French Premier: Socialists Chose Too Soon

French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin on Sunday took a dig at the notion that Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy was the governing party's automatic presidential candidate, saying the debate is not yet over.

Villepin said that the "game has not been played out," dashing party hopes for quick unity around Sarkozy, particularly since the opposition Socialists have just picked their candidate, Segolene Royal.

The premier spoke three days after Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie openly questioned some of Sarkozy's stances at a party function with him in attendance.

Villepin, special guest on a television show, suggested that there is no reason to rush to choose a candidate with the April first-round presidential vote five months away.

The opposition Socialist Party erred in choosing its candidate so soon, he said.

The Socialists picked Segolene Royal in a party primary on Thursday, giving her more than 60 percent of the vote in a widely-watched internal election.

The 'gazelle' as Royal has called herself, has out-raced the elephants — the grey men of French politics who now find themselves up against a vibrant, fifty something woman given to wearing bright colors and a dazzling smile, reports CBS News foreign correspondent Shiela MacVicar.

She is not a political newcomer. But she does portray something fresh.

"We need change and Segolene is new," Jerome Godefroy, a political commentator for RTL, tells MacVicar. It's a new product and this is the reason why she is so appealing."

The fifty-three-year-old mother of four — now aged thirteen to twenty — has never married her long-time partner. In France, that's not a liability. In the past French politician's private lives have been off limits. But this summer, paparazzi photos showed her on the beach. The admiring comments that followed helped to spur voter interest.

Villepin said he personally fought so that his party, the governing Union for a French Movement, or UMP, waits to name its candidate, which it will do Jan. 14.

Sarkozy, who has for years set his sights on the presidency, is widely viewed as the candidate for the UMP party, which he heads. Villepin had at once point been considered a potential rival for the candidacy, but a series of government crises and a poor showing in polls all but ruled that out.

Villepin suggested that serious candidates could still emerge and that nothing has been set in stone.

"We are not yet at the end of the political debate concerning our family," Villepin said, referring to the UMP. "We must advance step by step. Each must advance at his own rhythm."

Villepin said he did not know whether President Jacques Chirac would seek a third term, and he refused to spell out his own intentions during the Sunday political talk show in which he appeared as a special guest. Alliot-Marie, the defense minister, also has hinted she might run. She was booed by some UMP members on Thursday after publicly disagreeing with some Sarkozy policies at a party function.

A divided governing party with several candidates risks opening the way to extreme-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen who stunned the nation with his second-place showing in the first round of the 2002 presidential race which set him up for a runoff with Chirac.

Asked about Le Pen, Villepin said he opposed "fishing in the waters of the National Front," Le Pen's anti-immigrant party, in search of votes — as some have accused Sarkozy of doing.