Reuters The shootings of French soldiers and Jewish schoolchildren by a home-grown militant gunman killed by police have upended France's election campaign and resurrected conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy's prospects. The first opinion poll to be taken since Mohamed Merah, 23, committed his third and deadliest attack at a Jewish school in Toulouse on Monday showed Sarkozy surging past Socialist challenger Francois Hollande in the April 22 first round. Hollande leads by eight points in voting intentions for the May 6 runoff, but the gap has narrowed and the Toulouse killings have thrust the issues of security and integration of immigrants to the top of the political agenda.That plays to Sarkozy's strengths, political scientists and campaign advisers say. Jerome Sainte-Marie, director of political studies at the CSA polling institute which took the survey, said Sarkozy's two-point gain, largely at the expense of far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, showed that people naturally rallied behind the head of state in times of crisis. The bounce could prove short-lived, he told Reuters Television in an interview, and the campaign may soon return to the underlying issues of unemployment, social welfare, living standards and pensions on which the left had been leading. Sainte-Marie cited the example of former President Francois Mitterrand, whose popularity hit a peak during the 1991 Gulf War in which France participated, only to plunge to record lows after the last shot was fired. “However it is also possible, since this shift had already begun, that Nicolas Sarkozy manages to turn the whole campaign around to his own agenda, which is about order, values, immigration, integration, security and national identity.” Police commandos stormed Merah's apartment on Thursday after a 30-hour siege and shot him dead in an exchange of fire in which two policemen were injured. Within two hours, the president had announced new measures to combat militant indoctrination and recruitment via the Internet, through foreign travel and in prisons. Before the shootings, Sarkozy had courted controversy by turning sharply to the right in a March 11 speech declaring there were too many foreigners in France and vowing to rewrite or walk out of the European Union's Schengen open-border system. “Of course what has happened in the past week has changed the course of events,” a senior Sarkozy campaign adviser said. __
