Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s political career has been effectively ended, after he was dealt a humiliating defeat on Sunday by his former prime minister François Fillon in the first round of the race to choose the rightwing Republican party’s candidate for the presidency next spring.

Fillon, a socially conservative, free-market reformer who admires Margaret Thatcher and voted against same-sex marriage, came close to winning the nomination straight out, with around 43% of the poll.



He now faces a second-round runoff against more moderate Alain Juppé, the mayor of Bordeaux who was prime minister under Jacques Chirac.

The divisive former president Sarkozy suffered a humiliating defeat, knocked out of the race after he ran a hard-right campaign on French national identity, targeting Muslims and minorities. His poor score after a campaign in which he suggested banning Muslim headscarves from universities and was forced to protest his innocence faced with several legal investigations into corrupt campaign financing, showed he had become just as much a hate figure on the right as on the left.

Who is François Fillon – the man who ended Sarkozy's dream? Read more

Fillon and Juppé now have one week to do battle over who could better unite French voters against the far-right in a country struggling with mass unemployment, economic sluggishness and the threat of terrorism.

Donald Trump’s US win has thrown the spotlight on France as the next place for a possible shake-up of the political system. Polls have consistently shown that the Front National leader, Marine Le Pen, will make it to the French presidential final round runoff next May, but that it would be difficult for her to win.

Fillon, a 62-year-old Paris MP, is the the epitome of the traditional provincial right. He is a Catholic from a village in north-west France, where he lived in a 12th-century chateau with his Welsh wife and their five children during a long career in local politics.

A tea-drinking anglophile, he has broken ranks with the long-running statist tradition of the French right to propose the most radical pro-business reform programme – vowing to cut a staggering 500,000 public sector jobs over five years. Attacked for going too far with proposed state cuts by Juppé, Fillon said in his final rally: “I’m tagged with an [economically] liberal label in the same way one would paint crosses on the doors of lepers in the middle ages. But I’m just a pragmatist.”



When he became prime minister in 2007, Fillon caused friction with Sarkozy by declaring that France was almost bankrupt.

Fillon voted against same-sex marriage when it was introduced by the Socialist president François Hollande, and had the support of the traditional Catholic right. Claiming to stand for Christian family values, he has campaigned against medically assisted procreation for single women or lesbian couples.

He surged in the polls in the final weeks of the campaign after publishing a book on the fight against radical Islam, saying “there isn’t a religious problem in France. Yes, there is a problem linked to Islam”. He said the solution was not to target law-abiding Muslims, but to target fundamentalism.

But he caused anger among a black rights association during the campaign when he referred to French colonialism as France “sharing our culture”.

Fillon has called for a rapprochement with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, on Syria. After the US election, he welcomed a new alliance between Putin and Trump. Asked early in the campaign whether France should cooperate with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad to fight Islamic State, he said France should unite with all possible forces, “democratic or not”. He told the website Atlantico in October: “De Gaulle, Churchill, Roosevelt allied with Stalin to defeat nazism.”

Fillon said the French people “wanted authority” and his was a “powerful project” to reform France.

Admitting defeat, Sarkozy said he felt “no bitterness, no sadness”. After belittling Fillon as his “employee” when he was president, Sarkozy said he would now back Fillon in the final round of voting on 27 November.

Whoever wins that vote will instantly become the favourite to take the presidency next spring.

Juppé, 71, has led a centrist campaign promising economic reform and rejecting what he called the “suicidal” identity politics of Sarkozy, which he warned would deepen rifts in French society.

Over the past few months, he had consistently topped polls as France’s favourite politician, after undergoing a staggering image transformation from the 1990s, when he was the most loathed French prime minister in modern times after 2 million people took to the streets in protest against his pension changes.

In 2004, Juppé received a 14-month suspended sentence and was barred from holding elected office for a year over a 1980s scheme that illegally put workers for Chirac’s party on the payroll of the Paris town hall. Although it is accepted that he did not profit personally and was seen as having taken the flak for Chirac, some critics warn the case could come back to haunt him during a fierce presidential campaign. Since Trump’s election, critics have warned he would seem too old-school establishment against Le Pen, with echoes of the US campaign. “I am not Hillary Clinton, and France is not America,” he said this week, insisting he could be trusted to take swift action on major reform.

The candidates’ economic programmes are similar: they agree on lowering public spending, ending the 35-hour week, scrapping France’s wealth tax, cutting varying levels of state jobs and overhauling welfare.

The deeply unpopular Socialist president, François Hollande, will make an announcement next month on whether he intends to run for re-election. Hollande is said to have been boosted by Fillon’s strong showing, feeling it would be easier for the left to unite against Fillon and dismiss him as a “French Thatcher”.

It was the first time the French right had held an open US-style primary race to choose its candidate and turnout was high. Any voter who signed a charter saying they agreed with the “Republican values of the centre and the right” and paid €2 (£1.72) could cast a ballot.