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In a Machiavellian ploy that has left his enemies foaming in impotent rage, French President Nicolas Sarkozy is neutralising his last remaining major political opponent as he eyes the next five years in power.
Sarkozy has stunned the opposition Socialists by championing their most popular figure, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, 58, as next head of the International Monetary Fund.
The European Union yesterday gave its backing to the idea.
"We think he would be an excellent managing director of the IMF," said Portuguese Finance Minister Fernando Teixeira dos Santos, whose country is current president of the EU.
If the move goes ahead, it seems likely to cripple the Socialist Party for years. The party is already in the grip of an undeclared civil war after defeats in the May presidential elections and the elections in June to the National Assembly.
Its left has split into rival factions led by defeated presidential candidate Segolene Royal and by the party secretary, her former partner Francois Hollande.
Strauss-Kahn, openly critical of Hollande's fudgy leadership and Royal's chaotic electoral performance, is the moderates' big hope for wrenching the party to the centre ground and making it electable once more.
The silver-haired "DSK" is one of France's political heavyweights. The former professor and business lawyer was Finance and Economy Minister in the Government of Lionel Jospin between 1997 and 1999.
An advocate of the Gaullist concept of a mixed economy of free-market reforms while nurturing a role for the state in industry, he was handed the task of reducing France's budget deficit to enable it to qualify for the euro.
Sarkozy insists he is interested in Strauss-Kahn's talents, not his politics. "Should I deprive France of his candidacy because he is Socialist? How would I be President of all French people if I reasoned like that?" he said in an interview published last weekend.
But Hollande, accusing Sarkozy of plotting to sow division within the Socialist camp, said: "A chance for Europe and France to run the IMF should not be exploited to domestic political ends."
Strauss-Kahn is only the latest in a string of Socialist politicians who have been poached by Sarkozy. His bag includes Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and Secretary of State for European Affairs Jean-Pierre Jouyet, and last week he asked another party heavyweight, former Culture Minister Jack Lang, to join a commission aiming to modernise the French states institutions.
Sarkozy has also won the centrist Union for French Democracy to his side, leaving just a tiny rump of a party headed by its former leader Francois Bayrou. Outraged, Bayrou says the President is behaving like a piranha in a goldfish bowl.
Within the President's own Union for a Popular Majority party, there has been grousing by some members who have missed out on good jobs because of the poaching. But, with Sarkozy firmly in the ascendant, criticism is mute and anonymous.
With former President Jacques Chirac's retirement from politics, Sarkozy's last rival on the right is former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, who yesterday said he was expecting to be placed under investigation over a campaign to smear Sarkozy that erupted in 2004, when the two men were jousting for the UMP's presidential nomination.
Chirac himself is under pressure over a financial scandal dating from the time he was Mayor of Paris.
Thus in two months Sarkozy has concentrated power in his hands, his main critics have been silenced and his rivals co-opted or sidelined. Some sections of opinion say the already powerful head of state has reduced the Prime Minister to a mouthpiece.
"The good thing is that the ambiguities of the old system are gone. Before, it was never clear who was in charge - the president or the prime minister. Now there is no question," said Philippe Maniere of the Montaigne Institute thinktank.
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* Dominique Strauss-Kahn, 58, is a former professor and business lawyer.
* He was Finance and Economy Minister in the Government of Lionel Jospin from 1997 to 1999.
* He was beaten by Segolene Royal for the Socialist candidacy for this year's presidential elections.
