Sarkozy pledges war on crime to woo far-right vote in European elections

French president announces plans to search pupils for weapons at school gates and flood troubled ghettoes with police

• Angelique Chrisafis in Paris
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 28 May 2009 14.42 BST
• Article history

Nicolas Sarkozy today set out to charm extreme-right voters with a draconian crime crackdown, announcing children's bags would be searched for knives at the school gates and troubled high-rise ghettoes would be flooded with police.

The hardline measures marked a return to the president's favourite campaign issues: crime and insecurity. Sarkozy has turned the European elections into a referendum on himself and, true to his strategy in previous elections, he wants to win over extreme right-wingers to his centre-right party and dent the already weak Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front in next month's vote.

France's president Nicolas Sarkozy outlines his plans to fight crime in a speech at the Elysée Palace. Photograph: Philippe Wojazer/Reuters

In a speech at the Elysée, Sarkozy said school staff would be authorised to search students' bags for weapons on the way into schools, where mobile police units would be deployed to tackle violence.

France has been gripped by a row over how to handle classroom crime after a 13-year-old near Toulouse stabbed a teacher in the chest with a kitchen knife, nearly killing her. Another teenager was treated in hospital after a hammer attack on his way to school and there have been recent incidents of pupils brandishing kitchen knives, saying teachers had given them bad grades.

But the head of the UNSA teaching union, Patrick Gonthier, dismissed the new measures as "useless dramatisation" and said another round of school security policies would not solve the root problems of France's troubled students.

Sarkozy also ordered police to step up lightning raids on high-rise ghettoes, flooding the estates with officers to "reconquer" France's troubled suburbs.

The measure is likely to increase tension on the estates which are already on a knife-edge in their uneasy relationship with police, who favour heavyhanded riot-cop raids rather than long-term community policing.

Sarkozy said: "The presence of the security forces there must be continuous, visible and massive. No street, no basement, no stairwell must be abandoned to the hooligans."

He said 25 estates riddled with crime, arms and drug-trafficking would be targeted by massive police operations – almost all in the Paris suburbs. He ordered police to "scour" buildings, apartments and squats.

The president also said video surveillance and security cameras in troubled areas across the country would be increased, and simply being a member of a gang would be punishable by up to three years in prison.

The beleaguered Socialist party, which is lagging behind Sarkozy's ruling centre-right UMP party in the European election polls, accused the president of wheeling out "repressive security policies" to play to the public gallery. A UMP spokesman said the socialists had their heads in the sand.