In France the Left means the Left -

Even if his boss has failed to see the danger, France’s Prime Minister Manuel Valls has slipped the leash attack-dog style to go for the throat of Nicolas Sarkozy, the most serious contender to replace France’s president Francois Hollande at next year’s election.

Nicolas Sarkozy was deposed as France’s president by Francois Hollande. Mr Sarkozy is not a good loser. He has seen his opportunity, writes our European Correspondent.

It is in the form of Mr Hollande’s seeming hesitation in coping with the new religious threat viewed by many French as the modern reincarnation of the nation’s sinister Fifth Column, wreaking destruction from within.

Mr Sarkozy announced his come-back in a book which he only ceased penning several days before it appeared in the bookshops last week.

In the book he announced his firm hand on the problem. No more shilly-shallying in the matter of coverall religious garb. No more immigration open-doors in the form of family re-grouping. No more fiery imams. And so on.

Mr Hollande meanwhile has been viewed as being distracted from the problem, even if he recognised it, by having to appease his own leftward-sprawling ruling constituency.

Their battle cry centres on the rights-of-man doctrine which takes the form of a turbo-charged political correctness at the expense of any larger focus on national or even individual security.

It is into this vacuum of discontent that Mr Sarkozy plunged. He has done so without any vague double talk. He has singled out the problem. He has defined the policies that he will use to solve it.

In contrast his main rival in the Republican Party (Conservative) primary the former prime minister Alain Juppe, presently mayor of Bordeaux, has been content to announce a generalised presidential policy based on nationwide “happiness.”

Mr Hollande meanwhile is facing a full scale revolt in his own Socialist Party which has taken the form of a platoon-sized field of internal rival candidates for his throne at the Elysee Palace.

Chief among these is his own former industries minister Arnaud Montebourg, a lawyer, and a Kennedyesque figure who is short on policy but long on the type of political glamour that French voters crave and have found absent during the Hollande tenure.

Mr Sarkozy’s drive to return to the Elysee rests on two formulas. The first is that he will plunder the votes of the National Front.. These will be the votes of those who are worried about the religious fanaticism threat. Yet who do not want to buy into the National Front’s full ticket.

Mr Sarkozy is also backed by the most powerful political machine in France centred on former president Jacques Chirac, revealed by all the polls to be the most popular living politician.

Mr Valls the Socialist Prime Minister, actually a scion of a prominent Spanish banking family, has understood all this. Wiry of build, he looks like the coach of a rather successful New Zealand rugger team. He has seen the other side’s star player and is tackling him, starting at his neck.

Mr Valls like all good coaches has seen his own side’s vulnerability. It is in its long tail doctrinal following. It is a tail that in the matter of the current emergency has been viewed as consistently wagging the dog.

English-speaking observers become instantly confused by this picture and for a simple reason.

Their mistake is to believe that France’s socialist parliamentarians are like their own. They believe that they teamed up with Labour Parties and the like just because they saw socialism as a more available, less competitive ladder. One which is easier and thus quicker to climb.

France’s vast and elitist Sciences Po (political science) educational industry ensures a constant flow of authentic hard-line political class inductees.

Even if they should waiver in their idealism this privileged cadre find themselves on their adult parliamentary journey constantly re-invigorated by the highly visible High Street manifestations of much earlier doctrinal struggles complete with festivals, icons, and stimulating fund-raising jaunts (see my photo).

From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk