and "immobility".
France missed out on a "a real debate of ideas" because the extreme right-wing leader Jean-Marie Le Pen made it to the run-off in 2002. Mr Sarkozy hopes for such a debate with Ms Royal in the coming months. "Her ideas are the opposite of the socialists'," he said. "They accuse me of being too firm; she says I'm not firm enough." Both candidates have zeroed in on juvenile delinquency as a vote-winning topic.
The socialists will officially designate their candidate in November; the UMP in January 2007. There could still be a mishap. Ms Royal is hated by socialist "elephants", and a former employee who sued her is writing a book about the experience.
Mr Sarkozy was again wearing his wedding band yesterday, indicating he has surmounted marital difficulties that once threatened his candidacy.
President Jacques Chirac and the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, both plummeted in opinion polls during the Clearstream scandal, in which Mr de Villepin used French intelligence services to investigate whether Mr Sarkozy, among others, held an offshore bank account.
Consequently, there was widespread speculation that Mr Sarkozy would resign to avoid being stained by the government's unpopularity. He rejected this yesterday. With the "huge" task facing him at the interior ministry, "Who would understand if I said I'm leaving in June because there's a presidential election next May?" Asked if he is feeling the heat of competition from Ms Royal, he said he'd been reassured by the morning papers.
The right-wing Le Figaro headlined with an opinion poll showing that 56 per cent of voters, including 36 per cent on the left and 82 per cent on the right, believe Mr Sarkozy is "the right choice against insecurity".
Citing what he repeatedly called "indisputable" statistics, Mr Sarkozy said he had brought France's crime down 8.8 per cent in four years. By comparison, crime increased 14.5 per cent during the last four years of the Jospin socialist government.
Mr Sarkozy noted that the number of people in prison had risen by 22.9 per cent, prompting a journalist to ask how many French people would have to be imprisoned before the country would be safe. "I never said there weren't enough people in prison," Mr Sarkozy snapped. "People say ex-convicts are more criminal when they get out of prison. Do you want them not to go to prison any more? Prison is not supposed to be a pleasant place."
Sex offenders should be given the choice between prison and sterilisation, he said. Other countries have adopted such policies, which have always been taboo in France.
As a result of his crackdown on illegal immigration, the interior minister boasted, the number of deportations rose from 9,498 four years ago to 21,050 in 2005/2006.
France has the highest drug consumption among minors in the EU: "We are facing an explosion of violence by minors," which has increased by 80 per cent in the past decade.
Mr Sarkozy said 80,000 attack dogs in France are used as weapons, and called for sterilisation and a ban on imports until they become extinct. Up to 60 cars are still burnt every night in France, a "national sport" which he intends to stop. He wants to make the filming of assaults with mobile telephones an aggravating circumstance.
Some 5,000 delinquents were arrested during last November's riots, without a single death, he boasted. "The penal chain must follow," he said, deploring the fact that the Bobigny tribunal where rioters from the Paris region were taken did not hand down a single prison sentence.