KEY POINTS:
In the green depths of rural Normandy, the posters of the 12 presidential candidates grin from the official billboards. Only one poster has been defaced: that of Nicolas Sarkozy.
In the concrete entrails of the Paris suburbs, the same 12 faces grin from the same posters. Only one poster has been defaced: that of Nicolas Sarkozy.
If you go to a Sarkozy rally, you see an angry little man in a dark suit. He talks well. He sometimes talks sense. But he always seems to be angry.
He is angry with the way France has been governed for 25 years. He is angry with his opponents. He is angry with bureaucracy, angry with criminals, angry with Beijing, Washington and Brussels.
He resembles one of Shakespeare's intelligent villains, on the margins of society - a "malcontent", a perfect Iago. And yet Sarkozy is not an outsider. He is not a villain (any more than most politicians and less so than many). He is not an extremist (although many on the left insist he is).
Sarkozy is the presidential candidate for France's ruling party.
He is forecast to comfortably top the poll in first-round elections on Sunday. He is likely, but not certain, to be the next President of France, after the second round on May 6.
Sarkozy began his official campaign in January with an attempt to present a gentler image. In the past month, challenged for soft, consensual, middle-class votes by the centrist Francois Bayrou, he has veered to the populist right.
He has courted the voters of the National Front, promising to create a ministry of "Immigration and National Identity". He has used the political windfall of a minor riot at the Gare du Nord in Paris to stir middle-class and white working-class fears of violence in the poor, multi-racial suburbs of French cities.
He has accused his main rival, Socialist candidate Segolene Royal, of being "morally defective" and defending violence and crime. (She does not.)
He has underplayed his calls for pro-market and pro-work reforms. He has invested much more emotional capital in calls for European trade protectionism. He has called for EU governments to devalue the euro.
All this may have been tactically astute. Sarkozy has shored up his position in the polls. He has also, however, confirmed the fears of those who doubt his credentials to be head of state.
Opponents have pounced on odd remarks he made last month to Philosophie magazine. He suggested that the behaviour of paedophiles, and even teenage suicides, was genetically pre-determined. Shock, horror, the opponents said. "Sarko" believes in eugenics (or genetic selection). How chilling. How neo-fascist.
Bizarrely, the veteran far-right leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, weighed in to suggest it was Nicolas Sarkozy who was genetically unfit to be president. The president should be a pure-blood Frenchman, he said, not a mudblood like Sarkozy (who is half Hungarian and a quarter Jewish).
In their own ways, left and far right were trying to exploit the paradox of this campaign. Sarkozy may be in front, but hundreds of thousands of French people, even many natural centre-right voters, feel deeply unsettled by the idea of a President Sarkozy.
Sarkozy became mayor of his home town, Neuilly-sur-Seine, a wealthy Paris suburb, at 28. Unlike most French politicians he never attended the elite "grandes ecoles". He has been Budget Minister, Finance Minister and Interior Minister (twice).
He was once a protege of President Chirac and was linked to Chirac's daughter, Claude. After splitting with the Chirac clan in 1993-4, he rebuilt his career as an insider-outsider: the man of France's future; the young and dynamic man who could save France from the threats of the extreme right, and extreme left, from internal division and economic decline.
He believes in public investment and in a role for the state but would like a more economically liberal and dynamic France. His ideas are based on two simple but accurate diagnoses of France's economic decline in the past 30 years.
First, France does not work enough. Young people enter the workforce late; experienced people retire early; the standard working week is now just 35 hours. France works an average of just over 600 hours per inhabitant per year, taking into account all the people not in work - Britain 800 hours. Result: slow growth, low incomes and high unemployment.
Second, the burden of the French welfare state falls not on individuals but on employers and so on jobs. Sarkozy wants part of the welfare cost shifted on to France's already high rates of value-added tax (VAT).
Sarkozy is a teetotaller who binges on chocolate and sweets and runs 6km most mornings. To meet him is like meeting an overactive 9-year-old. He finds it physically irksome to stay still.
The French say they want an active president. They are not so sure they want a hyperactive one. It is Sarkozy's determination to be seen to be a Man of Action that leads him to errors of judgment.
In the weeks before the suburban riots of November 2005, Sarkozy made two visits to crime scenes in poor, multi-racial housing estates near Paris. There, he spoke of suburban youth gangs as "racaille" (scum) and said that he would clean them out with a "Karcher", or high-powered hose.
His words are often misrepresented. He did not refer to all young people in the multi-racial suburbs as scum. To use such language was, nonetheless, the trademark of Jean-Marie Le Pen.
A President Sarkozy would polarise the nation. Any economic reform by Sarkozy would be opposed on the streets. Any police-versus-youth clash in the suburbs could spark new riots.
France needs a courageous man or woman to move things forward but also one capable of projecting a sense of steadiness and fairness. Sarkozy may or may not have the courage. Even many people on the centre-right doubt his capacity to generate calm.
- INDEPENDENT
