AFP/Reuters/Paris
“The match has begun,” French political veteran Alain Juppe said yesterday after his rival and ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy announced his comeback, as the battle for supremacy over the country’s beleaguered opposition kicked off.
Both centre-right heavyweights, keen to put behind the in-fighting and scandals that have stopped the opposition UMP party from mounting a credible fight against the unpopular Socialist government, are set to go head-to-head over the next few years with their sights firmly set on the 2017 general election.
Francois Fillon, who was prime minister during Sarkozy’s five-year term, is also wading into the battle as he also vies for a chance to be the main opposition presidential candidate in 2017.
“I know that today the match has begun,” the 69-year-old Juppe told a programme broadcast on Europe 1 radio and on i-Tele television, just two days after Sarkozy ended months of speculation with a Facebook announcement he was returning to politics. “Some are trying to make people believe that I will not go through with this. Well I’m going to prove it. You will see in 2016 and 2017.”
Sarkozy, who inspires disdain and adoration in equal measure, will be standing for the UMP presidency in November.
He wasted no time in attacking potential rivals in the 2017 presidential race after announcing his return to French politics via Facebook.
In comments to French weekly Le Journal du Dimanche before a television interview scheduled for later, the former president said that he was starting “a long march”, having pledged to restore France’s world standing and revive its stagnant economy.
In a swipe at his rivals in the UMP party, Fillon and Juppe, as well as at current Socialist President Francois Hollande who beat him in the May 2012 election, Sarkozy said he was “overwhelmed” by the response to his comeback via a message on the social media website.
“Two-and-a-half million Internet users have already read my message,” he told the paper on Saturday in comments published yesterday. “Last night, we saw 300,000 French in the Americas read it, and I got 35,000 new friends in less than a day.”
But Sarkozy will have to explain to voters how he would reverse a relentless rise in French unemployment, having failed, like Hollande, to do so as president.
Hollande, whose popularity has sunk to a French post-war low of 13% according to polls this month, held a routine news conference on Thursday in which he promised he would work until the end of his term in 2017 to modernise France, revive economic growth and protect its generous social model.
Sarkozy, who as president raised the retirement age to 62 from 60, loosened the 35-hour work week and made overtime more attractive through tax tweaks, remains a divisive figure.
But he told Le Journal du Dimanche: “My audience on Facebook is twice that of Hollande’s press conference, and I’ve got more new friends in one day than the total for Juppe and Fillon combined.”
Fillon sought to project himself as a unifying force, saying on his Twitter account yesterday: “Today, the question is not to find out who can beat Francois Hollande. In theory, everyone ... the question is how to bring the French together ... I’m not about the cult of saviours, but the cult of ideas!” in a thinly-veiled allusion to Sarkozy.
Meanwhile Juppe, a one-time prime minister who served as defence and foreign minister under Sarkozy, has already said he will stand in the UMP’s presidential primaries in 2016, as has Fillon.
The battle for opposition supremacy comes at a time when France is mired in a deep economic and political crisis.
Sarkozy is expected to be crowned the head of his UMP party with little resistance in November.
But looking ahead to a possible presidential run in 2017, he has a much longer row to hoe.
Polls suggest Juppe is the favourite among the French even if Sarkozy remains the most popular within his own camp.
And a myriad of ongoing legal investigations that involve Sarkozy in one form or another are still lurking in the background.
He was charged in July with corruption and influence-peddling related to his alleged attempt to interfere in a judicial case.
There are also legal questions around the financing of his 2007 and 2012 campaigns that could come back to bite him.
