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Sarkozy's bitterest enemy launches rival party
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Sarkozy's bitterest enemy launches rival party
AFP - Friday, March 26
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French former Prime minister Dominique de Villepin gives a press conference at the Press Club in Paris. French President Nicolas Sarkozy's bitterest rival Villepin mounted a challenge from within the governing right Thursday, creating a new party with an eye on the 2012 presidential vote.
PARIS (AFP) - – French President Nicolas Sarkozy's bitterest rival Dominique de Villepin mounted a challenge from within the governing right Thursday, creating a new party with an eye on the 2012 presidential vote.
The move by the former prime minister adds to mounting pressure on the president, whose party was humiliated by the Socialists and their left-wing allies in regional elections at the weekend.
Villepin was a ministerial colleague of Sarkozy but they fell out over who would succeed former president Jacques Chirac amid lawsuits and dirty tricks allegations.
Villepin, who was preferred by Chirac but has never held elected office, hinted Thursday he would challenge Sarkozy in the 2012 presidential race as widely expected.
"I have decided to create a political movement, a free and independent movement, open to everyone, which is above divisions and can unite all good intentions," Villepin told a press conference.
He said he was looking to shake up the political scene "over the next two years," and "to defend our ideas and our plans when the time comes."
He declined to confirm or rule out a possible run for the presidency in 2012, saying: "I am not here to fight for my personal ambitions. I am here to fight for a vision, a plan, and political convictions."
Without naming Sarkozy or his governing UMP party, he described himself as "uneasy with the politics practised today by the majority," and bemoaned what he called a "failure of strategy and of policy" by France's leaders.
He appeared to cast himself as part of a right-wing patriotic tradition by saying he would officially launch the party on June 19, some 70 years after the call for resistance from wartime leader in exile, Charles de Gaulle.
Villepin promised a "change of policy" in dealing with the economic crisis that has driven unemployment in France to 10 percent, its highest level in a decade.
Laurent Bouvet, a politics expert at Nice University, questioned whether Villepin would have the clout to seriously challenge Sarkozy and his power base.
He said Villepin had only a handful of backers in parliament and that while his movement claimed several thousand supporters it also needed numerous elected representatives to endorse a presidential run.
"I don't think Dominique de Villepin's initiative will cause a major transformation of politics, even on the right. It will be very limited," Bouvet told AFP.
Villepin is a member of the UMP and both he and Sarkozy served as ministers under Chirac, but they clashed spectacularly in the fight to succeed him.
Sarkozy alleged that Villepin had sought to smear him by linking his name to a graft inquiry in order to derail his 2007 presidential bid.
Although Villepin was acquitted in January of a first charge of conspiracy to slander in the case, state prosecutors appealed and he will face a second trial, potentially disrupting any shot at the presidency in 2012.
A career diplomat, Villepin served as prime minister between 2005 and 2007.
But it was in February 2003, as foreign minister, that he made an impact on the international stage with his speech at the United Nations Security Council opposing the Iraq war.
His announcement on Thursday came at a moment of unprecedented vulnerability for Sarkozy, whose UMP was left in charge of only one of the 22 regions covering mainland France and Corsica in Sunday's elections.
Many UMP members blame him for Sunday's election defeat, but several said Villepin's plan was not helping the right wing.
"Now is not the time to be worsening the right's problems," complained UMP deputy Claude Goasguen. "It has enough already."
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