Personalities of the year

The party leadership put Copé, 46, a frequent Sarkozy critic, in the front line to be the next UMP candidate for the presidency, most probably in the 2017 election.

But it was in more junior political leagues that personalities emerged with the potential to set the agenda for the vote before that, in just 16 months in May 2012, in which Sarkozy’s re-election for a second and final term is anything but a foregone conclusion. It was they who were getting all the media attention, somewhat eclipsing Copé’s moment of glory.

Like father like...
Chief among them was Marine Le Pen, 42, positioning herself to take over from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder and president of the far-right, anti-immigration National Front. In a smooth performance in a leading political programme on prime-time television, the younger Le Pen established herself as every bit a master of the French language and repartee as her 82-year-old father. And, like her father, she dropped a word to prompt outrage from the establishment, likening Muslims publicly praying in streets in France to an “occupation.”

This was immediately interpreted as a reference to the German occupation of France during World War II, with its deportations of Jews and Gypsies to concentration camps, putting practising Muslims of Arab and African immigrant stock on a par with the Nazi oppressor.

It kept Marine Le Pen on the front pages in the succeeding weeks, as the National Front prepared to choose its new leader.

Away from the centre
The other side of the political spectrum has an anti-establishment bête noire in the shape of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, 59, a senator who was a junior minister from 2000 to 2002 for two years in the government of Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin.

Mélenchon slammed the door on the Socialist Party in 2008, accusing it of being too close to the centre, and now leads the Parti de Gauche which is encroaching on the turf of the rest of the far left, from the Trotskyites to the Communists. Mélenchon is especially virulent in his opposition to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the director general of the International Monetary Fund and a former finance minister who is seen as the Socialist best placed to defeat Sarkozy next year. In December, Mélenchon called Strauss-Kahn “authoritarian” and even “an imbecile.”

Divisory role
While neither Le Pen nor Mélenchon stand a chance of being elected president in 2012, each has  the power to fragment and distort the vote on their side of the political divide. In 2002, when the Left fielded five candidates including two Trotskyites, the fragmentation put the elder Le Pen ahead of the Socialist Jospin, giving the National Front what was considered the unthinkable - a place in the second, deciding round of the vote.

It was then that the Left rallied round to re-elect the conservative Jacques Chirac.