Strauss-Kahn trouble fails to boost Sarkozy

French President Nicolas Sarkozy's re-election hopes have failed to improve despite the sex scandal that felled his main challenger Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a new poll showed Sunday.

Published: 13 June 2011 17:29 CEST

The IFOP poll published in the weekly Journal du Dimanche showed Sarkozy winning 22 percent of first-round voting intentions, trailing behind the leading opposition Socialist contender Francois Hollande with 26 percent.

Until mid-May, the favourite to win the 2012 French election was Dominique Strauss-Kahn, known as DSK, the Socialist who led the IMF until New York police arrested him on sexual assault and attempted rape charges.

Sunday’s poll showed that Hollande, a former leader of the Socialist Party, had gained three points since IFOP’s last survey and moved firmly into the lead.

It showed the right-wing president was still facing a threat from Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front party.

Le Pen would score 21 percent to Sarkozy’s 22 in the first round of voting if Hollande runs for the Socialists, and would beat him 22 percent to 21.5 if Socialist leader Martine Aubry ran instead of Hollande, the poll showed.

“Although the DSK affair has flummoxed the public and sparked a burst of feminism, the French do not seem to have decided, at least for now, to offer Nicolas Sarkozy a second presidential term,” the newspaper wrote.

France’s former president Jacques Chirac, who was Sarkozy’s mentor before falling out with him, surprised journalists on Saturday by saying he would vote for Hollande. He later insisted he was joking.

“I don’t believe in the model… which would involve finding third countries on the African continent or elsewhere where we’d send people who arrive on our soil illegally, who don’t come from these countries,” Macron said.

“We’re creating a geopolitics of cynicism which betrays our values and will build new dependencies, and which will prove completely ineffective,” he added in a wide-ranging speech on the future of the European Union at Paris’ Sorbonne University.

British MPs on Tuesday passed a law providing for undocumented asylum seekers to be sent to Rwanda, where their asylum claims would be processed and where they would stay if the claims succeed.

The law is a flagship policy for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government, which badly lags the opposition Labour party in the polls with an election expected within months.

Britain pays Paris to support policing of France’s northern coast, aimed at preventing migrants from setting off for perilous crossings in small boats.

Five people, including one child, were killed in an attempted crossing Tuesday, bringing the toll on the route so far this year to 15 – already higher than the 12 deaths in 2023.

But Macron had warm words for London when he praised the two NATO allies’ bilateral military cooperation, which endured through the contentious years of Britain’s departure from the EU.

“The British are deep natural allies (for France) and the treaties that bind us together… lay a solid foundation,” he said.

“We have to follow them up and strengthen them, because Brexit has not affected this relationship,” Macron added.

The president also said France should seek similar “partnerships” with fellow EU members.