Nicolas Sarkozy returns: The ex-President is preparing to fight for the leadership of France's main opposition party – but will he win big enough?

Mr Sarkozy has returned from retirement to head off scandal and a formidable rival in Alain Juppé. But it is a big risk...

Nicolas Sarkozy is about to complete his rise from the political dead. Déjà vu is not a compelling political narrative. The former President insists that he is a “changed” man: less abrasive, less cocksure and less impetuous.

Barring the wildly unforeseen, Mr Sarkozy will be elected as leader of France’s main centre-right party this weekend. At his last big campaign meeting before the vote begins on Friday, he did seem to have changed but not quite in the way that he claims.

Two minutes into his speech in the Paris suburbs, a supporter stepped forward to lower his microphone. Mr Sarkozy brushed him away, snapping: “Don’t touch anything. Don’t touch anything.” The ex-President, who has always been sensitive about his height, laughed it off. He went on to speak for 90 minutes with some of the flair of his rise to power between 2004 and 2007. He still has his familiar bodily tics: a self-congratulatory shiver of the shoulders when he says something statesman-like; a swaggering tug on his lapels when he says something clever. And yet this was not quite the Sarko of old. His hair was greyer. His voice was thinner and harsher. He lacked the compelling energy and fresh thinking of the candidate Sarko of a decade ago.

He turns 60 in January. Five tough years in the Elysée Palace, a bruising defeat in 2012 and a tangle of criminal investigations into his campaign finances have taken their toll.

During a question session, he made a clumsy mistake. He said that he had chosen the controversial Rachida Dati as his Justice Minister in 2007 because it “made sense” to have someone of Algerian and Moroccan origin in charge of “penal affairs”.

Within hours, he was accused of racial stereotyping. A vote on Friday and Saturday by the 260,000 members of the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP) will almost certainly restore Mr Sarkozy to the presidency of France’s main opposition party. He needs, however, to achieve a huge score if his gamble in returning early from “retirement” is to succeed.

Mr Sarkozy scored 85 per cent when he last became UMP president 10 years ago. Anything less than 70 per cent this time will be seen as a failure.

Since he announced his return in September, his support has been falling – within the party and even more so within the country. Both of his rivals this weekend are relatively unknown: the ex-farm minister Bruno Le Maire (who has emerged as a rising star) and the Anglophile social conservative Hervé Mariton (a man of limited appeal).

The latest polls put Mr Sarkozy’s UMP support at around 60 per cent. They are based, however, on samples of UMP voters, rather than party members. card-carriers tend to be more Sarkofanatical.

Why does Mr Sarkozy need a huge score? He plans to, in effect, abolish the UMP and rename it. He wants to push the new movement towards the mildly Eurosceptic and anti-immigrant right. Above all, he wants to turn the party into a vehicle to re-elect him President of the Republic in 2017.

A moderate Sarkozy victory would, therefore, be a de facto victory for a man who is not even running this weekend.

Alain Juppé ,the Chirac-era Prime Minister and Mayor of Bordeaux, is the early favourite for the 2017 presidential election. Mr Juppé, 69, trounces Mr Sarkozy in the polls as the best centre-right challenger to President François Hollande and the man most likely to see off the National Front,

In September, Mr Sarkozy was forced by financial scandals and by Mr Juppé’s rising popularity to fast-track his return to politics. By doing so, he hoped to dismiss as “politically motivated” the dozen or so investigations in which his name now appears. He calculated that an overwhelming victory in the internal election would make him, not Mr Juppé, the “natural” candidate for the centre-right.

Things are not going to plan. “Sarkozy’s performance since his return has been less than sure-footed,” one pro-Juppé UMP politician said: “It has reminded people of his record in office: a mixture of evasiveness and authoritarianism.

The UMP plans a centre-right “primary” in 2016. Mr Sarkozy originally wanted to dump the primary, leaving himself as the only candidate. He has been forced to backtrack but insists that primary voters must “prove” their centre-right “values”.

At a meeting of campaigners against gay marriage this month, he said the “marriage for all” law passed by Mr Hollande last year could be amended but not repealed. He was booed and did an instant U-turn.

In Bordeaux last weekend, Mr Sarkozy’s supporters whistled his rival Alain Juppé in his own city. The sarkofanatiques had been bussed in.

Although Mr Juppe has dismissed the incident, he has complained privately of a “filthy ambush”. “If Sarkozy wants war, he can have it,” he is reported to have said. In other words, the battle for the leadership, and soul, of the French centre-right is just beginning.