Nicolas Sarkozy's election campaign has been transformed by the shootings of three soldiers, a rabbi and three children
Five weeks before the first round of the French presidential election, the horror of the Toulouse shootings is likely to transform the campaign. But whether it will tone down the brutal tone of the presidential battle remains to be seen.
Jewish and Muslim religious leaders in France immediately appealed against politicians using the seven murders – of three soldiers, a rabbi and three children – for political gain. But even as the gunman, with his apparent links to Islamist extremism, was holed up in his apartment with hit squads negotiating through his front door, the politicking had begun in Paris.
First came Marine Le Pen, of the extreme-right Front National, who has campaigned on the dangers of unfettered immigration and unlabelled halal meat. She seized on the shootings to warn that the "risk of fundamentalism" had been underestimated in France and that "politico-religious groups" had been developing in a lax state. She proposed a referendum on bringing back the death-penalty. Le Pen is currently third in the presidential race, at 15%.
The centrist François Bayrou immediately accused the far right of "surfing" on the situation, warning of a fragmented France weakened by politicians deliberately stoking emotions. François Hollande, the Socialist front-runner, who had warned politicians to take care over "vocabulary" said he hoped an arrest would be achieved quickly to end France's unbearable anguish.
But the full political spotlight fell on Nicolas Sarkozy, for whom things could go either way. Polls have consistently predicted he may lose the final round run-off to Hollande.
If it emerges that the suspect was known to the police, there may be outrage that he was not caught after his first two attacks, leaving him free to strike against Jewish schoolchildren – France's first ever school shooting.The president knows he must walk a delicate line and not be perceived to be twisting the situation for his own gain. His entourage is aware of the disaster for the Spanish right in 2004 when José María Aznar's government blamed Basque militants for the Islamist Madrid train bombings. Days later, Aznar lost the elections to the Socialists.
Crucial to Sarkozy is the personal turnaround in his image. He had been fighting a bitter and difficult battle for re-election, but instantly suspended his campaign after the school shooting.
He went from being a thundering candidate, trying to divert attention away from his unpopularity and contentious record in office by warning there were too many foreigners in France, back to the sober president of the republic, mobilising the full panoply of state to protect the people.
He had been criticised for stoking tensions over halal meat and chasing the extreme right vote. Now he said: "Terrorism will not manage to break our nation's feeling of community" and people should not give way to discrimination or vengeance. He visited victims' families, schools and the police, regaining presidential stature.
Hollande, who also suspended his campaign and followed the same pattern of engagements, was described by some as a sort of "vice president".
The question was whether Sarkozy would regain enough presidential standing to overturn Hollande's clear second-round lead. The president was under pressure to unite France and stop people turning against each other, or wrongly bracketing French Muslims with what the hard-left's Jean-Luc Mélenchon called a plain criminal.
For Sarkozy, the shootings could mark a return to his old image of Supercop, France's one-time tough-talking interior minister and head of police. But that raises pressure to deliver a faultless police operation. It was reported that Sarkozy personally phoned the heads of the elite squads, and he turned up at the barracks near the gunman's besieged flat during the stand-off.
One of the most famous images of Sarkozy was in 1993 when a man calling himself the Human Bomb took children hostage at a nursery in Neuilly. Sarkozy, then a young mayor, walked into the classroom and carried out several children in his arms in front of the cameras.
After three days' suspension, the presidential campaigning is expected to resume at the end of the week. Political commentators say the violent invective and populist language that had dominated before the shootings can not continue. There was a need for national "healing", one analyst said.