PARIS: Al Qaeda-inspired gunman has coloured the final month of France's presidential election race, where conservative Nicolas Sarkozy is battling Socialist Francois Hollande to win a second term.
Sarkozy has inched up in opinion polls, with some now giving him a 1-2 point lead for the April 22 first round vote, since the March shootings in the southern city of Toulouse, but Hollande is still 8 points ahead or more for a May 6 runoff.
Mohamed Merah, 23, was shot dead by a police sniper after a long siege during which he confessed to having killed three soldiers, a rabbi and three Jewish children in attacks that badly shook France and briefly took attention away from the economic issues that remain voters' main concerns.
A survey showed that 71 percent of the public judge that Sarkozy - a law-and-order hawk who is at his strongest in a crisis - handled the Merah affair ably, as he oversaw the police operation that tracked down and killed the gunman and ordered a crackdown on people who follow radical Islamist websites.
Yet poll gains by Sarkozy seem limited so far, as opponents ask whether there were intelligence lapses and analysts see the election debate moving back to core issues of employment, purchasing power and public finances.
Hollande still needs to find a way to get back into centre-stage, after treading water over the past week as he suspended his campaigning along with other candidates and was left as something of a bystander as Sarkozy dominated headlines.
PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
Long the underdog in the election race, Sarkozy has inched up to his strongest position yet, narrowing the gap behind Hollande in the second-round vote to 8 points from 12 a few weeks ago.
A slip in support for National Front leader Marine Le Pen suggests Sarkozy's hardline stance on immigration has allowed him to woo some far-right voters. Since Merah's attacks, he has warned that radical Islamists will not be tolerated in France and barred some preachers from visiting.
His strategy of veering right is a double-edged sword because it could put off centrist voters who would be crucial in a May 6 runoff against Hollande.
Centrist candidate Francois Bayrou, who has not said who he would back in a second round, has around 10 percent support in polls for the first round, either in fourth place behind Sarkozy, Hollande and Le Pen, or sometimes in fifth place due to a surge by hard leftist Jean-Luc Melenchon.
Melenchon, whose frank yet articulate speeches appeal to both the educated centre-left, some of whom find Hollande uninspiring, and centre-right voters concerned by Sarkozy's move further to the right, even leapfrogged Le Pen in one recent poll to stand in third place.
His participation has injected a dose of working-class rage and radical panache into the race, and could help redirect the debate back to popular economic issues such as unemployment, inequality and overpaid executives.
Comments
Comments are closed for this article.