France's Hollande nods to right on immigration, veils

PARIS (Reuters) - Presidential frontrunner Francois Hollande gave nods to far-right voters who could decide the outcome of the election, saying on Friday he would limit immigration during an economic crisis and uphold a ban on women wearing veils in public.

Hollande, a Socialist, is on course to win a May 6 runoff against centre-right President Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy's only hope for victory is to win over the record number of voters who picked the far-right National Front in the first round on Sunday.

The president has swung hard to the right on immigration and Islam in the week since National Front leader Marine Le Pen won 17.9 percent of the first round vote. Hollande has said National Front voters should be listened to, but has been reluctant to court them openly.

"In a period of crisis, which we are experiencing, limiting economic immigration is necessary and essential," he said.

Hollande answered evasively when asked repeatedly on prime-time television on Thursday whether he thought there were too many foreigners in France, as Sarkozy and Le Pen have both proclaimed in campaign speeches.

Clarifying his position after his evasions drew criticism, he told RTL radio on Friday that if elected, he would have parliament fix an annual quota for non-European Union foreigners coming to France to take up jobs.

"There will always be legal immigration. Can the number be reduced? That's the debate," Hollande said, noting Sarkozy had already reduced the government's annual target for economic migrants to 20,000 from 30,000.

"In my view, that's the kind of level that would apply in times of crisis. In any case, the numbers will be managed."

Hollande also said he would uphold and enforce a ban on all-enveloping Muslim veils, known as the niqab or burqa, even though he abstained in a 2010 parliamentary vote when Sarkozy proposed the law.

His comment seemed designed to counter attempts by Sarkozy to paint him as soft on radical Islam, notably by alleging that a Swiss Muslim scholar had endorsed Hollande for president. The scholar, Tariq Ramadan, has denied backing a candidate.

The huge vote for Le Pen revealed frustration among voters over a relentless rise in unemployment. She proposes giving preference to French nationals for job openings, welfare benefits and public housing, and penalising firms employing illegal immigrants.

Sarkozy successfully appealed to far-right voters in the second round to secure his election to his first presidential term in 2007, but faces a more difficult task this time around because of economic hardship.

An election race dominated from the start by the economy has now boiled down to whether Sarkozy can lure enough of Le Pen's supporters to his side in the runoff to eat into Hollande's lead of between 6 and 10 percentage points in polls taken this week.

Both candidates hold political rallies at the weekend and will come face to face in their sole televised debate on May 2.

A Harris Interactive survey published on Friday found that 31 percent of Le Pen voters plan to abstain on May 6, while 48 percent would vote Sarkozy and 21 percent would back Hollande. Most tallies suggest Sarkozy would need as much as 80 percent of Le Pen's vote to win the run-off.

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Graphic on French polls http://r.reuters.com/was36s

French election online http://link.reuters.com/pyr27s

Interactive runoff calculator http://r.reuters.com/nym77s

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HOLLANDE TREADING CAREFULLY

Sarkozy is the only sitting president in France ever to lose a first round ballot for re-election. If he loses again in the second round, he will be the first president voted out of office in more than 30 years. Piling more pressure on him, jobless claims rose for the 11th month running in March to hit their highest level since September 1999.

Foreign commentators have criticised the presidential contenders for focusing too heavily on secondary domestic issues and not addressing a lack of labour market flexibility which they say is holding back job creation and stifling growth.

Financial markets are fretting anew about the risk that anaemic economic growth will derail deficit-cutting targets in the No. 2 euro zone economy, which has promised to bring down its budget shortfall to 3 percent of output in 2013.

Inside France, media debate remained centred on the new far-right pull of the election race. On Thursday Sarkozy proposed a new licence to shoot for police pursuing suspects.

Former prime minister Dominque de Villepin, a bitter foe of Sarkozy's who failed to win the backing to run as an independent centre-rightist in the election, said the conservatives were going down a "path of no return". He said the hardline rhetoric was "a deadly poison that is threatening the right."

"Everything is happening as though there were only National Front voters in France, as if there were no other issues but halal meat and legal immigration," Villepin wrote in an opinion piece in Le Monde.

Even before the Le Pen vote, Sarkozy was hammering hard on the need to curb immigration and protect French producers from cheap competition. On Friday, he lashed back at suggestions that he was leaning too far to the right.

"Do you think those whom you call centrists think it is perfectly normal that everyone can come into France, that there is no immigration problem, that the integration system works?" he asked on RTL radio.

"Do you think giving immigrants the right to vote is something that only shocks the voters of Marine Le Pen?" he said, referring to Hollande's proposal to let non-EU nationals resident in France for five years vote in local elections.

Henri Guaino, Sarkozy's speechwriter and senior adviser, said uncontrolled immigration was a problem affecting all of Europe and should not be seen as a far-right issue.

"His plan is above all to put borders at the heart of politics. This isn't a far-right problem, it's not even a problem of the right," he told Radio Classique. "It's a central issue from which all other problems in Europe and France ensue."

The focus on Le Pen voters since Sunday has left Hollande with the dilemma of how to reach left-wing defectors to the National Front by voicing understanding of economic gloom while not taking any position that would offend his core support base.

A BVA poll released on Friday showed Hollande gaining 1.5 percentage points to 54.5 percent of voter intentions for the second round versus 45.5 percent for Sarkozy. A CSA poll showed a narrower lead with Hollande at 54 percent, down 2 points from last week, and Sarkozy at 46 percent.

The Harris Interactive survey found that of those voters who backed centrist Francois Bayrou in round one, 41 percent would back Hollande on May 6 and 36 percent would back Sarkozy.

Bayrou, who won 9.1 percent in the first round, has not yet said which, if either, of the two rivals he will endorse. Hollande said he had written to him and saw common ground on education, social issues and public finances.

Hollande also stands to benefit from the backing of 92 percent of those who supported hard leftist Jean-Luc Melenchon, who won 11 percent in the first-round vote.

Melenchon has refused to campaign with Hollande, however. He has turned down an invitation to appear at an Hollande rally on Sunday and plans separate events ahead of the vote, campaign aide Clementine Autain told the weekly Le Journal du Dimanche.

(Reporting By Alexandria Sage, Brian Love, Elizabeth Pineau and Leigh Thomas; Writing by Alexandria Sage; Editing by Catherine Bremer, Paul Taylor and Peter Graff)

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