Sarkozy woos far right after Hollande wins round one

President Nicolas Sarkozy hammered home pledges to get tough on immigration and security as he sought to win over record numbers of far-right voters and whittle down Socialist Francois Hollande's narrow first-round election lead.

The centre-left Hollande pipped Sarkozy in Sunday's 10-candidate first round by 28.6 percent to 27.1 percent, but it was National Front leader Marine Le Pen who stole the show by surging to 18 percent, the biggest tally a far-right candidate has ever managed.

Her performance mirrored advances across the continent by anti-establishment Eurosceptical populists from Amsterdam and Vienna to Helsinki and Athens as the euro zone's grinding debt crisis deepens anger over government spending cuts and unemployment.

Sarkozy, the first sitting president to be forced into second place in the first round of a re-election bid, faced a difficult balancing act as campaigning restarted on Monday to attract both the far-right and centrist voters he needs to win the May 6 runoff.

"Today, I return to the campaign trail," Sarkozy said in a statement. "I will continue to uphold our values and commitments: respect for our borders, the fight against factories moving abroad, controlling immigration, the security of our families."

After five years of leading the world's fifth economy, a nuclear power and activist U.N. Security Council member, Sarkozy could go the way of 10 other euro zone leaders swept from office since the start of the crisis in late 2009.

Opinion polls on Sunday said 57-year-old Hollande, who has vowed to change the direction of Europe if elected by tempering austerity measures with greater social justice, would likely win the decider with between 53 and 56 percent of the vote.

But Le Pen's strong showing offered Sarkozy an unexpected ray of hope. "The breakthrough by Marine Le Pen throws the second round wide open," ran the headline in right-leaning Le Figaro newspaper, while left-of-centre Liberation wrote: "Hollande in front. Le Pen the killjoy".