French celebrities desert Sarkozy in wake of attack on urban poor

France's interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, has discovered that calling people louts and rabble and threatening to "clean them off the streets" has won him few friends in celebrity circles.

Mr Sarkozy, whose injudicious use of language was partly blamed for exacerbating the recent urban riots, is now being abandoned by his friends in high places. Worse still, many of them are lining up to publicly put the boot into the man who hopes to be president in 2007.

The tennis player turned pop star Yannick Noah, actor and comedian Jamel Debbouze, who starred in Amélie, rapper Joey Starr and film director Luc Besson - of Subway, Nikita, Big Blue and Leon fame - are among those attacking Mr Sarkozy, who has been compared to far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen and Napoleon.

"Calling people racaille, I've not heard anything so violent since Le Pen and his hatred of anyone who is different," Besson told the film magazine Premier. In an interview with Paris Match, Noah - recently voted France's most popular personality - declared: "If Sarkozy succeeds [in 2007], then I'm off."

Even Debbouze, who had previously expressed qualified support for the minister, condemned him. The comic described the minister as "a bourgeois who arrives, cameras in tow, looks at the little rebels and tells them: 'I'm going to clean you out, you bunch of rabble'."

Until waves of rioting and urban violence broke out in France's grim high-rise city suburbs, Mr Sarkozy, a member of Jacques Chirac's right-of-centre government, appeared to be winning friends and influencing people across the political spectrum. His robust response to the terror threat was widely supported, and a tough new law that he sponsored, which increases surveillance options and lengthens detention periods for suspects, was adopted in parliament yesterday. Leftwing opponents had even congratulated him for his support of positive discrimination for France's mainly north African immigrant community, allowing the first legal rave party and campaigning for the end to the "double penalty" under which jailed immigrants were deported after serving their sentence.

Then he visited the notorious suburbs north of Paris - known as banlieues - and vowed: "The louts will disappear - we will clean this estate with a Kärcher." Kärcher is a make of high-pressure hose used to clean buildings. Some felt the minister, known for tough talking, had gone too far. The comedian Muriel Robin told a chatshow: "For a guy to use words like Kärcher makes me feel bad."

The former footballer Eric Cantona told the Observer: "It's not easy growing up in a bad neighbourhood. People look at you and treat you in a certain way. In France we are capable of celebrating a man like Napoleon, who brought back slavery. Today he has been replaced by a man who, for me, is Le Pen with a mask: Sarkozy."

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