FRANCE: Mr Nicolas Sarkozy celebrated his takeover of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), France's largest political party, yesterday with a decidedly right-wing speech extolling the virtues of hard work and low taxation and denigrating handouts to the undeserving. Lara Marlowe reports from Le Bourget.
Mr Sarkozy was elected president of the UMP by 85.1 per cent of the 70,830 party members who voted. The popular base and treasury now at his disposal should facilitate Mr Sarkozy's campaign to become president of France in 2007.
Opponents of the ambitious politician say he is a megalomaniac and a demagogue. "There are many trials on the path of he who has a grand design," Mr Sarkozy said yesterday. "I am more than aware that the roughest attacks are in store for me."
Mr Sarkozy promised dramatic changes. "This strength I have in me, I will give to you," he promised 40,000 party militants who gathered at the Le Bourget conference centre outside Paris.
"This determination that I feel, I dedicate it to you. The confidence that belongs to me, I will share it with you."
One of Mr Sarkozy's remarks, which met with loud cheers and applause, would not have sounded out of place at a rally of the extreme right-wing National Front: "We want everyone to understand that society does not have to negotiate respect for its rules with anyone. If they don't like our laws, nobody has to submit to them by staying in France."
On Saturday night, Mr Sarkozy threw a party for the UMP youth movement, Jeunes Populaires, at La Bodega, which is owned by the coach of the French football team.
"Together, we will make political life younger," Mr Sarkozy (49) promised. "It needs it. We will bring new blood, new ideas, a little joy." The comment was perceived as a dig at President Jacques Chirac, who turns 72 today.
Thousands of young people were conspicuously placed in the front of the huge auditorium where Mr Sarkozy gave his acceptance speech.
They cheered him boisterously and booed when he mentioned Mr Chirac's demand that he resign as minister of economy and finance on becoming president of the UMP.
Mr Sarkozy kissed the first lady, Mrs Bernadette Chirac, and the Prime Minister, Mr Jean-Pierre Raffarin, in front of the TV cameras, and the embraces were projected on giant screens throughout the conference centre. "The [ right-wing] family is totally reunited today," Mr Sarkozy said.
Yet all France is waiting for the inevitable clashes between Mr Sarkozy, the President and Prime Minister.
Mr Sarkozy's victory speech befitted a presidential inauguration, or a prime minister's general policy speech, touching on topics as far-ranging as foreign policy and education.
Mr Sarkozy promised to meet all new members of the UMP, to spend three days of every month in the provinces, to visit factories, the countryside and universities, and to discuss the future of France with "social partners, men of culture, heads of companies, associations, civil servants, farmers, workers, researchers, employees. . ."
The only hope left to Messrs Chirac and Raffarin, it would seem, is that Mr Sarkozy will exhaust himself.
Mr Sarkozy implicitly criticised them both in his speech yesterday. For French people to regain faith in politics he said, "you start by telling things like they are, without constantly asking yourself if it will be popular or not".
Without naming Mr Raffarin, Mr Sarkozy attacked him for saying that the French resist reform. "Those who say that do it because the status quo suits them, because the status quo is comfortable," he said.
Referring to the previous socialist government's establishment of a 35-hour working week, Mr Sarkozy criticised those "whose ultimate ambition seems to be to do as little work as possible - as if working 35 hours a week instead of 39 was enough to make men happy." The RMI, a welfare payment that continues after unemployment benefits are exhausted, "buys the silence" of the unemployed, Mr Sarkozy said. It "may enable them to survive, but not to live. You have to live off your own work, not from handouts."
Mr Sarkozy called for the abolition of death duties: "I want people to be able to transmit to their children, free of taxes, the fruit of a life devoted to a profession. One shouldn't have to make excuses for an inheritance that was built by the sweat of the brow!"
A survey handed out to party militants in the morning seemed to indicate more extreme positions than those publicly espoused by Mr Sarkozy. "Do you think there are too many foreigners in France?" and "Should France restore the death penalty?" were among the questions asked.