French President Nicolas Sarkozy said he should have resisted the temptation to swear at a critical bystander at a trade fair at the weekend but stopped short of apologizing in a newspaper interview yesterday.

A much-viewed video of the clash posted on Le Parisien's website showed him using an insult when a man in the crowd at an agricultural fair refused to shake his hand on Saturday.

"It is difficult even when you are the president not to respond to an insult," Sarkozy told a panel of Le Parisien's readers in an interview which the newspaper said was arranged well before the weekend.

"Just because you are the president doesn't mean you become a doormat. That said, I would have done better not to reply to him."

The admission failed to put an end to the controversy after a senior editor at Le Parisien, Dominique de Montvalon, told Canal Plus television Sarkozy had never uttered the last sentence and that it had been added by the president's office afterwards.

The interviewing panel "find in the newspaper something which the president never said, which they never heard", Montvalon said, adding the newspaper would publish the original version of the interview today.

Sarkozy's office said that while the phrase might not have been said, it corresponded to the president's state of mind.

The exchange between Sarkozy and the unidentified man came at a time when opinion polls show the president's popularity at 36 percent, its lowest since his May 2007 election and down 19 points in just three months.

In the interview Sarkozy brushed off the polls, which have also shown Prime Minister Francois Fillon eclipsing his boss.

"You can't believe that when the polls are good that everything is going well and that when the polls are bad, everything is going badly," he said.

"My vision of the role of the president is not to cultivate friendship, to be the friend that you would dream of having."

His aim was rather to act on all fronts to shake up France and get results, he said.

"It is my duty to be hyperactive to wake up a country which was dozing," Sarkozy said.

"If I don't bang the table, if I don't demand results, nothing happens."

Agencies

(China Daily 02/27/2008 page12)