Giscard and Petain return, the dirt begins to fly
Giscard backs Sarkozy
Nicolas Sarkozy may not have received an endorsement from his predecessor, Jacques Chirac, but he does have the backing of another right-wing former president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.
In yesterday’s Le Parisien, Giscard said he would vote for Sarkozy as the candidate who best understood France’s economy and the problems it faced.
“Let’s make no mistake,” he said. “France is on the list after Greece, Portugal, Italy and Spain.”
While he sympathised with some criticisms of the incumbent, Giscard said he had grown into the role and learned lessons.
“He is the most credible person to put France back on track,” he said. “The most recent decisions he took allow us to hope that we are exiting the crisis.”
Sarkozy will welcome such a high-profile endorsement but, given current circumstances, he may also be keen to avoid being linked too closely with Giscard, who is, of course, the only sitting president since the Fifth Republic was founded in 1958 to be denied a second term by voters.
Hollande’s Muslim support?
While steering his campaign towards National Front themes since the run-off campaign began on Sunday night, Sarkozy has sharpened his attacks on François Hollande.
His latest claim about the socialist candidate is that he is being supported by the controversial Swiss Muslim intellectual Tariq Ramadan. This has been denounced as “a lie” by Hollande’s camp, and nobody has so far found any evidence that Ramadan is rooting for the socialist.
The man himself denied it yesterday, telling the AFP news agency: “Never in my life have I called for a vote for François Hollande. I’m not French. I didn’t advise anyone how to vote.”
Confusion also surrounds Sarkozy’s claim that “700 mosques” have called on the people to vote for Hollande on May 6th. The Muslim Council of France has said it can find no trace of such a call.
Women in the firing line
The tone of the campaign has grown more vicious as the stakes have risen in recent days.
At a rally for Sarkozy, Lionnel Luca, a deputy from the president’s UMP party, mocked Hollande as “the eiderdown candidate” and referred to his partner, Valérie Trierweiler, as “Rottweiler”.
Luca also took aim at Fadela Amara, a former Sarkozy minister who is supporting Hollande.
“Fadela Amara? Me, I always preferred Rachida Dati [another former minister with immigrant origins], because she is less ugly and she is campaigning for the president.”
Hollande’s campaign condemned the comments as “abject”.
Pétain, Sarkozy and May 1st
There are few worse insults in modern French politics than being compared to Marshal Pétain, the leader of the collaborationist Vichy regime during the German occupation in the 1940s.
The communist newspaper L’Humanité set off a row this week when it ran photos of Sarkozy and Pétain together on its front page.
The paper said Sarkozy’s decision to hold his own Labour Day rally in Paris on May 1st to celebrate what he termed “real work” recalled Pétain’s attempts to reclaim May 1st for the right.
“Sarkozy isn’t Pétain, happily, but the similarities point to the dangers for our country of the president-candidate adopting the theses of the extreme right,” Max Staat wrote.
Finance minister François Baroin called the front page “scandalous”.