PARIS (Reuters) — The burned-out cars, torched store fronts, scattered bricks and petrol bombs are gone, but last year’s riots still hang over 2007 French presidential elections like a storm cloud before a downpour.Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy won strong public support for his handling of the three-week crisis, despite criticism that his use of strong language to describe unruly suburban youths helped fuel rioting that began last October 27.

The suburbs represent a microcosm of many of the problems France faces: unemployment — in areas four times the national average of nine percent — poverty, immigration, crime and an acute sense of exclusion among minorities from mainstream society.

Some analysts say Sarkozy, the conservative presidential frontrunner, will easily win the election next spring if the problems of rundown suburbs ringing many French towns become the major issue for voters on polling day.

“The left’s mistake (in the 2002 election) was to allow security to dominate the debate,” said political scientist Emmanuel Le Masson, who teaches at the Mediterranean University in Aix-en-Provence.

“When that happened, they lost, because on that issue the left appears to the French people as less relevant than the right,” said Le Masson.

Polls make Sarkozy best-placed to hand the right victory next year, but his real foes and false friends disparage a plain-speaking style they say alienates voters and makes him part of the problem in the suburbs, not the solution.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin struck a consensual tone on the suburbs in an interview in Le Monde daily on Tuesday, the sort of sniping designed to keep himself in contention should Sarkozy’s poll ratings suddenly tumble.

Political scientist Dominique Reynie noted the right has had two candidates at every presidential poll since 1965 and only lost when competition within the right turned poisonous.

“If they’re firing red-hot cannon balls at each other obviously that won’t be good. That’s what happened in 1981,” he said of the bitter rivalry between two right wing candidates that gave Socialist Francois Mitterrand a narrow win.

Sarkozy’s most likely challenger next April, Segolene Royal, sees herself as Mitterrand’s political heir and her “tough love” message on crime aims to prevent any repeat of 2002 when law and order issues cost the Socialists the election.

Her call for boot camps for young offenders dismayed some party stalwarts but proved popular with party workers, who saw her as giving the Socialists a fighting chance against Sarkozy.

The anniversary of last year’s riots, the worst in four decades, has put the suburbs back on the front pages, aided by a spate of vicious attacks by youths on police and leaked police reports warning that trouble could erupt at any time.

Royal hopes her line of firmness and justice will strike a chord with voters while Sarkozy’s record on defeating crime is under fire over a steep rise in violent crime. That could allow the left to push alternative policies.

“The strategy of the Socialist Party is to oppose a security policy that has failed, with proposals on a ‘social’ security,” said Jean-Christophe Cambadelis, the party’s national secretary.

“If Mayor Rudy Giuliani resolved the problem in New York it is not because he put police everywhere but because there was also economic growth.”

But few analysts see crime playing well for the Socialists. Veteran commentator Jacques Julliard said Sarkozy had embraced his hardline image because “it allows him to cement his own electorate and broaden it to the working classes who normally vote left, but who see in him the best defender of republican order”.

And Francois Miquet-Marty of pollster LH2 said voters might turn to the extremes rather than the Socialists if they felt Sarkozy’s tough policies were failing to produce results.

“The main risk of the current situation in the suburbs is that it will fan a sense among low income people that the government has not really managed to resolve this problem ... and that, perhaps, the far right offers better solutions,” he said.