AS YOU were. That was the media consensus yesterday after the gruelling televised debate between Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande failed to give the incumbent the clear victory he sought going into the final days of the campaign.
While each side claimed victory, opinion polls suggested the duel was widely seen as a draw. For Mr Hollande, the socialist who leads Mr Sarkozy in polls with just three days until voting, that was as good as a win.
Fighting to avoid becoming only the second French president in the past 50 years to be denied a second term, Mr Sarkozy needed to land a killer blow on Wednesday night to inject momentum into his campaign, and he fell short.
An LH2 poll yesterday showed 45 per cent of viewers found Mr Hollande more convincing, versus 41 per cent for Mr Sarkozy. Contrary to widespread expectation, French media concluded, Mr Sarkozy had failed to impose himself against an opponent who met his aggression with a rarely seen pugnacity of his own.
“Hollande still favourite after the debate,” declared Le Monde on its front page. Mr Sarkozy tried to “play the teacher to Hollande the pupil”, said the newspaper’s columnist Françoise Fressoz, but the socialist had held his ground.
“The result was a draw,” she said. “Hollande started off as favourite, and he finished as favourite. Mr Sarkozy was unable to destabilise him, which was evidently his strategy.”
Similarly, the left-wing Libération declared on its front page that Mr Hollande had emerged best from the debate and argued in an editorial that he “scored well” against an opponent who was “constantly looking for a fight”.
The right-wing Le Figaro disagreed, saying Mr Sarkozy had emerged on top and could still turn the election around.
Criticising Mr Hollande’s “old-fashioned socialist language”, the newspaper’s columnist Paul-Henri du Limbert said the left was out of touch with modern France. “Sarkozy reminded his rival that the world has changed since the socialists were last in power,” he wrote, arguing that the French left’s biggest talent was “looking to the past” and criticising as outdated promises to lower the minimum age of retirement and increase taxes on the rich.
Commentators described the highly charged three-hour debate as one of the most bruising and hard-fought in recent memory. Mr Sarkozy called his opponent a “little liar” and mocked his claims to be a “normal president”. “Your normality is not up to the challenge,” he told Mr Hollande.
The Sarkozy camp had claimed the socialist would “self-destruct” when put under pressure in the debate. Instead, Mr Hollande’s strategy of turning the debate constantly back to the incumbent’s record unsettled Mr Sarkozy.
When he pointed out that France had had to weather a major economic crisis on his watch, Mr Hollande snapped: “With you it’s easy. It’s never your fault.”
Yet with the economy Mr Sarkozy was generally on firm ground, showing off his mastery of detail and raising questions about how Mr Hollande would make enough cuts to balance the budget.
