FRANCE/FILE: Nicolas Sarkozy - France's most controversial and colourful post-war president

Record ID: 838496

  • Title: FRANCE/FILE: Nicolas Sarkozy - France's most controversial and colourful post-war president
  • Date: 15th February 2012
  • Summary: PARIS, FRANCE (FILE) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF NEWSPAPERS SHOWING PRESIDENT SARKOZY'S FALL IN OPINION POLLS
  • Embargoed: 1st March 2012 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: France, Libya, Jordan
  • City:
  • Country: France Jordan Libya
  • Topics: Politics
  • Reuters ID: LVADSWLAH9PEKLUEX01B5I0HRE63
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  • Story Text: Nicolas Sarkozy, who is expected to announce his bid for re-election to the French presidency in May 2012 on Wednesday, is one of the highest profile and occasionally controversial presidents since the Second World War.
    To his supporters on the centre-right he's a decisive, incisive leader and statesman who has shepherded France through crisis and war. To his critics, he's a micro-managing control freak whose authoritarian style has divided and damaged French society.
    But possibly all will agree that the man variously dubbed the 'hyper president' or the 'president of bling-bling' has been one of the most colourful heads of state in France, breaking with the slightly aloof and regal tradition of France's highest office.
    Renowned for his bounding energy, Sarkozy emerged as a precious political talent in the early 1980s when he became the mayor of a wealthy suburb of Paris.
    Before being elected president, he served as the right-hand man of once Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, serving as budget minister and and spokesman for Balladur's unsuccessful presidential campaign.
    Prior to his election to the presidency in 2007, Sarkozy served two stints as a tough-talking interior minister and one as finance minister under then president Jacques Chirac.
    His outspoken and occasionally abrasive style sprang to international attention in 2005, when France was engulfed by a wave of riots and burning of cars, as youths in the impoverished outskirts of many of the country's large cities went on a rampage in a loosely-structured protest against their living conditions.
    "That's what I'm here for. To get rid of this scum for you," he told residents of a Paris suburb during the riots in comments that critics say fanned the flames of the violence.
    He confounded his critics who said that style would prevent him from winning elections in 2007 after he triumphed against Socialist Segolene Royal, whose lacklustre campaign failed as the French were seduced by Sarkozy's message of toughness and decisiveness as he zig-zagged the country.
    By the evening of May 7, 2007, Sarkozy was voted in as the sixth president of the Fifth Republic since the Revolution with a margin of more than 53 percent -- a score that many of his predecessors would have envied.
    But barely had Sarkozy ushered his predecessor out of the door that his approval began to come under pressure, his administration engulfed by minor scandals and his personal life taking a precedence that many French people were uncomfortable with.
    Days after he was sworn in and he had wiped a tear off the face of his then wife Cecilia, she was gone, leaving the president for a French advertising executive who was her former lover.
    Barely two months after that, Sarkozy had started dating his current wife, Italian former supermodel Carla Bruni. A marriage followed that summer and in October 2011 Bruni bore Sarkozy's fourth and her third child.
    Critics said the episode demonstrated an inappropriate neediness for the holder of a high office with his finger on the nuclear button.
    Within a year of Sarkozy taking office, the world was swept by a major financial crisis in 2008 as banks around the world needed bailing out and the spectre of another great depression loomed, rumbling on for the rest of his term in office.
    And it is on his shepherding of the crisis that Sarkozy may try to stage his bid for re-election: a safe pair of hands who shielded France from the worst of the cutbacks that many Western economies were forced into implementing.
    Adopting a somewhat anti-capitalist tone after the financial crisis began in 2008 by promising to punish speculators and advocating a strong state role in the economy, Sarkozy is ending his mandate portraying himself as one of the main defenders of the euro.
    As the 2008 credit crunch mutated into the 2011 European sovereign debt crisis, Sarkozy became increasingly outspoken in his defence of the euro -- a currency used by more than 300 million people in 17 countries.
    Presenting a united front alongside German Chancellor Angela Merkel that masked their often strong divergence, Sarkozy repeated his injuctions that there was no alternative to the euro -- his tone getting increasingly strident as the crisis deepened.
    "If the euro is destroyed, it's all of Europe which is blown apart. If Europe blows apart, it's peace on our continent which will be threatened sooner or later," he said in January 2012 as he went into the final strait for the polls.
    Controversy and more than one scandal dogged the president throughout his term, maintaining pressure on Sarkozy's ratings, which during most of his mandate were at or close to the lowest levels ever seen by a French president in office.
    Arguments over the sexual peccadilloes of one of his ministers and a dispute over nepotism when Sarkozy's son sought election to a major state body were a frequent source of distraction.
    The high-profile Clearstream trial -- a case of mind-boggling complexity involving allegations of attempts to smear Sarkozy's name -- dragged on in open court for months. Public and repeated accusations by the flamboyant former foreign minister Dominique de Villepin that Sarkozy was waging a political vendetta did little to calm the political climate.
    Meanwhile, Sarkozy's government maintained tense relations with the country's substantial Muslim population -- an estimated six million people who come from North Africa.
    The most significant of these was the introduction of a highly controversial law banning the wearing of burqas and full Islamic veils in public places, which critics said was discriminatory. But the government defended it as saying it was essential to an integrated society and several European countries have passed similar measures.
    The sense of unease about how France deals with foreigners was further emphasised by the controversy in 2010 when Sarkozy's government decided to expel hundreds of Roma back to Romania -- a fellow member of the European Union.
    But Sarkozy's supporters are likely to argue that the president took the tough decisions when they were needed.
    In a break with the tradition of previous French administrations going back decades, Sarkozy did not buckle to pressure from the streets when in 2010 he pushed through reforms to the country's costly pensions system, which brought hundreds of thousands onto the streets and led the country's petrol pumps to run dry after its refineries were blockaded.
    With people living longer, economists were unanimous in saying they had to work longer if the pension systems were to survive. Many commentators felt Sarkozy would end up caving in. They were proven wrong.
    As he nears polls, Sarkozy will most likely turn to his record outside France's borders to back up his claim that he is the only true statesman to allow France to punch above its weight on the global stage.
    The highest-profile initiative of his presidency was his push to get NATO involved in enforcing a no-fly zone against Libya, which eventually led to the toppling of Muammar Gadaffi.
    For months, NATO bombers left French bases and carriers to carry out bombing missions against Libyan targets before Sarkozy, accompanied by Britain's David Cameron, paid a triumphant visit to Bengazi and Tripoli.
    But it's in France that his fate will be decided, at the hands of the French electorate. And as he prepares for a new campaign with his trademark energy and feistiness, he now faces possibly the biggest challenge of his career: to disprove the pollsters who say that no president with ratings that have stayed so low for so long has ever won re-election.
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