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Nicolas Sarkozy's Tour de France resembles a breathless race against the clock. From Verdun to Strasbourg, from Perpignan to Sancerre, from Chamonix to Bordeaux. He has made appearances in Avignon and Besançon, Nantes, Caen and Toulouse. He has given speeches in Essonne in southern Paris, in Cormeilles-en-Parisis in the city's north. The campaign to succeed Jacques Chirac as France’s next president has taken him to Marseilles, and destinations further afield like Madrid, Berlin and the Antilles. And that's just the last six weeks -- one last burst of energy before reaching the electoral finish line.

Indeed, it seems forever ago that he was in Sancerre, an ancient stone village perched above the Loire River, some 200 kilometers (124 miles) from Paris -- though the stop came at the end of February. He arrives in his motorcade of dark Renaults and Citroëns, followed by three buses packed with journalists, on a day of changeable weather -- first rain, then sun, then wind. Sarkozy stands on the veranda of the "Maison des Sancerres," the main headquarters of the region's vintners.

Their chairman gives Sarkozy -- still France's interior minister, a position he resigned from in late March to concentrate on the campaign -- a warm welcome before clumsily mentioning local concerns and the wine industry's financial woes. He then hands his prominent guest the microphone with the words: "We would like to hear more about it from you, Monsieur le Président."

Monsieur le Président. It is clearly a mistake, but no one laughs -- in fact, hardly anyone seems to have noticed. Monsieur le Président. Sarkozy plays the statesman role so naturally that it's easy to forget that he is still just one candidate in a field of 12 contenders -- one of the two or three frontrunners in this presidential race, which enters its first round on Sunday, April 22. Monsieur le Président. It's the title to which Nicolas Sarkozy's life-long hunt, his personal Tour de France, has been dedicated.

Directness and clarity

On the veranda in Sancerre, Sarkozy ignores the blunder, choosing instead to launch in to the practiced role of concerned candidate -- a role he plays almost to perfection. He knows that French vintners eye him with suspicion, both for his public acknowledgment that he doesn't drink alcohol and for his rigid campaign to lower the blood-alcohol level allowed on French roads -- much to the vintners' disadvantage. In Sancerre, famous for its elegant dry wines, Sarkozy is not on friendly territory. But if there's one thing he knows, it's how to work a crowd.

"Thank you for your kind words," he says. "But what I am hearing is an unasked question: What's going to happen with the traffic checks?" The vintners laugh, nudging and glancing at one another as if to comment approvingly on Sarkozy's approach. "Let me tell you the truth," says Sarkozy, "and please accept it as my way of showing you respect. The traffic checks will continue. I know you don't like to hear this, but we have thousands fewer deaths on our roads. No one can argue against that."

Sarkozy keeps talking for another 10 or 12 minutes, outlining his campaign's main objectives, but it is the initial impression, the first sentences he utters, the directness with which he points out contradictions and the clarity with which he rebuffs expectations that ultimately prompt the vintners to give him a round of enthusiastic applause. Finally they have someone standing in front of them who takes them seriously and treats them like adults, not someone who acts as though they were children who needed protection. That someone is Sarkozy. He clearly relishes the effect he has had on his audience.

Scenes like the one in Sancerre have repeated themselves again and again wherever Sarkozy shows up these days. He takes trade unionists to task in factories and argues with business owners demanding subsidies. He wants to know why the unemployed are complaining, and he is quick to strike back when hecklers brand him as a dictator and extremist in sheep's clothing. This is campaigning a la Sarkozy, constantly on the offensive.

A highly effective strategy

Sarkozy and his speechwriters have invented a new way of confronting and even berating his audiences. The candidate cultivates an openness that would devastate most other European politicians, an approach he developed long before he began his bid for the French presidency. Instead of hoping that no one will bring up controversial issues he brings them up himself. Instead of ignoring criticism he asks for it. And instead of sugarcoating problems he highlights them. He says: "I will not lie to you and I will not deceive you. We've had enough of that." It's a highly effective strategy.

After Sarkozy's speech in Sancerre, the chairman of the vintners' association stands in the midst of a group of journalists from Paris. As he refills their wineglasses he insists that his only concern was not to lump together wine and traffic deaths. "But let me tell you something else," he says to the journalists. "I prefer someone like Sarkozy, someone who tells you that white is white and black is black. I don't care about the rest of it."

