Rival attacks Sarkozy over Holocaust remark

Rival attacks Sarkozy over Holocaust remark

"(There are) many signs, many comments that show Nicolas Sarkozy has decided to get closer to the National Front in the first round" of elections on April 22, Bayrou told France 2 television.

"He has said things for example about Germany, imputing to the German people the responsibility for the final solution, the Shoah, the extermination of Jews, which makes one shiver in terms of future relations within the European Union."

At a rally in the southern city of Nice last month Sarkozy said France should not be ashamed of its history: "It has not carried out a genocide. It did not invent the final solution. It invented human rights and it's the country in the world which has fought the most for freedom."

The comments, carried on the website of the ruling centre-right UMP party, come on top of comments Sarkozy made in a recent interview with a leading French philosopher.

"It's an enigma that a great democratic people could participate, through elections, in the Nazi madness," Sarkozy said in the April edition of Philosophie Magazine.

"There are a lot of nations across the world which have gone through social, monetary and political crises and who have not invented the final solution, nor decreed the extermination of a race," he said in an interview with philosopher Michel Onfray.

Sarkozy has pledged to make Berlin his first port of call should he win election on May 6, in a bid to inject new life into the Franco-German relationship and seek to break a deadlock over EU institutional reform.

Bayrou said Sarkozy's Holocaust comments were outrageous and boded ill for European cooperation in the future. Germany is France's biggest trading partner.

"How do you expect the German people and the German government not to shiver at such forthright accusations, which take the German people back to the drama and crime of Hitler?" Bayrou said.

Former French presidents would not have talked in that manner to German chancellors of their day, he said.

"Can you imagine (Charles) de Gaulle saying that of the German people when he was in touch with (Konrad) Adenauer? Or (Francois) Mitterrand with Helmut Kohl or (Valery) Giscard (d'Estaing) with (Helmut) Schmidt?" Bayrou said.

France's presidential election campaign has increasingly focused on questions of national identity and crime recently.

Sarkozy has proposed creating a ministry for immigration and national identity, and Socialist Royal has called on compatriots to keep a French flag at home and wave it on public holidays.

Recent opinion polls show Sarkozy leading over his rivals ahead of the April 22 first round of the vote.