Sarkozy Puts the Boot in As Chirac Falters

It is not much fun being Jacques Chirac now. Deeply unpopular at home, his only chance of adulation will come this week when his plane lands in Madagascar for a two-day state visit. There, at least, he will be treated with the respect befitting a head of state.

It will be a brief sojourn, however, and tinged with worry over what his troublesome Interior Minister - and fast-emerging nemesis - Nicolas Sarkozy will be getting up to at home. For Sarkozy has been undermining Chirac's presidential gravitas.

At the weekly Council of Ministers' meeting on Friday the President reportedly gave Sarkozy a stinging dressing-down following his openly stated ambition to 'lead the boss to the exit' ahead of the 2007 presidential election.

The previous day Sarkozy had broken a political taboo by stealing the President's thunder on Bastille Day. The Elysée Palace garden party and the televised speech that goes with it was to have been 72-year-old Chirac's chance to recover from recent setbacks such as the defeat of Paris's Olympic Games bid, his cuisine gaffes, his failure to secure the next EU budget, the 'non' vote on the European constitution and a poll suggesting 48 per cent of voters want him to retire early.

But as Chirac lauded 'the genius' of the French social model and took cheap shots at Tony Blair, Sarkozy, 50, was hosting his own 'poor man's garden party' next door. Sarkozy's event was, by all accounts, much more fun, with a jazz band playing the Mission Impossible theme tune and a medley of James Bond film tracks.

As ever, the Interior Minister struck a chord. 'I'm not going to quietly mend the locks at Versailles while a revolt is brewing in France,' he said, a reference to Louis XVI's dithering before the French Revolution. 'As a result of 20 years of standing still, of waffle, avoiding reality and ducking challenges, France is grumbling. I'm trying to listen.'

This marked the peak for Sarkozy in a week when he was on quotable top form.

At a press breakfast in Paris at the beginning of the week, he ridiculed the Bastille Day ritual, saying: 'French people are thinking of their holidays anyway.' He poked fun at Chirac's advancing age, his decade as President and his interest in sumo wrestling. Sarkozy ended the week by addressing his favourite theme - immigration - with a pledge to expel radical Islamic preachers.

These are just the latest slights by the Interior Minister, who has accentuated Chirac's unpopularity since he was re-elected in 2002 by voters choosing between him and National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Sarkozy, by contrast, is the most popular politician in France. Yet it remains to be seen whether he will take pole position for the 2007 race. Henri Cuq, a leading Chirac loyalist, said he was campaigning too soon. 'He who tries to weaken the President weakens himself,' he said.