An absent President will cast a long shadow across the hall in Paris where thousands of Gaullist activists meet tomorrow to give a rousing send-off to Nicolas Sarkozy as he embarks on his campaign for the French presidency.

As the party’s only nominee, the pugnacious leader of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) can count on overwhelming endorsement for the candidacy after two weeks of voting by 300,000 members.

Up to 50,000 will converge on the Porte de Versailles exhibition centre to ensure a spectacular coronation for the reformist party leader and Interior Minister.

The shadow over the proceedings is that of President Chirac, 74, who has failed to stand aside to let the heir to his party get on with fighting Ségolène Royal, the popular Socialist candidate. After two months of unchallenged campaigning, Ms Royal, 53, enjoys a small lead, according to polls.

With time running out before the first round on April 22, Mr Chirac has astonished and angered most of his loyalists by refusing to give his blessing to Mr Sarkozy, 51. He is toying publicly with the idea of running for a third term.

The President’s conduct, along with that of Dominique de Villepin, his Prime Minister, is seen by all but his inner circle as mischief-making to weaken a subordinate with whom he has feuded for more than a decade. Mr de Villepin, a career civil servant appointed by the President, kept up the offensive this week, saying that he would not back Mr Sarkozy.

There was anger within the UMP this week when the parliamentary party showered Mr de Villepin with contempt for his spoiling action. Françoise de Panafieu, a former Chirac minister and senior party official, said yesterday: “President Chirac is very alone on his planet.”

The UMP, which was formed when the RPR (Gaullist) party incorporated smaller centre-right groups in 2002, would be completely united on Sunday, “with the exception of the Prime Minister, who has never himself been elected,” she said.

The only other prominent dissident, Michèle Alliot-Marie, the Defence Minister, was expected last night to announce her support for Mr Sarkozy. The biggest sign that Mr Chirac’s supporters are now siding with Mr Sarkozy came this week when Alain Juppé, Mr Chirac’s former prime minister and longstanding lieutenant, announced his support for the Interior Minister.

The struggle between the two men has a Shakespearian flavour. Mr Chirac, who has spent the past four decades in high office, is being depicted as an ageing monarch who is unable to relinquish power to an estranged spiritual son.

Mr Sarkozy, a member of Mr Chirac’s Cabinet since 2002 as Interior and Finance Minister, wrested control of the party from the President in 2004 and is campaigning for “une rupture” with the past. Yet he has spent his career modelling himself on Mr Chirac, whom he used to see as his political father-figure. Both men are brilliant tacticians but Mr Sarkozy’s big blunder was to betray Mr Chirac and support Edouard Balladur, his Gaullist rival, in the 1995 campaign that took the President to power.

The political profiles of the elderly President and his mutinous minister are so similar that a foreigner might imagine they were the same man, Libération commented yesterday. Mr Sarkozy was a pastiche of the Gaullist warhorse, it noted, right up to choosing for his rally tomorrow the same hall where Mr Chirac founded the RPR (Rassemblement pour la Republique) 30 years ago.

Mr Sarkozy, the son of a Hungarian immigrant, faces a formidable challenge from Ms Royal as he launches himself into what many see as the most important election since the late François Mitterrand led the Socialists to power in 1981.

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