PARIS, Sept 3: French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen mocked the two favourites to win next year’s presidential election, likening them on Sunday to an opening act and saying they would not even make the run-off.

Polls suggest conservative frontrunner Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist Segolene Royal are likely to fight it out for the presidency in the second round of next spring’s election.

But in a speech to supporters of his National Front party, Le Pen, who stunned France by making it to the run-off of the 2002 election, said neither would get that far but he would.

“They are media bubbles. And I am more or less certain, convinced anyway, that neither one nor the other will be in the second round of the presidential elections,” Le Pen said in a speech that was short on campaign pledges.

He added that they were ‘American stars, who sing while the audience get to their seats, while the late arrivals sit down, before the real stars arrive’.

Le Pen, 78, is due to stand trial later this month for saying the Nazi occupation of France during World War Two was not ‘particularly inhumane’.

He lost the 2002 presidential run-off to Jacques Chirac, who won 82 per cent of the vote.

Le Pen described Royal as a Socialist ‘gadget’ but saved most of his scorn for Interior Minister Sarkozy, whose tough law-and-order stance has been seen by some as an effort to win over National Front voters.

Sarkozy, who addressed supporters of his Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party earlier on Sunday, has called for a ‘clean break’ with past policies.

Le Pen dismissed that as hypocrisy.

“Apart from president of the republic, which he hopes to become, and prime minister, which would in a way be a substitute post, he has held every post of the republic possible and imaginable,” Le Pen said.—Reuters