KEY POINTS:
PARIS - Nicolas Sarkozy appears to have shored up his claim on Sunday's vote for the presidency after a testy TV debate with rival Segolene Royal.
After the show wound up, the conservative former Interior Minister seemed to have kept his advantage over Socialist Royal. Sarkozy has had
the lead in 141 out of 145 opinion polls conducted since mid-January.
In a faceoff in which both were as primed as boxers gearing for the world crown, Sarkozy kept under tight control his sharp tongue, short temper and ambitiousness - the characteristics seen as most likely to cost him victory.
Calm, smiling, he jabbed at Royal with figures and soundbites on opening up France's 35-hour working week, lowering payroll taxes, reforming a pension scheme threatened by early retirement and demographic change, and restricting immigration flows. "She still thinks that you have to share out work like pieces of a cake. Not a single other country in the world accepts this reasoning, which is a monumental mistake."
Royal frequently interrupted Sarkozy's flow in an apparent strategy to unsettle him, and chose to fight in the areas of welfare, social solidarity and gender, pitching especially to women. With competence and experience her own Achilles heel, she dodged tax, costs and technical details.
She vowed to create 500,000 youth jobs, beef up schools and hospitals and improve pensions. But she found herself badly challenged on several points involving competence, including her knowledge about France's nuclear power programme and her assertion that under the present conservative Government, thousands of teaching jobs had been scrapped.
She did well, though, in a blaze of genuine anger at Sarkozy across the 2m-wide table when he promised he would require schools to give places to all handicapped children - a scheme launched years ago by the Socialists yet scrapped, she said, under the conservatives.
Royal accused Sarkozy of "the height of political immorality" by exploiting the needs of the handicapped for political gain, prompting him to rebutt: "Calm down and stop wagging your finger. Anyone who wants to be president has to be calm."
"No, I won't calm down, I feel revulsion because of the lies," said Royal. Aiming at Sarkozy's suave demeanour, she added tartly: "I have not lost my ability to feel revulsion ... I will still feel this anger when I am president." Sarkozy sniggered: "Well, that's going to be fun."
ROYAL
'For now I don't think Turkey should be part of the EU, but this may change. It is very dangerous to slam the door in the face of an entire country.'
'I will be the president of what works.'
'Two days ago a female police officer was raped, five years ago, exactly the same thing happened. What did you do for five years? For five years, you had all the power.'
'You are in part responsible for the situation in which France finds itself today.'
SARKOZY
'I will focus on results and take responsibility.'
'The 35-hour week was a catastrophe for the economy. People who want to work more should be allowed.'
'You jump off the rails very easily. To be president ... one must be calm ... I don't know why Mme Royal has lost her calm.'
'I was Interior Minister for four years. I found a catastrophic situation which [explained] the defeat of your friends in the government.'