Just a day after Hollande overtook him in the number of votes won in the first round of Sunday's presidential election, Sarkozy, the centre-right candidate, began to "woo" voters of the far-right National Front, whose representative Marine Le Pen won a solid third place.
"The word protectionism is not a heinous word," said Sarkozy in a speech he gave yesterday not far from Tours, southwest of Paris, according to AP.
In their first speeches after the first round, both Sarkozy and Hollande tried to attract far-right voters to their camps, but Hollande was less attacked in those attempts.
The French press commented that Sarkozy, not at all discreetly, "brought out the heavy artillery in an attempt to seduce the far right, while Hollande is "trying to convince National Front voters".
Hollande assessed that some citizens voted for Marine Le Pen because they have the impression that the system has abandoned them.
Both candidates warned of the spread of populism in Europe - what Sarkozy called a "crisis vote" of a people hurt by the consequences of the debt crisis, who feel abandoned in the globalized world.
Hollande won 28,6 percent of the vote on Sunday, while Sarkozy was trusted by 27,2 percent of voters, so both need the votes of the extreme right to cross the 50 percent threshold in the second round, which will be held on May 6.
Still, Sarkozy has more reason to win over the far-right as Hollande is expected to win over many supporters of far-left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon, who won 11 percent of the vote on Sunday, and nine percent of French who voted for centrist candidate Francois are also in the running. Bajru.
"I will immediately address the voters who do not blindly follow the ideas of the National Front, and by that I mean above all the obsession with immigration, but who, above all, express social anger," the socialist candidate pointed out.
According to the French press, Hollande said that he wanted to address left-wing voters first because he did not want to make a mistake and "forget about his own while speaking to others", but he still emphasized that he was addressing all French people.
A fifth of the French voted for Le Pen
The success of the far-right candidate, who won almost 18 percent of the vote - which means that one fifth of the French voted for her - is actually the biggest surprise in the first round of voting, according to AP.
Marine Le Pen and her anti-immigrant party want to take France out of the eurozone, restore border controls, crack down on immigrants and stop what she calls the Islamization of France.
Sarkozy is trying with all his might not to become the first French head of state not to win a second term since Valéry Giscard d'Estaing lost to socialist François Mitterrand in 1981.
EU officials in Brussels warned Sarkozy not to invest too much in the extreme right and sacrifice the hard-won European unity built on the ashes of World War II, bearing in mind that the values of the far right are fundamentally opposed to the ideals that led to the building of Europe.
Gaining supporters for Marine Le Pen is quite a difficult task, since she has previously said that she will not instruct her followers on how to vote in the second round.
If Hollande wins the decisive round, he will become the first socialist president of France since François Mitterrand left office in 1995.
According to polls conducted on Sunday evening, Hollande, as previously predicted, will probably surpass Sarkozy by ten points on May 6, according to AP.
Hollande's victory in the first round worried the financial markets because of his promises to increase government spending, reduce huge French debts, stimulate economic growth and unite the French after Sarkozy's mandate, and he is also in favor of imposing a 75 percent tax on the rich.
Sarkozy, meanwhile, is doing his best not to become the first French head of state to fail to win a second term since Valery Giscard d'Estaing lost to socialist François Mitterrand in 1981.
Whatever the outcome of the decisive election on May 6, the decision of French voters will affect the rest of the 27-member EU, considering that France is the second largest economic country in the EU after Germany, reminds AP.
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