FRENCH PRESIDENT Nicolas Sarkozy overtook his socialist rival, François Hollande, in an opinion poll for the first time yesterday, giving his re-election hopes a boost with five weeks still to go before the first round of voting.
The Ifop daily tracking poll put Mr Sarkozy’s first-round score at 28.5 per cent, ahead of Mr Hollande on 27 per cent. National Front leader Marine Le Pen, who formally became a candidate yesterday after securing the 500 mayors’ signatures she needed to appear on the ballot paper, was in third place on 16.5 per cent.
The survey found that Mr Hollande retained a strong lead in a hypothetical run-off against Mr Sarkozy, but the socialist had slipped by two points to 54.5 per cent while the incumbent gained two points at 45.5 per cent.
Voting will take place on April 22nd and May 6th.
“It’s true that it’s better when things are going well,” Mr Sarkozy told reporters when asked about the poll, adding that “nothing is settled, nothing is finished”.
The boost for Mr Sarkozy came after a period of intense media exposure for the president and a marked shift to the right by his campaign.
At a large rally near Paris on Sunday, he threatened to unilaterally pull France out of Europe’s Schengen open borders zone unless progress was made on controlling immigration. He also said Europe should have a law, modelled on the Buy American Act, requiring governments to buy European products.
Mr Hollande played down the Ifop poll, saying his rival appeared to be running out of inspiration and was ready to “try anything”.
“Nothing is in the bag, but nothing is lost either,” Mr Hollande told supporters. “I am sticking to my course.”
A separate poll, by TNS Sofres, put Mr Hollande in first place on 30 per cent (unchanged) and Mr Sarkozy on 26 per cent (down two).
However, the trend in the closely watched daily Ifop poll over recent days gave Mr Sarkozy his best news of the campaign since he formally joined the race in mid-February.
An initial rise in his poll numbers last month ebbed away after a series of lacklustre speeches and a string of socialist policy initiatives, including a plan for a 75 per cent tax on the super-rich, that set the terms of the debate.
Mr Sarkozy has since moved immigration and national identity to the heart of his campaign, seeking to win back voters who supported him in 2007 but have since shifted their allegiance to the National Front.
In a major speech on these themes, he pledged to cut the number of immigrants by half, saying there were “too many foreigners in France”.
Following claims by Ms Le Pen that all abattoirs in the Paris region slaughtered meat according to halal custom, he promised to introduce a new meat-labelling system. “French people’s biggest preoccupation is halal meat,” the president said.
Mr Sarkozy has given strong performances on the most-watched politics programmes on television over the past week. On Monday evening, he told 4.6 million TF1 (Télévision Française 1) viewers he would start making tax exiles pay some contributions back to France.
In a two-and-a-half hour appearance on France 2’s flagship show, Des Paroles et Des Actes, last week, he was considered to have come off better in a duel against the socialist former prime minister Laurent Fabius.
The final field of candidates will be known on Friday, which is the deadline for nominations.
Ms Le Pen, who wants to withdraw France from the euro and calls for tighter limits on immigration, had warned that she might not secure enough signatures to enable her to run because local elected representatives did not want to take the risk of associating themselves with her campaign.
