French elections offer Sarkozy's moment of truth

France's Nicolas Sarkozy faces a tough fight Sunday against nine challengers in presidential elections awash in fear and anger.

This has been a race of negative emotion and nostalgia for a more protected past: One of the world's top tourist destinations and biggest economies, France is feeling down about its debts, its immigrants, its stagnant paychecks and, above all, its future.

To voters, the conservative Sarkozy gets much of the blame. While he's likely to make it past Sunday's first-round voting and into the decisive second round May 6, polls show his support waning.

They predict another man will trounce Sarkozy in the runoff and take over the Elyse Palace: Socialist Party candidate Franois Hollande.

Under a quirk of French electoral rules, balloting got under way Saturday in France's embassies and overseas holdings, starting in the tiny islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, just south of Newfoundland. Campaigning and the release of poll data have been suspended until the first-round results come in Sunday evening.

Surprises may await, like a surge by the anti-immigrant far right or the utopian far left. How votes for the other myriad candidates shake out Sunday will weigh heavily on the remainder of the campaign, on the makeup of the future government and on parliamentary elections in June.

And that will weigh on the fate of France, and on a struggling Europe in which it plays a central role.

Fear of free market

Hollande, in his Mr. Nice Guy kind of way, has tapped into a fear of the free market that has always held more sway in France than almost anywhere in the West, and has enjoyed a resurgence in the era of Occupy Wall Street and anti-banker backlash.

He wants to tax high-income earners at 75 per cent and reconsider a hard-won European fiscal treaty meant to stem the continent's debt crisis. He says it's too focused on cost-cutting and hurts ordinary folks.

Yet Hollande is just one of five leftists in Sunday's race and he's the most moderate and pragmatic of the bunch. If fiery rival Jean-Luc Mlenchon, with his red neck-scarves and rallies thick with communist red flags, scores strongly, he and his voters will press Hollande to make his own policies even more progressive.

Speaking to international reporters Friday, Mlenchon who wants to tax the ultra-rich at 100 per cent discussed how international finance can be "parasitic." He criticized U.S. hegemony and military might, looking instead to China for partnership.

Islamophobia

On the other side of the spectrum, the campaign fear-mongering has a different focus: France's No. 2 religion.

Right-wing extremist candidate Marine Le Pen rails against the "Islamization" of France and made a stink about the widespread availability of halal meat and Muslims praying on sidewalks for lack of mosque space.

The rhetoric horrifies many voters and stigmatizes France's estimated five million Muslims Western Europe's largest Muslim population. But it's hit a nerve among many French, especially after a suspected gunman killed Jewish schoolchildren and paratroopers in the name of radical Islam in a rampage last month.

More than anything else, though, this French election campaign is a referendum on the man currently in charge.

Sarkozy inspired voters in 2007 with pledges to break with the past and make France a more dynamic economy. But after an initial wave of reforms, his momentum fizzled. His stormy personal life got in the way. He divorced months into office, then quickly married former supermodel Carla Bruni, and became seen as a bling-bling president more concerned with pleasing his super-rich friends than serving the public.

Then France ran into its worst recession since the Second World War.

Hollande, despite a bland persona and few eye-catching campaign ideas, has been more popular than Sarkozy for months. The last polls before the election, released Friday, show Sarkozy slipping a few points behind Hollande in the first round, and a crushing 10 to 15 points away from victory in the runoff.