The secretary-general of French president Nicolas Sarkozy's party may have the most difficult job in the country
Jean-François Copé leans back and contemplates the Zorro-masked crusader figurine on his desk. "My mother bought it for me when I joined the government," he says. "Because Zorro fights injustice and when he's knocked off his horse, he gets straight back on. And now I've got Napoleon next to him," he adds, rearranging a plastic Bonaparte.
Copé, dubbed Sarkozilla for his killer political ambition, is the man with the most difficult task in France.
He holds the key to whether the country can lift itself out of the gloom-ridden, scaremongering, anti-Muslim, nationalistic extremism which intellectuals warn has taken over mainstream debate.
Secretary general of Nicolas Sarkozy's rightwing ruling UMP party, humiliated in local elections this week when the extreme-right Front National virtually equalled its score, he must convince the classic French right to resist the onslaught of Marine Le Pen.
Yet he is unabashed about appropriating far-right topics. He is the man behind the "burqa ban", which means from next month women in niqab, or Muslim full-face coverings, will be banned from all public places.
He is about to lead a controversial national "debate" on Islam to decide the place of Muslims in the secular state.
A friend of David Cameron and William Hague, he has declared he will run for the French presidency in 2017. In the meantime, he must try to stop the UMP collapsing and Sarkozy being eliminated from next year's presidential race.
"He and Sarkozy were rivals for years, their personalities, and egos, are so similar," said one party member in Paris. "But now we're seriously looking to Copé to get us out of this terrible mess."
Copé is an MP with a bulldozer reputation for rebelling against Sarkozy as head of the UMP parliament group. He's as interested as the president in targeting "national identity", integrating immigrants and blasting crime.
His family, Jews originally from eastern Europe, were saved from the Nazi concentration camp roundups by a French family who hid them. As mayor of Meaux outside Paris, he proudly dynamited the town's tower-block ghettos.
He is a rigid product of France's exclusive postgraduate school for civil servants, ENA. But his father, a top surgeon, has retrained as an actor and appeared in France's biggest TV soap opera, the Marseille-based Plus Belle La Vie – the equivalent of George Osborne's dad taking a cameo in Coronation Street.
Why are record numbers of French people now voting Front National?
"Fear," he says with a sigh. "People are afraid of everything. There has been a banking crisis, a financial crisis, an economic crisis, a social crisis, a geostrategic crisis and an environmental crisis.
"That's considerable in a country that's used to being protected. But the Front National doesn't have any answers."
Copé claims the UMP's best tactic is "solutions" such as the niqab ban. It's about women's rights and the notion of living together, he argues. "If you meet a woman in a burqa, she can't reply to your smile. It's a denial of identity."
The UMP – a broad coalition party of moderate centrists and rightwingers created by Jacques Chirac in 2002 – is tearing itself apart over the debate on Islam ordered by Sarkozy.
Some in the party complain of a lurch to the right and the stigmatisation of France's estimated 5 million Muslims just to gain populist appeal. Copé, who will lead the debate on 5 April, is defiant.
Topics include the building of mosques – a few overcrowded, makeshift prayer-rooms spill on to the street – as well as Sarkozy's drive to ban halal food in secular school canteens and define how French imams should preach.
Sarkozy's former diversity adviser, sacked for denouncing the debate, called Copé an Islamophobe.
Copé dismisses this outright. He argues that fundamentalists are creating a "deformed caricature" of Islam and stoking tension in France.
"There are a certain number of extreme behaviours led by fundamentalists who are using their religion for political ends and use extremist techniques," he says, citing street prayers, the niqab, women refusing to be treated by male doctors and girls banned by their parents from mixed swimming sessions.
"None of these phenomena existed 10 years ago. They have developed today with fundamentalism. The Front National is seizing on them to caricature Muslims and exacerbate tensions.
"All this is happening with a backdrop in France of a social crisis, and an identity crisis for some recent immigrant families who haven't been able to integrate for various reasons: they were put in ghettos, they have education or professional problems, crime or they can't make ends meet."
The 1905 French law separating church and state predated the arrival of most Muslims, he argues, so now "Islam in France" must be defined. "We have to remind of the rules of secularism and come up with concrete measures."
To him, French people crave one thing: "a future". France's main problem is that "people think they have no prospects".
He blames French pessimism on the "weakening of the value of work", and wants to abolish the 35-hour week, which has created "two Frances", one which toils very long hours and another, largely public sector, which does not. Both feel discouraged and unable to make ends meet.
The UMP is riven with infighting over how to direct voters away from Front National candidates in Sunday's local election final round. Sarkozy's poll ratings are historically low.
Copé, with an eye on his own future presidential ambitions, has been touring party meetings promising that hard times bring "the most beautiful battles".
"I've never known a presidential race to be easy," he says, rising from his desk to firefight the next controversy.