Election's on, will France be the next to change leaders?

Rome fiddles, Athens burns, the euro teeters, and Paris?Paris is silent.

Or rather, Nicolas Sarkozy, France's motor-mouth president, the man who addresses every problem, and promises to solve most of them, has been uncharacteristically quiet about Greece and its troubles in recent days.

He was otherwise occupied, his aides said, readying his candidacy for another presidential term.

There was, perhaps, another reason for his silencethe polls.

With just over two months before the first round of France's presidential elections on April 22, and the campaigning now having begun in earnest, the president is trailing, and trailing badly.

"On paper, we're dead," one downcast minister said recently. Another, identifying the cause, says, "We're conscious that his person has become the object of rejection in French public opinion."

Put less elegantly, French voters now loathe Sarkozy. For months the polls have shown that two-thirds of the electorate is dissatisfied with his leadership.

The same polls show that his main opponent, the Socialist Party's Franois Hollande, would crush him in the second and decisive round of presidential voting.

The grandeur of France

Five years ago, Sarkozy swept into office promising "a rupture" with the past. Most commentators simply shrugged; more of the man's overblown rhetoric.

But Sarkozy was serious, at least about the office he had just gained. By changing it, he thought, he could change the country.

The French presidency was the creation of one man, Charles de Gaulle, and he designed it to fit his personalitydistant, regal, and for piloting the grandeur of France.

De Gaulle then put in place two other pillars of the French presidency.

The president would be the defender of France's social model of capitalism, and he would link up with Germany to run Europe.

But like Samson in the temple, Sarkozy seemed determined to bring down each of those pillars.

He railed against the bureaucratic chains constraining France's businesses and in particular he took aim at the 35-hour work week.

Then, rather than championing the country's social model, led by its powerful state enterprises, he said France should copy the Anglo-Saxons, meaning the Brits and the Americans, with their more free-wheeling private capitalism.

'Monsieur Bla Bla'

Almost five decades ago, de Gaulle symbolized the new Franco-German alliance by enveloping the startled German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, in a bear hug before the cameras.

Twenty years later, the Socialist president Franois Mitterand updated the symbolism by holding hands with then chancellor Helmut Kohl in a First World War cemetery.

But Sarkozy appeared to have a different idea. He began by treating Chancellor Angela Merkel like a dim, annoying sister.

"Hey Angela, over here," he shouted to her at one European summit. The antagonism was mutual.

In private Merkel was said to refer to Sarkozy as "Monsieur Bla Bla."

But it was Sarkozy's attack on the monarchical aspect of the French presidency that was his boldest; it was also, in retrospect, almost suicidal.

He had reached power as a tough-talking man of the people. He wasn't a member of the country's administrative elite, trained at the cole nationale d'administration; he was a lawyer. What's more, he liked the rich and liked to be seen with them.

So on the night of his election victory in 2007 he partied at an exclusive Parisian restaurant with his rich backers and then vacationed on a French billionaire's yacht. He sported a Rolex and designer dark glasses.

His love life was fodder for the country's tabloids. Even as president, he yelled at voters. "Beat it, you clod," he told one at a market.

It wasn't regal; it didn't go down well. Sarkozy's poll numbers started dropping and never recovered.

'Merkozy'

His third wife, the former model Carla Bruni, took him in hand and stripped him of his glitter.

She and his advisers told him to step back, to become monarchical. He tried.

He also tried, and succeeded, in forming a new Franco-German alliance withMerkel.

The dim sister turned out to be smart and tough. Together they would rescue Greece and the other failing economies of the euro, together they would refashion the European Union, and alone Nicolas Sarkozy would defend the honour of France and its AAA rating.

But the economic problems of Europe were far harder to overcome than he first thought.

Greece lurched from crisis to crisis. And in the power couple that became known as "Merkozy," it was Merkel who increasingly ran the show.

Also,Sarkozy's vow to defend his country's credit rating became a hollow promise when one agency downgraded France's AAA status and a second threatened to.

Better not to talk of economic problems, Sarkozy told his advisers. It just confuses people.

Becoming an adult

What was left? Well, Angela Merkel. She even came to Paris in early February to do a joint interview with her friend and ally. She would back him whatever he did, she said.

German commentators said she made the gesture because she fears Sarkozy's rival, Franois Hollande, would rip up the economic stability pact that she has bludgeoned Sarkozy and other European leaders into accepting.

Butwhat else was left torun on? Values. Sarkozy's campaign will be based on values, French values.

And so he celebrated the 600th anniversary of the birth of Joan of Arc; he celebrated France's nuclear arsenal.

He no longer talks of the Anglo-Saxon economic model.

Late, very late, he has tried to repair the three Gaullist pillars of the presidency.

In an alarmingly candid interview last month, one of Sarkozy's closest friends and an unofficial adviser, Alain Minc, said, "Sarkozy didn't realize that the French elect a king.

"He acted like the captain of a football team at first," meaning the kind of paparazzi-haunted European celebrity who is always being quoted for the wrong reasons.

Minc went on to say that he felt the recent economic crisis has helped Sarkozy "to become an adult." But French voters, belatedly realizing they had elected an adolescent in his fifties, do not appear at all sure that they want five more years of him.