PARIS—French President Nicolas Sarkozy is closing the gap with front-runner Socialist candidate François Hollande and could get the highest share of votes in the first round of the country’s presidential elections in five weeks’ time, polls show Sunday.
A poll of 962 people by survey institute LH2 on March 16 and 17 showed Mr. Sarkozy picking up 27.5% of the vote in the first round, 4.5 percentage points higher than a comparable poll from the beginning of the month. Mr. Hollande is still ahead in the first round with 30.5%, an unchanged score.
A poll by Ifop published in French Sunday paper Le Journal du Dimanche also showed Mr. Sarkozy getting 27.5% in the first round, but Mr. Hollande falling behind with 27%.
Mr. Sarkozy would still lose in the head-to-head second round, according to both polls. But the margin has fallen to 10 percentage points from 16 in the LH2 survey, and was only eight percentage points in the Ifop poll.
The trend of Mr. Sarkozy narrowing the gap confirms other polls over the last week, following an intensification of the president’s campaign with multiple television appearances. Mr. Sarkozy has gone fishing for votes from far-right candidate Marine Le Pen by proposing protectionist measures and threatening to strengthen controls at France’s borders.
However, the media blitz may not be sustainable. On Tuesday, the election campaign moves into a new phase as election rules come into force to ensure candidates have equal speaking time in the media.
«This new situation will avoid the effects of ‘media bubbles’ seen sometimes in the surveys,» LH2’s Adelaide Zulfikarpasic said. Limited speaking time will be a good test of whether Mr. Sarkozy can sustain the positive trend, she said.
The polls also confirmed the rising popularity of Jean-Luc Melenchon, who campaigns further to the left than Mr. Hollande. Mr. Melenchon would get 11% of votes in the first round, a 2.5 percentage-point improvement from the last LH2 poll. He would also score 11% according to the Ifop poll.
Polls show Melenchon voters would overwhelmingly transfer their votes to Mr. Hollande in the second round of voting. But losing voters on the left in the first round would weaken Mr. Hollande.
The tightening of the race shown by the polls doesn’t mean more people will turn out to vote. The Ifop poll shows only 71% of those eligible would vote if the election were held now, while turnout in the first round in 2007 reached 84%.
On Saturday, Mr. Hollande said that—if elected in May—he will press the European Union to issue new debt and inject fresh money in a wide-ranging plan aimed at boosting the Continent’s economic growth.
Mr. Hollande, who spoke to leftist EU leaders gathered in Paris for a two-day seminar, said the bloc should channel the funds to develop new energy projects, to boost research and universities, and to enact a swiping urban renewal.
The plan, Mr. Hollande said, would balance out the austerity measures that several EU countries have adopted to rein in their budget deficits.
«We must mobilize additional tools to allow for growth and employment,» the Socialist candidate said. «No one can imagine that if growth isn’t there, the prescriptions of this treaty can be respected.»
The fiscal pact, which calls for national budgets to be balanced or in surplus, was negotiated by EU leaders in December and signed by 25 of the EU’s 27 member states in March, to quell market anxiety over a sovereign-debt crisis that has been sweeping the continent for close to two years.
Still, opponents have argued that the German-inspired fiscal orthodoxy prescribed by the treaty will ignite a downward spiral, with austerity causing economies and—in turn—tax receipts to shrink and government deficits to widen.
Mr. Hollande, who has said he will renegotiate the treaty, has drawn ire and suspicion from the majority of the EU’s conservative governments that have signed the pact. Influential German magazine Der Spiegel recently claimed conservative leaders in Berlin, London and Madrid, as well as Italy’s technocratic prime minister, had agreed to keep their doors closed to Mr. Hollande before the French elections as they throw their weight behind Mr. Sarkozy.
Shunned by conservative leaders, Mr. Hollande has turned to the chiefs of the bloc’s leftist parties to break his international isolation and gather support for his campaign.
Little over a month ahead of the first round of the presidential elections, the socialist leaders from Italy and Germany, as well as Belgian Prime Minister Elio Di Rupo, joined the Socialist candidate for a conference in Paris, throwing their weight behind Mr. Hollande’s proposal.
«We want to cut debt, but that’s only made possible by growth,» said Sigmar Gabriel, head of Germany’s Social Democrats. «The idea of project bonds for specific European investment projects is a useful and necessary step forward.»
The idea of adopting new measures to boost economic growth and fight high youth unemployment has been gathering steam in some corners of the 27-member bloc, as well as among EU officials in Brussels.
Earlier this week, Mr. Hollande got the backing of Robert Fico, whose Smer-Social Democratic party last week won elections in Slovakia. «Fiscal consolidation based solely on austerity will lead to higher inflation, higher unemployment and that’s not a good way for [economic] policy making,» Mr. Fico said.
Besides euro-zone bonds, Mr. Hollande said funds will be coming from new European Investment Bank issuances, as well as from the income generated by a financial-transaction tax that would be levied on all exchanges and all derivative products. Unused EU structural funds, the candidate said, should be unfrozen and employed.
Mr. Hollande also called for changes to the European Central Bank’s mandate to include economic growth, now that the bank has succeeded in establishing price stability and taming prices. «We’ll do everything we can to make the central bank’s mandate evolve,» Mr. Hollande told a leftist crowd gathered in the Cirque d’Hiver.
Source: http://online.wsj.com