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PARIS - PRESIDENT Nicolas Sarkozy, hit by dismal poll ratings, looked set for more punishment on Sunday as millions of French were to head to vote for their local representatives.
Opinion polls predict major gains for the opposition Socialists in a vote seen as a referendum on Mr Sarkozy's first 10 months as head of state.
He trounced Socialist presidential candidate Segolene Royal last year with promises of a break with the past, but since then has seen his popularity plummet among voters dismayed by his flamboyant private life.
The Socialists are likely to hold on to Paris and the second city of Lyon, and could also take Marseille, Strasbourg and Toulouse from the right, symbolic victories that could further damage the president's image.
The vote has only a minor effect on national politics, even if 20 of Mr Sarkozy's ministers and junior ministers are running for local office, but it has been cast as the biggest public test yet on the president's achievement in nearly a year at the helm.
Since coming to power, he has eased France's 35-hour work week, the shortest in Europe, and reduced pension benefits for state workers, a feat which French presidents before him tried and failed.
Unemployment, which has been persistently high in France for decades, has fallen to 7.5 per cent, its lowest level in 25 years.
But this has not dispelled public gloom. Consumer confidence in France has fallen to a 21-year low and inflation hit an 11-year high, fuelling a national obsession with the cost of living.
Mr Sarkozy's much-publicised divorce in October, followed by a jet-setting romance and swift marriage to supermodel and singer Carla Bruni, gave voters the impression he was neglecting their needs, pollsters said.
The Socialists, themselves riven by infighting and still smarting after a third consecutive defeat in presidential elections, accuse Mr Sarkozy of hobnobbing with the rich and famous while secretly drawing up a painful austerity plan for ordinary folk.
Mr Sarkozy's Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) currently controls 55 per cent of all towns of more than 30,000 inhabitants, after winning 23 from the left in 2001. But the right is bracing to lose many this time.
Forty-four million French voters are choosing the mayors and local councillors of 36,000 towns as well as filling half of all local canton, or district, seats on the country's 100 departmental councils.
Mr Sarkozy's 21-year-old son Jean looked set to win a cantonal seat in Neuilly, the wealthy Paris suburb that catapulted his father to political prominence some 30 years ago. -- AFP
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