There has been a very hard turnout. The moderate former prime minister Alain Jupp and two more right wingers Nicolas Sarkozy and Franois Fillon appeared to be leading contenders.
And she has often found it hard to work with others: she eventually forged a relationship with France's Nicolas Sarkozy, but has not got on with his successor, Franois Hollande.
Cycles of prosecutions in Latin America, for example, in Brazil, between various former presidents as well as Nicolas Sarkozy in France, Jacob Zuma in South Africa and Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel.
So in 2008 said an embarrassed Nicolas Sarkozy, then France's president, exasperated by the near-impossibility of hailing a cab on the capital's streets.
The former French President Nicolas Sarkozy has rejected media allegations that he received confidential information from a senior prosecutor about criminal cases against him.
Mr Sarkozy was found to have entered a pact with a judge to get information about a legal investigation using a secret telephone line to speak to his former lawyer.