Nicolas Sarkozy dropped in on a Paris refuge for women yesterday in a loaded first act of his duel for the presidency with Ségolène Royal.

The conservative Mr Sarkozy’s session with battered and homeless women started a new campaign to convince voters that the winner of the first round on Sunday is compassionate and not the heartless sectarian of left-wing caricature.

Ms Royal, the socialist whose offer of a new feminine style of leadership helped to take her to second place on Sunday, has promised a law on violence against women as her first presidential act if she wins on May 6.

Now that both candidates are fighting for the middle ground, Ms Royal’s chief tactic is to fan opposition to Mr Sarkozy’s abrasive nature and tough doctrines among centrist voters. After scoring 26 per cent on Sunday against Mr Sarkozy’s 31 per cent, Ms Royal called him the would-be monarch of a “France ruled by the law of the strongest and most brutal”.

Accompanied by Simone Veil, the revered doyenne of French politics, Mr Sarkozy told the shelter residents yesterday: “I want to take those who suffer under my care. I want to say that there is hope for the most broken down, most damaged women.”

Mr Sarkozy’s visit was part of a battle for the seven million voters who gave François Bayrou of the centrist Union for French Democracy 18 per cent of Sunday’s vote. After wooing far-right voters with a virile, nationalist line, Mr Sarkozy is now promising “protection for the weakest”.

His new slogan, adapted from Martin Luther King, is “A dream of a new France”.

To take the presidency, Ms Royal must win the affections of the majority of Mr Bayrou’s voters, who liked neither Mr Sarkozy’s plans for turbo-charged reform nor her promises of a protective moral revival. Relishing his power to influence the outcome, Mr Bayrou is to outline his views tomorrow.

François Hollande, the Socialist party chief and Ms Royal’s partner, said that he found it hard to believe that his voters would back Mr Sarkozy because “many of the voters who chose François Bayrou did so because they wanted to beat Nicolas Sarkozy”.

The Sarkozy team is making overtures to the centrist leader, who was allied with them until 2002. Some politicians believe that that he will keep a distance from both big parties in the hope of creating a new centre-left party after a Royal defeat.

As the first round was acclaimed a triumph for democracy, Sunday’s arithmetic made clear that the election is Mr Sarkozy’s to lose. Exit polls in a vote with the highest turn-out in four decades — 85 per cent — showed the leader of the neo-Gaullist Union for a Popular Majority enjoying a four-to-eight point advantage over Ms Royal in a notional run-off.

This could evaporate, but Mr Sarkozy’s advantage is illustrated by the total 36 per cent of the vote that went to all left-wing candidates on Sunday, the lowest for decades. Ms Royal failed to win over working-class voters, but scored especially high among civil servants and in the troubled immigrant areas with high unemployment.

Mr Sarkozy can count on part of the 10.5 per cent of the vote that went to Jean-Marie Le Pen of the far-right National Front. Mr Le Pen’s lowest score for 15 years was seen as a final humiliation for the 76-year-old anti-immigrant campaigner. He was bitter at losing one million of his 2002 votes and denounced the “blindness of the French”.

Commentators hailed his collapse and the record turn-out as proof that France had restored its faith in politics.

Ms Royal and Mr Sarkozy are expected to hold the first and only candidates’ debate in the long campaign on May 2. They both headed south yesterday for a new round of rallies.

Ms Royal aims, while playing to the anti-Sarkozy feeling, to inject energy into a lacklustre campaign and convince voters that she has presidential stature. Mr Hollande said that this would come about now that she had earned her spurs in the first round.

However doubts persisted after her uninspiring performance in a first appearance after Sunday’s vote. Michel Rocard, a former Socialist Prime Minister, did not help the Royalists’ morale yesterday when he said that he was worried about the candidate’s chances. He said: “Nicolas Sarkozy is not badly placed and the reserve of leftwing votes is weak.”

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