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PARIS: French President Nicolas Sarkozy swung further to the right on Thursday, proposing a new licence to shoot for police pursuing suspects, in an increasingly frantic quest to woo far-right National Front voters before a decisive election runoff.
A new rise in unemployment to the highest level since September 1999 dealt another blow to the conservative Sarkozy's effort to catch up with Socialist frontrunner Francois Hollande before the May 6 second round of the presidential election.
Sarkozy is on course to become the first French president to lose a bid for re-election in more than 30 years, in part because of the sputtering economy. The number of jobless rose for the 11th straight month in March to 2.88 million, up 7.2 percent in a year.
The latest opinion polls, published 10 days before the decisive ballot, suggested Sarkozy's strategy of courting the 6.4 million electors who voted for far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in last Sunday's first round was making scant impact.
Le Pen has promised to spell out her view at the National Front's traditional “Joan of Arc” rally on May 1, and she urged Sarkozy to make his position clearer concerning parliamentary polls in June.
Building on her record support, the National Front hopes to win its first seats in parliament since 1986, when an experiment with proportional representation gave it 35 deputies.
“In a runoff between the National Front and a Socialist, would the UMP and the president prefer to have one of my deputies or a Socialist elected?” Le Pen asked, referring to Sarkozy's centre-right Union for a Popular Movement party.
“I still don't have an answer to that question. I'm waiting,” she said, when asked whom she would endorse. “How I express myself will depend on the response.”
