The Guardian has reported that the former French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has called for the current equal marriage bill to be scrapped and a new, more restrictive one, to take its place.

Sarkozy spoke at the right-leaning Common Sense debate on Saturday and suggested that the ‘Marriage For All’ bill needed to be “rewritten from top to bottom”. Sarkozy called for a change to be made to the bill, or for it to be scrapped and rewritten entirely, so that marriage for heterosexuals and homosexuals would be considered different in the eyes of the law.

Though Sarkozy, who hopes to lead the centre-right party UMC as President in 2017, stated that he was in favour of “some form of marriage” for homosexuals, he believes that it should be different to that of heterosexuals. He is also opposed to surrogate parenthood for same-sex couples.

Centre-right Sarkozy previously claimed that the Taubria Law, named after justice minister Christine Taubria, was “humiliating families and humiliating people who love the family”.

Sarkozy’s comment and apparent off-the-cuff policy-making brought angry reactions from the governing Socialist party, which accused him of “appealing to the most reactionary instincts of his core supporters”. A spokesperson said Sarkozy wanted to create “a new form of segregation” with his two-tier marriage proposal.

The anti-gay marriage group La Manif Pour Tous (Demonstrations for All) cautioned that Sarkozy’s “conversion” to its cause was still only a “declaration of intent”.

Nicolas Sarkozy, defender of ‘traditional marriage’, has been married three times.