Photos: Police clash with riotersKEY POINTS:
PARIS - Conservative Nicolas Sarkozy triumphed in France's presidential election on Sunday, sweeping aside his Socialist rival Segolene Royal and winning a powerful mandate for reform.
Sarkozy won 53.1 per cent of the ballot against 46.9 per cent for Royal, with voters signing up to his vision of a hardworking France and turning a deaf ear to leftist accusations he would prove a divisive, dangerous and abrasive leader.
Sporadic violence flared in a number of French cities after his emphatic victory was flashed on television screens, but a conciliatory Sarkozy immediately reached out to his beaten foes, promising to be president of the entire nation.
"Those who have been broken, those who have been worn down by life, must know they have not been abandoned, that they will be helped, they will be rescued," he told cheering supporters.
Turnout was almost 84 per cent, the highest since 1988, giving his victory a strong legitimacy and extending the right's 12-year grip on power after two successive terms by president Jacques Chirac, who is retiring.
However, Sarkozy, the son of a Hungarian immigrant, has made clear he wants to be a more pro-active and radical leader than Chirac, promising to loosen rigid labour laws, trim fat from the public service, cut taxes and wage war on unemployment. "The French people ... have chosen to break with the ideas and habits of the past. I will thus rehabilitate work, authority, morality, respect, merit," said Sarkozy, a former interior minister with a hardline reputation.
The French president is elected for five years, is commander-in-chief of the armed forces, nominates the prime minister and is responsible for foreign and defence policies.
He will take power on May 16, becoming the first French head of state to be born after World War Two.
He will then name a government and start campaigning for June's parliamentary election. Most analysts expect his UMP party to retain its majority, giving Sarkozy a good chance of pushing through his economic and social reform programme.
"It is a clear mandate for reforms. He will have to fine-tune things very skilfully, of course," said Nicolas Sobczak, an economist at Goldman Sachs.
Sarkozy is promising a deluge of reforms in his first 100 days, including plans to undermine the 35-hour work week by cutting taxes on overtime, curbing union powers and tightening sentencing for repeat offenders.
Union leaders have denounced his proposals and France could face crippling strikes in the autumn of the sort that tripped Chirac when he took office in 1995 and tried to impose change.
The defeated Socialists face a period of potentially painful infighting after they suffered their third presidential defeat in a row. Moderates wasted no time in demanding deep reform to make the party more attractive.
Royal started the year as favourite but never recovered from a string of campaign gaffes and a manifesto full of lofty ambition but short of precise detail.
She told supporters on Sunday that she would continue her recent push to link her party with the centrists.
"You can count on me to deepen the renovation of the left and the pursuit of new convergences beyond its current boundaries," she told downhearted party activists.
European Union leaders congratulated Sarkozy, who promised to put France back into the driving seat of Europe after the country voted down the EU constitution in a 2005 referendum.
"Tonight France is back in Europe," he said.
US President George W. Bush also telephoned to offer his congratulations and said he expected good relations with Sarkozy, who has made a priority of repairing the damage to French-US relations caused by tension over the Iraq war.
Sarkozy said France would be Washington's friend, but urged the United States to do more to combat global warming.
The Socialists portrayed Sarkozy as a danger for France, saying he was authoritarian and likely to exacerbate tensions in the poor, multi-racial suburbs that ring many French cities and where the epicentre of three weeks of rioting in 2005.
Thousands of extra police were drafted in to patrol sensitive suburbs on Sunday and there were skirmishes between leftist sympathisers and police in Paris, Toulouse and Lyon.
Police said a number of cars were also set alight in suburbs around Paris, but there were no exact figures.
- REUTERS
