Sarkozy takes first poll lead after EU-bashing

PARIS (Reuters) - President Nicolas Sarkozy overtook Socialist challenger Francois Hollande for the first time on Tuesday in an opinion poll on the first round of France's April-May election after attacking the European Union's trade and immigration policies.

The conservative incumbent was still shown losing to Hollande in a second-round runoff, but by a narrower margin of nine points, down from 13 points a fortnight ago.

While it was too soon to predict a turnaround, Sarkozy's gain showed that he struck a chord with voters with a threat on Sunday to erect unilateral barriers to trade and immigration unless the European Union takes tougher stands.

His ultimatum on toughening border controls and protecting European companies, during a rally near Paris, has been largely dismissed by EU diplomats as campaign rhetoric but it spoke directly to the far-right voters he needs to rally to his camp.

"It's logical there's a poll reaction to the speech, and we may well see more surveys showing the same thing, but the situation is still much more positive for Hollande," said BNP Paribas economist Dominique Barbet.

"You can't say it has turned around based on one poll, especially when there is still a nine point gap for the second round. Hollande's second-round lead has been pretty steady."

Having trailed Hollande for months, Sarkozy leapfrogged ahead in an Ifop/Fiducial survey that put his first-round score at 28.5 percent, up from 27 percent at the end of February and ahead of Hollande, who slipped to 27 percent from 28.5 percent.

The poll gave Hollande 54.5 percent of the second-round vote to Sarkozy's 45.5 percent, a narrower lead as Hollande lost two percentage points and Sarkozy gained two.

"I hope the swallow we saw this morning will make the spring," Alain Minc, a longtime advisor to Sarkozy, told Europe 1 radio, citing an ancient Greek proverb popular in France.

The morale-boost for Sarkozy came as far-right leader Marine Le Pen, ranked third in polls, said she had secured the 500 official sponsors needed to enter the presidential contest within days of a Friday evening deadline.

A failure by Le Pen to gather enough signatures could have rocked expectations, given her 16 percent support level.

Election poll graphic: http://r.reuters.com/was36s

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ENTER LE PEN

After a strong campaign start by Sarkozy in mid-February, Hollande seized back the momentum by proposing a 75 percent tax on annual income over a million euros which many French support.

Six weeks from the April 22 first round, Sarkozy will need to deliver more high-impact proposals to catch up with Hollande.

Sarkozy played to a TV audience of millions on Monday evening with a pledge to start making tax exiles pay some contributions back to France and promising to ease social charges on the self-employed if they are not making money.

An aide to Hollande told Reuters last week that the Socialist still had potential surprises up his own sleeve.

"The campaign is not about opinion polls, it's being played out on the ground," Hollande's campaign manager Pierre Moscovici said. "Public opinion still shows an extremely strong will for change."

In what has quickly shaped up as a two-man duel, Sarkozy is promising tighter immigration controls, structural economic reforms and policy referendums, while Hollande is running on a tax-and-spend programme while also promising deficit cuts.

While Hollande enjoys high popularity ratings, Sarkozy is being punished for his failure, as economic crisis rocked Europe, to deliver on a 2007 promise to restore full employment.

He also suffers from a widespread dislike of his impulsive and sometimes brash personality and from an early perception of him as too chummy with the wealthy elite.

Seeking to breathe new life into his campaign, Sarkozy said on Sunday that Europe should have a law, modelled on the Buy American Act, requiring governments to buy European products. He also threatened to pull France out of Europe's Schengen open-borders zone unless progress is made on controlling immigration.

Hollande said Sarkozy's move was a sign the incumbent was running out of inspiration. "He will try anything," the Socialist said in a France 3 television interview on Monday.

Sarkozy's proposal to make tax exiles declare taxes paid abroad and pay France the difference with what they would have contributed if still resident follows pledges of executive pay curbs and a minimum tax on company profits.

An Opinionway survey on Monday found half of respondents think Hollande is running the strongest campaign, and 38 percent rated firebrand leftist Jean-Luc Melenchon's most highly. Only 27 percent thought Sarkozy's campaign was best.

With critics saying Sarkozy is leaning too far to the right, as he did in his 2007 campaign, Le Pen's announcement that she has the backing to run removed one major uncertainty.

"I have my 500 signatures and therefore I will be a candidate in the presidential election," she told Reuters.

A charismatic speaker who has won a strong following since taking over the party leadership from her father Jean-Marie Le Pen in January 2011, Le Pen snapped at Sarkozy's heels in surveys last year but has slipped back and no longer seems likely to prevent Hollande and Sarkozy competing in a runoff.

(Additional reporting and writing by Catherine Bremer)