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Sarkozy under fire

Angelique Chrisafis

NICOLAS SARKOZY, France's Interior Minister and the centre-right's favoured presidential candidate, is struggling to calm critics in his party who accuse him of muzzling opponents and stifling internal debate as he prepares to declare his candidacy in April's election.

Mr. Sarkozy, 51, head of the ruling UMP party, has spent two years positioning himself to stand for the presidency, recruiting large numbers of party members and promising the electorate a tough line on crime and immigration and a "clean break" with France's political elite.

Like the Socialist party's Segolene Royal, he has tried to present himself as an outsider, appealing to an electorate wary of a political elite seen as corrupt and detached.

But Mr. Sarkozy's long feud with the French President and party founder Jacques Chirac has returned to haunt him in recent weeks. Chirac sympathisers, unhappy at Mr. Sarkozy's criticisms of the President, have set out to undermine the idea that he is the party's natural presidential candidate. Dominique de Villepin, the Prime Minister, who is close to Mr. Chirac, has been attacking Mr. Sarkozy's policies daily, creating the damaging spectacle of a head of government rounding on his next in line and party leader.

First Mr. de Villepin needled him about "fishing in the waters" of the extreme Right, then he criticised his views on delinquency and said his positive discrimination plan was a "dead end."

Michele Alliot-Marie, the Defence Minister and potential challenger for the party's nomination, wrote Mr. Sarkozy a letter leaked to Le Parisien newspaper complaining of the "real difficulty" of proper debate within the party.

Mr. Chirac's wife even suggested her husband, who turns 74 next week, could stand again for the presidency, although that is unlikely. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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