Sarkozy and Hollande go toe to toe on TV

President Nicolas Sarkozy pinned his dwindling hopes of re-election in an all-out verbal assault on his Socialist rival Francois Hollande last night (Wednesday), as the rivals traded blows in a tense televised debate.

An estimated 20 million French - almost a third of the population - were glued to their screens to see whether Sarkozy would make good his pledge to "atomise" the Socialist front-runner.

Gaining ground on Hollande in the polls but with a seven-point deficit, Sarkozy's last hope of snatching an improbable victory was a "knock out" verbal punch in the two-and-a-half-hour debate. "Sarkozy needs to swing 1.5 million people to his side. It won't be easy, but that doesn't mean it's impossible," said Bernard Sananes, the head of the CSA polling institute.

But the incumbent had to hold fire after Hollande was chosen to open the debate and said he would be a president of justice, bringing the French together.

Sarkozy dismissed his rival's introduction. "We are facing not a crisis, but crises. Bringing people together is very nice, but one must also have acts," he said.

The blows rained down after Hollande said: "You think for five years you have brought the French together and not divided them, but I don't pit public and private sector workers against each other."

Sarkozy responded by stating that none of his reforms had provoked violence.

"If there has been no violence in the past five years, it's down to French society," said Hollande.

Sarkozy accused Hollande of standing by when Left-wing media branded him a fascist: "When I was compared to Franco, Laval, Petain, even Hitler, you didn't say a word."

"You will have trouble passing yourself off as a victim," Hollande responded.

The debate moved on to the economy, with Hollande accusing the president of bringing unemployment to a 12-year high.

"Unemployment has gone up half as much as the rest of Europe bar Germany," Sarkozy responded.

"With you it's simple, it's never your fault," said Hollande.

Sarkozy was expected to depict his rival as a dangerous Left-winger whose archaic tax-and-spend policies would spell disaster for the already struggling French economy.

The stakes were high for Sarkozy, the most unpopular president to run for re-election and the first in modern history to lose a first-round vote to a challenger. Defeat on Sunday would make him the first president since Valery Giscard d'Estaing in 1981 to fail to win re-election.

Every detail was meticulously planned and negotiated between the rival camps, right down to the temperature of the TV studio - between 66F and 68F. Each candidate had his own air-conditioning system and a height-adjustable chair.

Twenty TV cameras scrutinised their every move as they sat eight feet apart across a table.

Both agreed there should be no cutaways of one candidate listening while the other spoke.

Presidential debates can be game changers but only in a close race. Giscard d'Estaing's claim that "you don't have the monopoly of the heart" is said to have tilted the election in his favour against Francois Mitterrand in 1974. "That line lost me 350,000 votes," Mitterrand is said to have told him.

But the best put-down to date was in 1988 when Jacques Chirac, then Mitterrand's prime minister, told his rival: "Tonight you are not the president and I'm not the prime minister. We are two equal candidates...You will thus allow me to call you Mitterrand."

"But you are totally right, Prime Minister," came Mitterrand's withering reply.