PARIS (AFP) - Socialist Segolene Royal warned Friday that France could slide into violence if Nicolas Sarkozy wins the presidency as the rightwinger extended his poll lead on the final day of the hard fought campaign.
Royal, seeking to become France's first woman president, said she was "issuing an alert" that a Sarkozy victory in the election on Sunday could "trigger violence and brutalities across the country."
"His candidacy is dangerous. That is why I am asking voters to think twice," Royal told RTL radio on the last day of campaigning in one of the most exciting elections in decades.
Sarkozy cemented his frontrunner position as the four latest polls showed he would beat Royal with between 53 percent and 54.5 percent of votes, against a range of 45.5 and 47 percent for the Socialist.
The candidate of President Jacques Chirac's governing party gained between half a percentage point to 2.5 points in the polls carried out after a heated television debate Wednesday evening.
Royal described her rival as "the candidate of the hard right", backed by big media and financial interests and underscored that he was unwelcome in the high-immigrant suburbs that exploded into rioting while he served as interior minister.
Sarkozy dismissed Royal's attacks as "outrageous" and said she was upset by her drop in the polls.
"It must be the polls. It's so outrageous," Sarkozy said of her comments in an interview with Europe 1 radio. "She is getting tense, stiffer, because she feels the ground shifting."
Sarkozy is seen as a divisive figure by many on the left and in the troubled suburbs for his tough talk on controlling immigration and restoring law and order.
His description of young delinquents in the suburbs as "racaille" -- "rabble" -- turned him into an enemy of the Arab and African residents in the areas around Paris and major cities that were rocked by three weeks of riots in late 2005.
Royal was to travel to Brittany in the northwest on Friday while Sarkozy headed to Haute-Savoie in the southeast to wrap up campaigning in the election to choose a successor to Chirac.
During his final big rally in the southern city of Montpellier late Thursday, a confident Sarkozy urged supporters to help him "create the conditions for a French rebirth" as he appeared increasingly sure of victory.
"People accuse me of encouraging public anger. But who's angry? The yobs? The drug-traffickers? I can assure you: I do not seek to be the friend of yobs. My aim is not to make myself popular among the traffickers and the fraudsters," he thundered.
In the northern city of Lille, Royal hammered home on her campaign theme of bringing change to France without brutality, saying she wanted "a new France, a protecting France, a fraternal France, a competitive France."
The 53-year-old former adviser to president Francois Mitterrand said "victory was within reach", a day after she clashed with Sarkozy in a television debate seen as her last chance to change the predicted outcome.
While commentators judged the debate to be a draw, polls showed that a majority of viewers rated Sarkozy "more convincing" than Royal.
Nearly seven million voters who backed centrist Francois Bayrou in the April 22 first round of the election have been courted assiduously by Royal and Sarkozy ahead of the runoff and are thought to hold the key to victory.
But an Ifop poll showed that Bayrou's electorate was split equally between Sarkozy and Royal who would both get 43 percent of their votes.
Voters in overseas departments are to cast ballots on Saturday with some 44.5 million people in mainland France to go to the polls on Sunday.
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