Nicolas Sarkoz welcomes Hillary Clinton in 2011 | Eric Fefrtberg/AFP via Getty Images Nicolas Sarkozy sides with Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump Former French president says he admires tycoon’s rise but will not be running a Trump-style campaign.

PARIS — #NeverTrump just got a presidential boost — from France.

France's conservative former president Nicolas Sarkozy told local media that if he could vote in the United States, he would back Hillary Clinton for president over Donald Trump — regardless of their ideological differences.

"If I was an American citizen, I'd vote for Hillary," news magazine Le Point quoted Sarkozy as having said.

However, Sarkozy, who's in charge of the center-right Les Républicains party and wants to get re-elected as president next year, admitted that he could not take his eyes off the Trump campaign. He noted with admiration how Trump had repeatedly smashed predictions that his campaign would fail.

"The guy has beaten all the odds," Sarkozy was cited as saying.

That may be because Sarkozy hopes to pull off a similar prediction-beating performance.

With a primary in his center-right party coming up in six months, Sarkozy trails rival Alain Juppé badly in opinion polls. An Odoxa survey published in early May showed him winning 24 percent of votes versus 41 percent for Juppé in the first of a two-round election. In the runoff, Sarkozy would lose by an even wider margin — 37 percent versus 63 percent for Juppé, his former foreign minister.

But, however intriguing Sarkozy finds the real estate mogul, he said he would not run a Trump-style campaign.

Why bother spelling it out? Because French media keep reporting that Sarkozy is preparing to go full-Trump in an effort to turn the polls in his favor.

"Look what happened in the United States to the candidates who were supported by the establishment and the media," Le Monde quoted Sarkozy as having said. "They were destroyed by the candidates of the people."

Translation: Juppé is France's Jeb Bush, the establishment's choice, while Sarkozy is the people's choice.

French media go further, pointing out several personality traits that Sarkozy — who was known as the "bling-bling" president, or "Sarko l'américain" (Sarko, the American) for his ostentatious tastes — supposedly shares with the U.S. billionaire. Both worship the appearance of success; both court rich people and beautiful women; both have a prickly, vengeful attitude toward people who criticize them.

So far, Sarkozy has been the most Trump-esque of all French presidential hopefuls. He repeatedly drew attention to Juppé's age as a weakness, while branding other rivals as "apathetic" (Trump famously branded Jeb Bush as "weak"). He also promoted Laurent Wauquiez, a 41-year-old ex-minister known for shock-and-awe proposals — like a plan to extend France's legal working week from 35 to 42 hours — to the party's vice presidency.

Still, being explicitly identified with Trump is not a good look in France. Eight out of 10 French people feel hostility toward the real estate mogul, an Ifop poll in the JDD newspaper showed this month, more than the proportion that rejected Sarkozy at the height of his unpopularity.

By comparison, Juppé is the anti-Trump.

Precise and measured in his public manner, the 70-year-old former prime minister struggles with the opposite image problem — that he's too cold and distant. In what might have been an attempt to inject more rock 'n' roll into his public image, he volunteered some distinctly un-Juppé detail about himself to the author of a recently-published book titled "I will be president!" — namely that he enjoys gazing at beautiful women and that he was "constantly in a state of seduction."

Coming a few days after an uproar over sexual harassment in French politics, the quip was poorly timed, with some critics wondering whether Juppé was going too far to try to sound cool.

His campaign manager, Gilles Boyer, growled back: "I've been hearing for a long time that Juppé needs to let down his guard. Now that he's doing it, people are surprised."

Boyer should count his blessings. At least nobody is comparing his candidate to Donald Trump.