Sarkozy foe looks to polls for revenge

Dominique de Villepin. Photo / Ap

Under French tradition, Dominique de Villepin should be a busted politician, a dead man walking.

He was accused of smearing President Nicolas Sarkozy - who warned of hanging the plotter "from a butcher's hook" - and faced trial in a country where judicial independence cannot be taken for granted.

But in the case of Villepin, tradition is no guide.

Less than two months after his acquittal, France's former Premier and Foreign Minister is on the comeback trail.

Rather like his hero Napoleon after the escape from Elba, Villepin is aiming for the top. His plan: to joust with Sarkozy in the next election.

"On Thursday and in the following weeks, Dominique de Villepin will lay a new project before the French people, an alternative for 2012," Francois Goulard, an ally who is an MP in the governing Union for a Popular Majority (UMP), said as Sarkozy reshuffled his government.

Villepin, 56, plans to start a new party, built on Club Villepin, a booster group claiming 6000 supporters.

His pitch aims at conservative traditionalists worried by an erosion of national sovereignty and eager for an aloof, avuncular president after the motor-mouth, hyperactive Sarkozy.

For years, Villepin worked in the shadows as the suave, silver-maned lieutenant to Sarkozy's predecessor, Jacques Chirac.

In 2002, he became Foreign Minister, earning global prominence for refusing to join the Iraq War. In 2004, he became Interior Minister and a year later, Prime Minister.

Behind the scenes, the struggle with Sarkozy - whom the tall Villepin derided as "the dwarf" - scaled brutal heights.

The "Clearstream" banking smear scandal brought him low and enabled Sarkozy, then Interior Minister, to cast himself as victim and outsider, seizing the party and eventually the presidency.

Now the tables have turned. Villepin, posing at his trial as the victim of Sarkozy, has been politically reborn. He has been on a "listening" tour to solicit opinion on France's future.

Critics note Villepin has only ever been appointed and never held elected office. Some point to brashness, narcissism and smugness, hallmarks of a top-school technocrat with no love of the masses. Nor is he free of legal shackles, for an appeal is pending.

Even so, there is no better time to challenge Sarkozy, battered in regional elections and struggling to head off party defections.

Opinion polls give the former Premier up to 10 per cent of the vote - enough under the two-round election system for Villepin to anoint Sarkozy for a second term ... or destroy him.