Dominique de Villepin announces he will run for French presidency

Dominique de Villepin, former French prime minister and right-wing politician, announced on Sunday that he will run for president in 2012.

"I intend to defend a certain idea of France," Villepin told TF1 television. "I have a conviction: the 2012 meeting will be a meeting of truth, courage and will." 

Villepin is a bitter rival of President Nicolas Sarkozy, and was recently acquitted for participating in a smear campaign against the president, which claimed that Sarkozy had taken secret kickbacks from arms deals with Taiwan and deposited them in a Luxembourg bank. The trial focused on a web of claims about who was responsible for a fake list of names of participants in the scandal being released to the press, and whether or not Villepin could have put a stop to it, AFP reported. 

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In September, a lawyer reportedly close to Sarkozy claimed that Villepin and Chirac had taken $20 million in cash from African leaders, which both politicians vehemently denied, AFP reported. 

Though Sarkozy has not formally declared that he will run for re-election, he is widely expected to do so, BBC News reported.

Francois Bayrou, a former education minister and centrist politician who was popular in the 2007 election, announced he will be running for president on Wednesday, Reuters reported. Socialist candidate Francois Hollande is the current front runner in a recent poll by LH2, with 31.5 percent of projected votes. Sarkozy has 26 percent, and Bayrou has 13 percent, on par with far-right candidate Marin le Pen, who has 13.5 percent. Villepin is currently unpopular amongst voters, with only 1 percent of the votes. However, Villepin is expected to steer some conservative votes away from Sarkozy, AFP reported. 

Some analysts think it will be difficult for Villepin to be considered as serious competition for Sarkozy, as many of his friends and allies are now in the president's UMP party, BBC News correspondent Hugh Schofield reported. Villepin has also recently been named in a corruption inquiry; he is said to have put pressure on a businessman to withhold information from police that would have implicated a friend of his, BBC reported. 

"Ten years is too long" for the country to be ruled by Sarkozy, Villepin told TF1 television during his announcement. 

"Today we are losing a large part of our sovereignty. We are aligning ourselves with interests that are not those of France. I believe one needs more courage than that," Villepin said. "I have confidence in the ability of the French people to discern what is in the public interest and to what point, more than ever, national unity is required of us all." 

Villepin, 58, was a protege of former president Jacques Chirac, and served as his foreign minister from 2002 to 2004 and as prime minister from 2005 to 2007, AFP reported. Though he is a political insider, he has never run for public office. 

He is positing himself as being above party politics, and has created a new party, United Republic (In French, Republique solitaire) with some members of Sarkozy's ruling party, the UMP. 

"I want to reunite all the French, those on the left, those on the right, and those in the center," Villepin told the TF1 channel.

French voters will elect their new president in a first round of elections in April, possibly followed by another round in May. Parliamentary elections are in June.