KEY POINTS:
Flags waved. The crowd howled. An angry little man in a dark suit and a dark tie jabbed the air with an angry finger.
The serial finger-jabber with a scowling face is the pollsters' favourite to be the next President of France.
Nicolas Sarkozy, after two months of trying to persuade France that he is a changed and more mellow "Sarko" - less driven, less scary, less obviously hungry for power - has now cut loose.
Partly, this seems to be a calculated response to a slow melting of his ascendancy in the opinion polls. Partly, it is a reaction to a random event that has placed Sarkozy's record and Sarkozy's character at the centre of the presidential campaign.
A mini-riot in the subterranean passages of the Gare du Nord in Paris gave the other leading candidates a perfect opportunity to assault his record as an authoritarian, no-nonsense interior minister. Not only had he failed to control crime, they said, he had created an explosive enmity between police and young people in the racially-mixed, poor suburbs of French cities.
For Sarkozy, this was an equally welcome opportunity to rewind the tape to the successful, crime-driven campaign of his former mentor, President Jacques Chirac, in 2002. "Our side stands for authority and respect," he told the Lille rally.
"The others stand for delinquency and fraud."
Sarkozy began his campaign in January by promising to be a different type of French politician. He promised to bring a new realism and purpose to French government. He promised a "peaceful rupture" with the muddled policies of left and right in the last 25 years.
But the real energy in his speech was directed mostly towards worn, populist and protectionist themes used by French politicians of the right, and further right, for decades.
- INDEPENDENT
