Sarkozy, the speedy saviour

France's new interior minister wants things to change - fast - and voters love his attitude, reports Jon Henley

"Sleep easy: Sarko's watching over you" was the front-page headline of Le Parisien yesterday, a day after the shining megastar of France's political firmament made his latest TV appearance - watched by nearly 30% of the viewing public, a record for a political programme.

The extraordinary ascension and ever-soaring popularity of the hard-hitting interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy ("Speedy" to his multitudinous fans) has been the biggest surprise of the first few post-electoral months in France since the centre-right government swept to power last June.

Diminutive, pugnacious, plain-speaking but somehow always human, the former barrister is everywhere. Hours after a meeting in London with his British opposite number, David Blunkett, with whom he successfully negotiated the closure of the Sangatte refugee camp, he was in a small town outside Lyon to denounce as an "assassin" the speeding driver who killed five volunteer firemen.

A couple of days later, he announced in front of a large Parisian department store the deployment of 1,000 extra policemen to counter the threat of terrorism over the Christmas period. At roughly the same time, a plane was taking off from Charles de Gaulle airport carrying back to Bucharest the first of the illegal Romanian immigrants that Sarko has had deported.

Shortly after, his office announced a 5.3% year-on-year fall in November's crime figures; police arrested seven Corsican separatists suspected of mounting a bombing campaign on the troublesome island for whose future Sarko is responsible; and the minister himself announced the recruitment of a young magistrate of north African origin as his special adviser on immigration and delinquence.

With every political hot potato in his lap - crime, immigration, Corsica, terrorism, road safety, prostitution - he deals frankly, decisively and above all energetically. He has a rule: never to let a single day go by without making a visit to somewhere sensitive or an announcement about something sensitive. As a result, he is never out of the papers for longer than 24 hours.

He has won the praise of the far-right National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen (who called him "sympathetic, dynamic and active", before Sarko wiped the floor with him in a television debate) and the communist mayor of Calais, Jacky Henin, who called Sarko's unstinting efforts in the Sangatte affair "the work of a true professional".

Concretely, since taking office Sarkozy has won an extra 5.6bn euros for the police, allowing him to hire an extra 13,500 new policemen over the next five years. He has started a massive reorganisation of the police force, bringing both the national police and paramilitary gendarmerie under his control.

He has negotiated Sangatte's closure (after being the first government minister to actually visit it), and tabled new legislation making youths who gather in stairwells or other communal areas of apartment blocks liable to two months in jail, effectively outlawing streetwalkers and banning "aggressive begging".

Thanks to Sarko, for the first time since the 1950s, frequent young offenders can now be imprisoned in youth detention centres from the age of 13. Swearing at a policeman or government official can bring a two-year jail sentence and police powers to search vehicles and frisk individuals have been radically extended.

In the wake of elections dominated by the issue of law and order, Sarkozy was deliberately appointed to play the hard man to prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin's amiable uncle. He is unashamedly rightwing - what he calls "Republican, moderate, Gaullist right", and he believes that previous conservative governments have failed by not calling a spade a spade.

He does not hesitate to use tough language, calling drunken drivers "murderers" and teenage gang-rapists "barbarians". It is time, in politics, to use "real words", he says. He has an answer to everything, but he is the first to admit (as in the case of the intractable problem of Corsica) that he is "more likely to fail than to succeed".

But, Sargozy insists, part of his job is to try to cure a French disease: "That because we cannot tackle everything, we end up tackling nothing" - the approach that, he argues, led the previous Socialist government to defeat and Le Pen into the second round of the presidential elections.

And to those he scornfully calls "the human rightists", who say he is indulging in a frenzy of repression, tackling symptoms rather than causes and ignoring education and prevention, he says he is looking after the interests of the French people.

"Human rights," he says, "should be first and foremost about the victims." Last but not least, his impressive armoury includes the necessary ingredients of sincerity and passion. "The terrible thing about what I do," he said on television the other night, "is that I believe in it, I care about it and I believe with all my heart that it is right". It all goes down a treat with the public. Recent polls show well over 60% of the electorate, including those on the left, think Sarko is pretty much the greatest thing to hit French politics since De Gaulle. Essentially, it is almost impossible to argue with the man.

Leftwing MPs such as Jean-Marc Ayrault, leader of the Socialist group in the National assembly, are left to bleat about "Sarko-mania" and the dangers of "the one-man Sarkozy-show", but few listen. What's more, Sarko is perfectly capable of adopting overtly leftwing causes, pleading, for example, for more humane treatment of illegal immigrants who have established family roots in France.

In the end, though, it may be his very success that does for Nicolas Sarkozy. He has made no secret of his presidential ambitions, and the powerful dinosaurs in President Jacques Chirac's UMP party are unlikely to take kindly to living for too long in the shadow of the brilliant young interior minister. Speedy Sarko's most dangerous enemies will probably come from within his own camp.