Sarkozy has a gift for telling things as they are. Or at least that's the impression he often gives. His opponents in this election season are often driven to distraction by Sarkozy's other gift -- his knack for gray, of mixing up black with white and of flip-flopping between right and left. His coronation speech -- delivered before tens of thousands of supporters in Paris's Porte de Versailles after being anointed the conservative candidate in mid-January -- set the tone for everything to follow.

Sarkozy painted a sumptuous tableau of what he called the "France that I mean," and in doing so, drew indiscriminately on the ideals and idols of the right and the left, including famous labor leaders like Jean Jaurès and Léon Blum. It was a heady speech, one that will live on in many a university seminar. And Sarkozy, fully cognizant of its impact, presented it with a presidential air of authority.

The next day Laurent Joffrin, editor-in-chief of the left-leaningLibération, called Sarkozy's speech a rhetorical stroke of genius, and wrote: "Yes, this man is dangerous. Especially for the left." France's socialists issued angry press releases without knowing exactly what they were objecting to. How could they possibly complain about a man who had just praised their traditions, a man who had counted the labor movement as one the great moments in French history?

Part of the glorious history he cites

Those who would call Sarkozy a player are wrong. When he quotes Jaurès, he does so because he has in fact read Jaurès. When he refers to Léon Blum or the Résistance, to Albert Camus or Emile Zola, to Clemenceau or de Gaulle, to Louis XIV or the revolutionaries of 1789, one can be fairly certain that Sarkozy, a man who literally devours documents and books, is familiar with their history, lives and works from more than just hearsay.

But this is also part of his problem. He already perceives himself as part of the glorious history he cites -- as one those great men who, as if answering some higher calling, will shape eras.

Indeed, polls often indicate that voters see Sarkozy as unsettling, even alarming, and his healthy sense of self-importance is likely to blame. Many see the small-statured Sarkozy as a ruthless wannabe and social climber, a man intoxicated by his own ambition and willing to step on heads to further his career.

Sarkozy was a member of the city council in Neuilly-sur-Seine at 22, mayor of the city at 28, a member of parliament at 33, and, in the early 1990s, budget minister and spokesman for the Edouard Balladur government at 38. He has served as communications minister, interior minister and finance minister. He has dozens of party and regional offices under his belt and was a leading candidate in the European elections. He has even already been immortalized in wax at Musée Grévin, the Paris version of Madame Tussauds. And he is just 52 years old.

Instead of fighting Sarkozy head-on, his opponents usually combat the caricature they have created of him. Instead of refuting his arguments, they sneer at his body language, the erratic movements he makes with his head when he speaks, the twitching of the shoulders, a habit he has unsuccessfully tried to break. At bad moments he comes across as a character from a mafia movie, as a lawyer for some old godfather, a man who is sometimes shady, a dandy whose hair is too perfectly in place, tie knot too big and Ray-Bans too flashy.

"French kid with mixed blood"

In his better moments, Sarkozy greets voters affably, coming across as genuine and direct in his interactions with people, as if he were speaking with equals. This even applies to his interactions with immigrants, even though his tough stance on immigration has brought him more condemnation than any other issue in this campaign. But of all the criticisms of Sarkozy, the most absurd is the claim that he is essentially a racist. His origins alone are enough to disprove that theory.

His father is Hungarian and his mother comes from a Jewish family. He refers to himself as "a French kid with mixed blood," a first-generation child of immigrant parents, born in Paris seven years after his father arrived in France, baptized a Catholic and, after the separation of his parents, raised in the house of his Jewish grandfather.

The claim that Sarkozy -- a man who won an award from the Simon Wiesenthal Center in 2003 for his efforts to wipe out racism -- is a racist is derived from the "national" passages of his speeches, the ones on immigration policy. He wants to limit family immigration and deport undocumented foreigners, and he wants to see newcomers required to respect France and its values, speak French, love the country and be familiar with its culture.

Slaughtering Sheep in the Bathtub Is not French

Described thusly, his platform sounds no different from the current European mainstream -- but word choice is key. Sarkozy is incapable of delivering sober, subdued speeches. Instead, there is always something pressing about his sentences, some important point or catchphrase he seeks to convey. This is why he says things like: "Anyone who believes that women have no rights, who believes that slaughtering sheep in the bathtub is part of his culture, is unwelcome in our country."

