Presidential race heats up as Sarkozy hails manifesto

France’s election race will pick up pace next week after being thrown off course by an Islamist gunman, with Nicolas Sarkozy unveiling his manifesto and opponents set to tear it apart.

Mohamed Merah’s killings of three soldiers, a rabbi and three Jewish children in the worst terrorist attacks in France since the 1990 prompted presidential candidates to suspend campaigning for several days from Mar 19 and the nation is only just emerging from a distressed daze.

Merah, a 23-year-old Frenchman who said he had links to al Qaida, was buried near Toulouse yesterday.

With only three weeks to go before the Apr 22 first-round vote, Sarkozy says he is ready to unveil a fully-fledged manifesto to compete with a weighty 60-point plan presented by Socialist frontrunner Francois Hollande in January.

“You’ll have a global project, with financing, next week,” Sarkozy said.

The manifesto will provide bait to Hollande to come back on the offensive after 10 days of treading water, sidelined as Sarkozy took command over the shooting crisis.

On launching his campaign last month, Sarkozy bet that his best chance of overcoming dismal popularity ratings and a strong desire for change was to announce his ideas one-by-one on TV and radio, or campaign speeches, for maximum impact.

“As soon as you unveil an idea, it immediately sounds worn out,” Sarkozy said, explaining his tactic.

Having vowed to halve legal immigration, deport more illegal immigrants, tax fiscal exiles and hold policy referendums, Sarkozy said it was finally time for a full manifesto complete with financial incomings and outgoings. He is expected to launch one before he departs for a trip to the French Indian Ocean island of Reunion on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, French police yesterday detained 19 people in a crackdown on suspected Islamist extremists in cities around the country.

Sarkozy promised more raids to come, but gave no details about the reasons for the arrests or what the detainees were suspected of.

“It’s in connection with a form of Islamist radicalism,” he said.

“There will be other operations that will continue and that will allow us to expel from our national territory a certain number of people who have no reason to be here.”

French Muslims have worried about a backlash after Merah’s attacks, and French leaders have urged the public not to equate Islam with terrorism.

But concerns about radical Islam are high, and the government banned a string of international Muslim clerics from entering France for a conference of a fundamentalist Islamic group.