Sarkozy focus on security after Toulouse Well before the deadly burst of gunfire ended the terrorist siege in Toulouse on Thursday, political hostilities had resumed in Paris in the campaign for next month's presidential election. A temporary truce called by Nicolas Sarkozy, the president, and François Hollande, the socialist candidate and his main rival, after the killings at the Jewish school on Monday morning, was the minimum required by public decency - and political expediency. Both were due to return to the stump on Thursday evening but their lieutenants had already rejoined the fray with a vengeance. Mr Sarkozy's camp, buoyed by the success in finding the killer, left no doubt that he intends to make the national security concerns raised by the al-Qaeda-inspired Toulouse gunman a central campaign issue in the four weeks before the first round of voting on April 22. Leading the way was Jean-Francois Copé, head of Mr Sarkozy's centre-right UMP party and one of the president's top attack dogs. In an interview with Le Figaro, which strongly backs Mr Sarkozy, he accused the socialists and their Green allies of "denying the danger of fundamentalism" and said Mr Hollande had never made security a priority. Alain Juppé, the foreign minister who normally stays above domestic politics, weighed in with a similar attack on radio. Laurent Fabius, a former socialist prime minister who is playing a leading role in Mr Hollande's campaign, shot back that Mr Cope's comments were "stupid, and that is putting it kindly." Mr Fabius protested that a Hollande-led government would be "hard on crime." But the rapid hunting down of Mohamed Merah, the gunman, has burnished Mr Sarkozy's reputation for being decisive in a crisis and tough on crime and security issues, notwithstanding concerns over why Merah had dropped off the security force's radar. "This will definitely reinforce his strengths but it will also reinforce the weakness of his counterparty," said one close associate of the president. It is difficult to imagine François Hollande acting like him. That is probably unfair but that's the way it is. Less clear is how the Toulouse incident will affect support for Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front, who has seized on the fact that Merah was French to hammer home her message that the country, with its 5m Muslim community, faces a profound threat from homegrown extremism. "Since the start of this presidential campaign one has had the feeling that the problems of security and particularly the problems of Islamic fundamentalism were deliberately excluded," she said on Thursday. Before the Toulouse killings, as the national debate focused on issues such as unemployment and tax, Ms Le Pen had struggled to make progress in the polls, slipping back from the levels of about 20 per cent that she was achieving at the turn of the year, when it looked like she might even overtake Mr Sarkozy in the first round of voting and prevent him from going through to the second round run-off. Mr Sarkozy's supporters are confident that, even if Ms Le Pen gets a boost in the polls, he will still finish well ahead of her in the first round. A poll taken this week at the height of the shooting crisis put him in first place on 30 per cent for the first ballot, two points ahead of Mr Hollande and far ahead of the National Front leader. What the Sarkozy camp hopes is that his decisive action over the Toulouse crisis will persuade Le Pen voters, who polls show might otherwise abstain, to turn out for him in numbers for the second round, on May 6, where polls have him trailing Mr Hollande by a significant margin. The Toulouse attack has, for the time being at least, banished the small matter of the economy to the campaign sidelines. With unemployment at near 10 per cent, growth anaemic, a €70bn trade deficit and public debt running near 90 per cent of gross domestic product, economic issues had been expected to be decisive. Mr Hollande will doubtless be trying to swing the debate back in that direction as soon as possible.