France's Sarkozy takes flak for courting America

PARIS, Sep 19 (Reuters) Conservative presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy has come under fierce criticism for heaping praise on the United States, with rivals denouncing his pro-American stance as unworthy of a French leader.

While French politicians are traditionally cool towards America, Sarkozy spent much of a recent trip to New York and Washington extolling the virtues of the US way of life.

The visit culminated in a brief meeting with the US president, the encounter immortalised in a single photograph showing a grinning Sarkozy clasping George W Bush's hand.

Sensing a political gaffe, his foes have leapt on the trip to suggest that Sarkozy, who is France's interior minister, did not have the right mettle to represent the country abroad.

''My diplomatic policy would not consist of going and kneeling in front of George Bush,'' Socialist presidential front-runner Segolene Royal Told LCI television today.

''When Nicolas Sarkozy lines up with George Bush, does that mean that he sanctions preventative wars, that he accepts this theory of a war of good against evil, that he tolerates all these efforts to destabilise the world? We can't accept that and moreover France cannot accept it,'' she said.

France's relations with the United States have not yet fully recovered from the 2003 Iraq war, when French President Jacques Chirac led international opposition to the invasion and rejected Bush's assertions that Baghdad had weapons of mass destruction.

Although Sarkozy also opposed the Iraq war, he told his US hosts last week that France had been too ''arrogant'' in the build up to the war and promoted himself as a more loyal friend.

''I'm not a coward. I'm proud of this friendship and I'm happy to proclaim it,'' said Sarkozy, who has used a string of trips to establish his foreign policy credentials.

''SUBMISSIVE'' Although Sarkozy is a senior member of the government, he is running his presidential campaign as though he were an outsider, promising voters a clean break with the Chirac past.

His warm overtures to Washington appeared to be a calculated bid to reach out to ''middle'' France which has always embraced American culture more warmly than the Paris elite.

However, some of his allies fear he went too far, noting that close ties with Bush have damaged the domestic standing of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and former Spanish leader Jose Maria Aznar.

''It wasn't necessary for him to be seen with Bush in Washington,'' said Axel Poniatowski, a parliamentarian with the ruling UMP party, which is headed by Sarkozy.

''We need to distinguish between our relations with the United States, which should improve, and our relations with the Bush administration,'' he told Le Parisien daily today.

Media reports said Chirac himself was furious with Sarkozy, telling aides that his criticism of French diplomacy was ''irresponsible'' and ''lamentable''.

''The relations I have with President Bush are relations ...

that are very good, and relations of confidence. But that does not mean the relationship is submissive,'' Chirac said in a radio interview yesterday, firmly putting Sarkozy in his place.

Sarkozy and Royal are running neck and neck in the polls but it is too soon to say if the US trip hurt the rightist leader.

REUTERS DKA RK1645