Nicolas Sarkozy declares candidacy for French presidential election

22:52, 22 August 2016

LONDON. KAZINFORM Nicolas Sarkozy has announced he will seek his party's nomination to stand in next year's French presidential election.

The rightwinger, who was nicknamed “the hyper-president” for his frenetic term in power from 2007 to 2012, had made no secret of his ambition to reconquer the Elysée palace and avenge his 2012 defeat by the Socialist François Hollande.

After weeks of suspense in which he grabbed media headlines by presenting an increasingly hardline stance on national identity and the place of Islam in France, Sarkozy launched his campaign with an announcement on social media and a link to the first chapter of a book, Everything for France, which he will publish this week.

“The next five years will be filled with danger but also with hope,” he wrote. He listed what he said were the five major challenges facing France, including defending French identity, restoring lost competitiveness and enforcing state authority.

Sarkozy said France’s “top battle” was over how “to defend our lifestyle without being tempted to cut ourselves off from the rest of the world.”

In his fight to win his party’s nomination, Sarkozy, 61, is putting forward a platform of policies that veer even further to the far right than in 2012, when he set out to win over voters from Marine Le Pen’s Front National.

He wants to ban the Muslim headscarf from universities and public companies, limit the French nationality rights of children born to foreign parents, and ban pork-free options in school canteens, meaning Muslim and Jewish children would no longer be offered a substitute meal.

He has also scoffed at what he called “legal niceties” in the fight against terrorism, prompting the left to warn that his treatment of suspected jihadis could be akin to that of Guantánamo Bay.

For the first time, the French right and centre is holding an open contest to choose its presidential candidate. Anyone on the electoral register can vote if they pay €2 and sign a pledge saying they adhere to “the values of the right and centre”. Up to three or four million people could turn out to vote in the two-round ballot on 20 and 27 November.