PARIS, May 8: President-elect Nicolas Sarkozy relaxed and strategised Tuesday on a luxury yacht in the Mediterranean, while back home “anti-Sarko” protestors burned cars and fought police in cities across France.

Sarkozy boarded the vessel in Malta with his wife Cecilia and their 10-year-old son Louis on Monday at the start of a three-day break to relax after the right-winger's weekend election victory.

His radical reform programme won him 53 percent of the votes to 47 percent for his Socialist rival Segolene Royal.

The new president had pre-planned the break to recover from his months of gruelling campaigning and to mentally ready himself for France's highest office.

The Sarkozys escaped the heady post-election atmosphere in Paris on board a private Falcon jet belonging to a wealthy industrialist friend, Vincent Bollore.

The yacht, a 60-metre vessel also believed to belong to Bollore, sailed along the south coast of Malta on Monday before returning in the evening to drop anchor just off the tiny capital Valletta.

It left early on Tuesday headed towards nearby Sicily.

Sarkozy's secretive high-budget retreat was beginning to draw criticism back in France.

One Socialist senator said the 52-year-old new president was living “in another world.” ”Mr Sarkozy never said he would be the president of the poor. He is the president of the CAC 40” Paris stock exchange, Jean-Luc Melenchon told France Inter radio.

Sarkozy takes over from President Jacques Chirac on May 16.

In his last major public ceremony as head of state, Chirac on Tuesday laid a wreath at the tomb of the unknown soldier in Paris to commemorate the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945.

Sarkozy's election triumph has sparked protests across the country, many of them violent. They began late Sunday and continued Monday night, prompting the leader of the defeated Socialists to appeal for calm.

Overnight Monday some 500 youths shouting “Sarko, fascist!” went on a rampage in the Bastille district of Paris, burning 10 cars, looting two stores and smashing windows, police said.

More than 200 people were detained during four hours of clashes with police, one of whom was injured.

The flare-ups echoed Royal's pre-poll warning that a Sarkozy victory could see the country slide into unrest.

Sarkozy, a tough-talking former interior minister, is hated in the high-immigrant suburbs after he described young delinquents as “rabble” and for his stance on law and order.

It was under his watch that the suburbs across France exploded into riots for three weeks in late 2005, in which hundreds of buildings were burned and thousands of cars torched.

Anti-Sarkozy protests turned violent overnight Monday in France's second city of Lyon, in Lille, Toulouse, Nantes and Rennes. More than 500 cars were set alight in cities nationwide.—AFP