Sarkozy pins dream on bricks and mortar

· Tax breaks designed to help French home buyers
· Socialists say rising prices boom will help only rich
The French president hopes to encourage a nation of tenants to become homeowners. Photograph: Bruno de Hogues/Getty
While the British have rushed to buy crumbling cottages in the Dordogne and Americans have snapped up Parisian apartments, the French, often life-long tenants, have watched the "Anglo-Saxon" property craze with a mixture of bemusement and worry.

But the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, yesterday stepped up his plans for a Thatcherite homeowners' revolution, as Socialists warned that his incentives for French buyers could send house prices soaring.

Mr Sarkozy portrays himself as the son of an immigrant who succeeded through hard work and ambition, and he has promised the nation a "French dream" inspired by American-style social-climbing and meritocracy. The key to this new generation of strivers is bricks and mortar.

Currently only 57% of French people are homeowners compared to 70% in Britain and 84% in Spain, but Mr Sarkozy wants to turn the figures around and create a "nation of property owners".

He said this week that home ownership was "everyone's dream" and, when asked in February what he would do if he won the lottery, he replied he would "buy a house". Days later, he was forced to deny newspaper allegations that he benefited from a substantial discount on a luxury apartment in Paris's richest suburb which he sold last year.

Mr Sarkozy promised tax breaks to help French buyers, but a row erupted this week over who would benefit. Initially the budget minister, Eric Woerth, said only those who bought homes after Mr Sarkozy's May 6 election would be eligible. But in a speech in Le Havre on Tuesday night, Mr Sarkozy - in campaign mode as he canvassed for his expected rightwing majority in June's parliamentary elections - promised that everyone in France with a mortgage on their main family home would benefit as interest repayments became tax-deductible.

Estate agents were ecstatic, hoping that a potential buying spree would revive the flagging housing market in the euro zone's second-biggest economy.

But the Socialist opposition warned the measure may favour the rich, and could send prices soaring to impossible levels.

Bernard Cadeau, president of France's biggest estate agents' network, ORPI, tried to stem fears, telling the news agency Agence France-Presse that house prices were unlikely to immediately soar as they were linked to "a range of factors", including high demand and foreign buyers.

Meanwhile, as Mr Sarkozy enjoys the highest popularity of a new French president since Charles de Gaulle returned from the political wilderness in 1958, "Sarkomania" has boosted another market. The Le Monde newspaper yesterday surveyed the Sarkozy memorabilia on eBay ranging from the free flip-flops of his party's beach campaign to signed books and photographs priced between €30 (£20) and €300, calculating that his market was bigger than those of the last two American presidents. He has already sparked a boom in political book sales with a biography and his own campaign books returning to the top of the bestseller lists.

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