French President

Conservative Nicolas Sarkozy won France's presidential election on Sunday, beating his Socialist rival Segolene Royal by a comfortable margin and extending the right's 12-year grip on power.

Within minutes of polls closing, Royal conceded defeat in a speech to party faithful in the heart of Paris.

Forecasts by four pollsters showed Sarkozy, 52, a hardline former interior minister, won around 53 percent of the vote in the second-round ballot and will succeed fellow conservative Jacques Chirac, who was president for 12 years.

Turnout was some 85 percent, the highest since 1981.

Sarkozy's face flashed up on television screens after polling stations closed at 8 p.m. (1800 GMT), signaling his victory and setting off jubilant scenes among supporters gathered in central Paris.

A swarm of cameramen on motorbikes followed his car as he swept through the city at twilight to talk to his supporters.

Across the French capital at Socialist headquarters, there was gloom after the party crashed to its third consecutive presidential election defeat. Party heavyweights immediately called for reform to make itself more appealing to voters.

Although opinion polls regularly suggested voters preferred Royal, who was seeking to become France's first woman head of state, they saw the uncompromising Sarkozy as a more competent leader with a more convincing economic program.

Sarkozy, the son of a Hungarian immigrant, presented himself as the "candidate of work," promising to loosen the 35-hour work week by offering tax breaks on overtime and to trim fat from the public service, cut taxes and wage war on unemployment.

On foreign policy, Sarkozy is more pro-American than Chirac, but has made clear he opposes the war in Iraq and will find it hard to ally himself too closely to Washington because of anti-U.S. sentiment at home.