To those who accuse him of sounding like Jean-Marie Le Pen, the godfather of the extremist right wing, Sarkozy responds that he refuses to strike correct sentences from his speeches merely because the wrong people are using them. And to those journalists who accuse him of fishing for voters along the right-wing fringe, Sarkozy poses one of his feared rhetorical questions: "And you? Don't you broadcast for the right-wing radicals? Or are they are not permitted to buy your paper?"

Sarkozy's profile, and his image as a hardliner, became more pronounced in June of 2005, during the riots in the Paris suburbs. One day after a child had been caught and shot between rival drug gangs in La Courneuve, Sarkozy said to bystanders: "We will clean up the neighborhood with a pressure washer, you can count on that." During a visit to Argenteuil, a woman called out to him: "When will you finally liberate us from this riff-raff?" Sarkozy responded: "You've had enough of this riff-raff? Then let's see how we can rid ourselves of it!"

Riff-raff and pressure washer aren't exactly the kinds of expressions one expects to hear from a statesman, especially one who represents the cultured French nation. Sarkozy's words and actions caused a great deal of uproar at the time, and he was blamed for the intensification of the subsequent unrest. But what the Paris media declined to notice at the time was that, according to the opinion polls, almost two-thirds of the French people agreed with Sarkozy and even approved of his choice of words.

Outdated economic structures

Even in the election campaign, Sarkozy doesn't avoid using the word "racaille," or "riff-raff." Although he no longer wears it like a chip on his shoulder, as he did for a long time, he never hides from it. "What do you call people who set a bus full of people going to work on fire? What's the word for those who sell drugs to children? I say they are riff-raff, and I stand by my words." His words are met with loud, enthusiastic applause, especially in the provinces.

But the controversy over words and immigration is secondary in the broader scheme of things. France has bigger problems. The structure of the economy is outdated, the organization of the welfare state is decrepit and the tax burden enormous. Sarkozy wants to prescribe an era of change to the country. He wants what he calls "rupture" -- an end to the stagnation which has characterized the last few years in office of his former mentor and current president, Jacques Chirac. Whether it's a discussion of the European Union in Strasbourg, of development policy in Réunion in the French Antilles, or of immigration in the Paris suburbs, Sarkozy is constantly throwing new barbs into the debate and coming up with ideas on how to modernize France. In doing so he is trying to broaden the conservative movement's base and modernize the right -- and he is keen to deprive the left of its role as social opinion leader. He has managed to make their issues his own and address topics that a conservative was traditionally not supposed to talk about.

Sarkozy does it with gusto. He is almost unique among politicians in his willingness to tackle the issue of unrest in the suburbs surrounding France's major cities. He is unrelenting when he lists the problems associated with immigration. And it is Sarkozy, not the socialist candidate Ségolène Royal, who speaks most clearly and convincingly about the decline in buying power, about the problems of the working poor, about the demise of traditional industries, the financial distress of small businesses and the problems in the employment market. Sarkozy, it seems, has no qualms about cherry-picking these traditionally "leftist" issues.

Labor is the key concept of his campaign. He speaks of a France "that gets up early in the morning and works hard," he campaigns against the 35-hour work week and against the retirement age of 60. He wants to see student jobs exempted from the minimum wage requirement. He wants overtime to be tax-free, to reduce the size of the government bureaucracy, to relax protections against job termination, to abolish the inheritance tax and reorganize the job placement system. Blood, sweat and tears are his stock in trade.

Neo-liberal with a French passport

From a Western European standpoint, many aspects of his program seem heavily social-liberal, some borrowed from the British "third way" and others from the reforms put in place by Germany's governing coalition under former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. But France is an idiosyncratic country and compared to the rest of Europe, France's entire political structure is shifted substantially to the left. Which is why Sarkozy's foes can get away with branding him as an American "neo-liberal with a French passport."

