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PARIS - There is a nightmare that is guaranteed to make any senior state official in France wake up bug-eyed and lathered in sweat at 3am: the vision of President Nicolas Sarkozy flying in to meet the people.
Media-friendly forays into the provinces have been a hallmark of Sarkozy's presidency since he was elected in 2007 and declared he would not be trapped inside the gilded cage of the Elysee Palace.
The visits are dreaded by local officials, who fear the disruption to local life, the huge bill in policing - and the risk that any hitch will put their head on the block.
"City under siege", the daily Mid-Libre headlined after Sarkozy paid a visit on January 13 to Nimes. The usually bustling southern city became a ghost town as battalions of riot police sealed off streets to ensure demonstrators were kept far from where Sarkozy was due to speak.
Doctors were barred from visiting patients living within the security zone. Restaurants, shops and other businesses were empty, and furious owners say they intend to demand compensation.
On January 27, it was the turn of the central town of Chateauroux to be favoured with a presidential handshake and TV soundbite.
Cars parked within the security perimeter were towed away. Parents who dropped their children off at school found they were then barred from leaving the area. People who
had been invited to a round table
discussion with Sarkozy had to go through five checkpoints, with identity checks at each.
The tiniest detail of Sarkozy's visits is studied in advance, belying the 40-second TV reports that portray these trips as relaxed or impromptu.
The Elysee first sends a team of scouts to identify a secondary
road route to exfiltrate "le PR" (the President of the Republic) in the event of an emergency, to spot sites for Army snipers and see where to set up tricolore flags and the presidential
lectern, the daily Parisien reported at the weekend.
Hundreds of local police, under the control of the prefect, are then deployed, and up to 700 CRS riot police and gendarmes are bussed in by the Interior Ministry. Roadblocks are set up and traffic diverted to create a security bubble.
The "PR" arrives by helicopter or plane at a nearby airport and then rolls into town in a massive motorcade - nothing less than 17 cars - with police escort.
There is always a delegation from the ruling UMP Party to welcome Sarkozy, and demonstrators are penned off at such a distance that they are usually invisible and inaudible to the President and the TV cameras.
But even these carefully choreographed exercises can go wrong. Last week, Sarkozy kicked out a prefect - the senior-most state official in a departement, or county - in northern France, and his police chief.
Sarkozy had been expected to press the flesh in the town of Saint-Lo. But draconian security controls meant the crowd was pathetically thin. Only a couple of dozen UMP supporters got through all the checkpoints. Worse, the presidential motorcade was routed past several thousand protesters, who booed, threw shoes and other missiles - and Sarkozy untelegenically lost his cool.
The two officials, of the Manche departement in Normandy, "failed to have an adequate appreciation of the situation", said Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie, arguing the pair had failed to organise proper security.
The episode has raised hoots from Sarkozy's critics and a show of dismay from his friends, too. They see imperial hautiness and a thin skin.
There have been five previous incidents in which Sarkozy has fired a top official after a headline-making foul-up.
Prefects and police directors are appointed by the head of state and serve at his discretion. If they are dismissed, they are not tossed on to the dole queue; instead, they return to a well-paid corps of top public servants to await their next assignment.
"He's acting on a royal whim," said centrist leader Francois Bayrou, after the latest dismissals. The Greens said the Normandy pair "were paying the price for failing to shield the President from the public's disapproval".
"It's scandalous, it's a practice from a different time, and counterproductive from a political point of view," said UMP Senator Jean-Francois Legrand.
Last September, Corsican police chief Dominique Rossi was booted out after nationalist militants staged a brief sit-in at the home of actor Christian Clavier, a close friend of Sarkozy's.
Sarkozy aides say these actions underline his drive to extirpate laziness or incompetence at top level and are not because of vainglory. And, they point out, Sarkozy is not the only one to have reacted in this way.
In 1977, then President Valery Giscard d'Estaing visited deepest Brittany. On returning to his helicopter, he found that angry farmers had hung pigs from the aircraft's blades, preventing him from taking off. The prefect was dismissed on the spot.
