Sarkozy's former protégé joins rebels in anger at lurch to right

(AFP/ GETTY IMAGES)

Rama Yade, the young black woman who once symbolised President Nicolas Sarkozy's overtures to racial minorities, yesterday accused him of "poaching on the territory" of the far-right National Front.

Ms Yade, 34, dumped from her ministerial post in a cabinet reshuffle last month, announced that she was joining forces with the centrist ex-environment minister, Jean-Louis Borloo, who may run against Mr Sarkozy in 2012.

The Senegalese-born former sports and human rights minister said that she had offered to work on social questions – such as unemployment and poverty – for Mr Sarkozy's centre-right party. He had been enthusiastic but the new leadership of the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP) had shown no interest, she said.

"They didn't understand what I was talking about because their priority now is to hold back the National Front by poaching on its territory," she said yesterday. The xenophobic, nationalist party is expected to elect Marine Le Pen, daughter of its retiring founder-president, Jean-Marie Le Pen, as its new leader next month. Ms Le Pen, 42, who promises to "modernise" and "de-demonise" the party, is riding relatively high – at 12 to 14 per cent – in national opinion polls.

Mr Sarkozy is said to fear that a high score for the NF in the first round of the presidential election in May 2012 could damage his own chances of winning a second term. He has placed a renewed emphasis on "law and order" and "national identity", including a crack-down on Roma migrants from eastern Europe.

Ms Yade, who came to France with her parents at the age of 11, said that this policy was mistaken and short-sighted. "By obsessing about security and the National Front, we are forgetting what really worries the people of France," she told the newspaper Le Parisien.

"We have not grasped that the success of this NF with a new face is not just based on security and immigration... They are also talking about so

cial problems and the suffering of people in the recession. That's why Marine Le Pen is so audible."

Ms Yade said that she had decided to join the Radical Party, run by Mr Borloo, who left the government last month because he was denied a much-anticipated promotion to prime minister.

Since the Radicals are part of Mr Sarkozy's UMP, Ms Yade said that she would also remain within the governing party. She evaded questions on whom she would support if – as widely expected – both men run in the first round of the presidential election in 2012.

Her comments yesterday amounted to a public repudiation of her political mentor. Ms Yade, a Muslim married to a Jewish socialist, had never run for political office before she was made a foreign minister for human rights in May 2007.

She, like the ex-justice minister, Rachida Dati, was catapulted into government to smash a de-facto race barrier in French politics and to demonstrate to white, grey-suited, middle-aged, male politicians that preferment was now in the gift of Mr Sarkozy alone. Unlike Ms Dati, Ms Yade became one of the most popular politicians in France, partly because she was willing to stand up to Mr Sarkozy in public.

She infuriated him by criticising his decision to invite Muammar Gaddafi for a state visit to Paris in 2008.

The Libyan leader, she said, should not be allowed to use France as a "doormat to wipe the blood off his feet". She was demoted, then fired in November.