What Parisians would call right wing would easily pass as centrist in Berlin. Many of the leftist splinter parties fielding candidates in the presidential election would undoubtedly be the subject of investigation by Germany's domestic intelligence agency. The same applies to most trade unions: Indeed, in France, the discussion of global problems still seems to be operating on the assumption that the Berlin Wall never came down, and that Mao is still running the show in China; it is a country where communist social structures are discussed and history is still treated as a class struggle.

Sarkozy, who sticks out in this milieu like a sore thumb, must sell himself as a savior and leader who can take France into a new era. He banks on the notion that most Frenchmen are tired of the old struggles, that ideological battles are passé and that many want "rupture." But he also has to reach and inspire the French people to get their vote, which explains why his dark analyses of France's current state always turn into a hymn for the nation and its future. The refrain of that song is the slogan of Sarkozy's campaign: "Together everything is possible."

More than just a slogan, it's a principle Sarkozy has consistently applied in his own life. From the beginning of his political career, he has formed teams, established committees and set up networks. His address book is considered one of the thickest in all of France. He owes his gradual rise to power to personal contacts. As a young man he asked Charles Pasqua, who would later become a notorious interior minister, to be the best man at his wedding to his first wife. The richest man in France, Bernard Arnault, head of the luxury conglomerate LVMH, was a witness at his second wedding, and Sarkozy was a witness to the marriage of Claude Chirac, the daughter and closest confidante of the current president.

Cliques and old boy networks

Such connections pay off in France, where power is dependent to a large degree on who you know. Sarkozy is close friends with the heads of the major media conglomerates and television networks, and his influence extends into their editorial offices. When Sarkozy's wife Cécilia, herself a darling of the media, was pictured together with a lover on the cover ofParis Match in August 2005, the magazine's editor-in-chief was let go. All of which makes Sarkozy's claim that cliques and old boy networks will not be part of an administration under his leadership difficult to believe. In fact, Sarkozy himself -- and his entire career, for that matter -- would be completely unthinkable without them.

In retrospect, each of his steps seems masterfully planned, as if Sarkozy had already known by his mid-twenties where his life would take him. But then, as his career progressed, his was repeatedly faced with the unpredictable, with events that gave him the chance to demonstrate instinctively the kind of tough political animal he truly is.

One of his first opportunities to shine came in May 1993, when a hostage crisis captivated all of France. Sarkozy had only been a cabinet minister for six weeks when, in a kindergarten in his city of Neuilly, a crazed computer scientist took 21 children and one teacher hostage and demanded a ransom of 100 million francs. When the man threatened to blow up the school, his threat was taken seriously and the police wanted to storm the building. But Sarkozy, who was present at the scene, took over the negotiation.

Over the course of 46 hours Sarkozy, his shirt wet with perspiration, walked into the kindergarten seven times to negotiate with the hostage-taker. He spoke with the man, calmed him down, promised him the ransom money, gradually managed to secure the freedom of all the hostages and even offered himself as a hostage. In the end, all of the children and the teacher were saved and special forces shot the hostage-taker. The French had gotten their first taste of Nicolas Sarkozy -- as a young and courageous mayor and minister, and as someone prepared to do anything necessary to achieve his goals.

A deserving veteran of politics

Similar scenes repeated themselves during the unrest in and around major French cities and during the riots in the suburbs in the fall of 2005. Although Sarkozy was no longer viewed as a hero at the time, the French saw him as a man of action who spent time at the scene of the riots and his nights at police stations, proving himself master of the situation. Meanwhile, the other leaders of the right and the left sat in their offices, commenting on the events from afar.

It is as if Sarkozy has been campaigning for years, or perhaps his entire life -- as if the goal of everything he has done has been to move into the Elysée Palace one day as master of the house.

To reach that goal, he will have to focus on yet another campaign tour, his 12th or 13th such drive. He has traveled the country with prime ministers, with candidates, presidents and losers. Sarkozy, at 52, is a deserving veteran of politics.

He knows the country, every one of its regions and Departments, and all of its cities -- and he has heard all of its problems. During his appearances, it sometimes seems as though he believed he had all the solutions at his fingertips. It is precisely at these moments that he seems uncanny, this man who is so convinced that he is familiar with the lives of his voters and speaks the language of the people. His message is: I'm ready. But the question now is whether France is ready for him? For Nicolas Sarkozy, it's a matter of victory or defeat as he nears the finish line of his lifelong Tour de France.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan