PARIS: It’s a good time to be a policeman in France. Back pay, overtime, rubber bullets — all will come tumbling from the pockets of the man who has been dubbed the bulldog of the French right, — home affairs and internal security minister Nicolas Sarkozy.

Heading into the deciding second round of the parliamentary elections on Sunday, France’s “premier flic” (number one cop) is the hardline standard-bearer of President Jacques Chirac’s resurgent centre-right, which opinion polls on Friday confirmed was about to capture 53 per cent of the vote and up to 415 seats in the 577-seat parliament.

His job is to bury the National Front by seizing the issues of immigration and law and order, which made the far right loom so large on the European stage. Candidates with dubious National Front friends have been ruthlessly purged, and the bulldog has been doing all the snapping.

Sarkozy spent his first night as a minister in a police car in a frontline suburb, making sure that the television crews were in tow. Then he popped up in Sangatte, vowing to close the refugee camp.

In rapid succession he has promised rubber bullets to policemen on the beat, announced the formation of 28 rapid reaction squads to smash organized crime, and begun pay negotiations with the police unions.

But Sarkozy is only half of Chirac’s successful two-pronged strategy for putting the centre-right back in the centre of the political stage.

The other is the amiable provincial senator Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the inoffensive moderate who was made prime minister.

If the mild-mannered Raffarin played the good cop, the acerbic Sarkozy played the bad one. The tactics have worked wonders. In the first round of voting last Sunday, Sarkozy won 66 per cent of the vote in his constituency, becoming France’s most popular parliamentary deputy overnight, while the centre-right set itself up for a landslide victory.

He has been accused of “Le Penizing” the centre-right by playing on the electorate’s fear of crime and violence — a theme exploited by the National Front’s leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen. It is a claim his closest supporters deny.

Louis-Charles Barry, a Sarkozy confidant who will stand in for him as mayor of the leafy Paris suburb of Neuilly, said that “He is only doing the same nationally as we’ve been doing in Neuilly. But with such a policy we can discourage people from voting for the National Front.”

The twin appointments of Raffarin and Sarkozy may be the masterstroke of Chirac’s campaign. The president’s problem, however, is that despite the formation of his umbrella Union for a Presidential Majority (UMP), the centre-right remains as divided and fractious as ever.

The man who bolted the UMP together is Sarkozy’s greatest rival, Alain Juppe, a former prime minister who is tipped to lead the party and who harbours presidential ambitions. It was Juppe who stopped Sarkozy being appointed prime minister, the traditional springboard for the presidency.

It took Sarkozy a long time to worm his way back into the president’s favour after he ditched Chirac in 1995 in favour of a rival RPR candidate for the presidency, Edouard Balladur.

Despite the display of unity, the centre-right remains a battlefield for personal rivalries. Having finally achieved the prize of a rightwing president dutifully supported by a majority in parliament, one of the first challenges facing it will be to resist the temptation to tear itself apart. — Dawn / The Guardian News Service.