Nicolas Sarkozy

Nicolas Sarkozy

Nicolas Paul Stéphane Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa (born 28 January, 1955, in Paris, 17th arrondissement), simply known as Nicolas Sarkozy (/nikola saʁkozi/ — [French pronunciation] ([Media helphelp]·[info])), is a French politician born of a Hungarian father and French mother, often nicknamed Sarko. As of 2006, he is the head of the conservative party UMP, Minister of the Interior, and one of the leading candidates for the 2007 presidential elections.

General traits

He is known for his ubiquity, is active in a wide range of political fields, and often appears on TV talk and news shows. He is well known for using frank and often polarizing language. Opponents have compared him to the over-ambitious cartoon character Iznogoud.

Since November 2004, he has been president of the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP), France's major centre-right political party, and he is Minister of the Interior in the government of Dominique de Villepin, with the honorific title of Minister of State, making him essentially the number three man in the French State after President Jacques Chirac and the prime minister. His ministerial responsibilities include law enforcement and working to co-ordinate relationships between the national and local governments. Previously, he was a deputy to the French National Assembly. He was forced to resign this position in order to accept his ministerial appointment. He previously also held several ministerial posts, including Finance Minister.

Sarkozy is a probable contender for the next presidential election, and opinion polls generally place him as one of two possible winners in the second round, along with socialist Ségolène Royal.

Personal life

Background

As the Russians entered Hungary in 1944, the family fled the country. Pál nagybócsai Sárközy crossed Austria and Germany with great difficulty in the chaos that was Central Europe at the end of the Second World War. Eventually, he arrived in Baden Baden, near the French border, where the headquarters of the French Army in Germany were located, and there he met a recruiter for the French Foreign Legion. He signed up for five years, and was sent for training to Sidi Bel Abbes, in French Algeria, where the French Foreign Legion's headquarters were located. However, at the end of training, a doctor who sympathized with him gave him a medical discharge in order to save him from being sent to Indochina, where death at the hands of the Vietminh was quite likely (the Foreign Legion were the most exposed troops during the Indochina War). Upon returning to civil life in Marseilles in 1948, he acquired French citizenship and his name was officially Frenchified into "Paul Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa".

Paul Sarkozy moved to Paris where he used his artistic skills to enter the advertising industry. He met Andrée Mallah, Nicolas Sarkozy's mother, in 1949. Andrée Mallah, then a law student, was the daughter of Benedict Mallah, a wealthy doctor (or surgeon) with a well-established reputation in the very bourgeois 17th arrondissement of Paris. Benedict Mallah was originally a Sephardic Jew from Salonica in the Ottoman Empire (now Greece). According to Jewish genealogical societies, the Mallah family of Salonica anciently came from Provence in southern France, which they had probably left at the time of the Jewish expulsions in the Middle Ages. In the beginning of the 20th century, Benedict Mallah had migrated to France, acquired French citizenship, and converted to Catholicism when he married his French Catholic wife, Nicolas Sarkozy's grandmother.

Paul Sarkozy and Andrée Mallah settled in the 17th arrondissement and had three sons: Nicolas, born in 1955, François, born in 1957 (now a researcher in biology), and Guillaume, born in 1951, who is an entrepreneur in the textile industry. Guillaume Sarkozy is also a well-known personality in France, being the former leader of the union of textile entrepreneurs and the former vice-president of the MEDEF, the French union of employers. Allegedly, Guillaume Sarkozy was prevented from running for the presidency of the MEDEF due to the political career of his brother Nicolas.

In 1959 Paul Sarkozy left his wife and his three children. He later married two more times and he had two more children with his second wife. Living alone with three young children, Sarkozy's mother resumed her legal studies. She graduated from law school, passed the bar exam in the western suburbs of Paris, and went on to become a successful lawyer. She pled in some of the famous cases of the 1970s, such as the Villarceaux case, a major political corruption scandal.

Early life

Similar to his maternal grandfather, his father Paul Sarkozy never taught him or his brothers Hungarian, or made any effort to teach them about their ethnic background. Sarkozy says that his father wanted the children to be fully assimilated into French society, thus the Sarkozy family can culturally be described as a mainstream, middle class, Roman Catholic family, albeit one without a father.

Sarkozy has said that his father's abandonment shaped much of what he is today. As a young boy and teenager, he felt inferior in relation to his wealthy classmates. He did not feel fully French at the time (his father is said to have told him once that a Sarkozy never could become President of France, that such things happened only in the United States), suffered from insecurities (his physical shortness, his family's lack of money), and harboured a considerable amount of resentment against his absent father. "What made me who I am now is the sum of all the humiliations suffered during childhood," he said later. Friends and opponents alike say that his seemingly endless energy and unconcealed ambitions are driven by his desire to compensate for what he felt was his second-class status during his youth.

Studies

Marriages

In 1984, as mayor of Neuilly, he married again, after the dissolution of his first marriage, to the former Cécilia Ciganer-Albeniz (great-grand-daughter of Isaac Albéniz) to TV host Jacques Martin. However, in 1989, Ciganer-Albeniz left Martin for Sarkozy. After a difficult divorce, Sarkozy married her in 1996. They have a son, Louis.

Between 2002 and 2005, the couple often appeared together on public occasions, with Ciganer-Albeniz acting as a sort of chief aide for her husband. This was fairly unusual: in general, French politicians seek to separate their public lives from their personal and family lives.

On May 25, 2005, however, the Swiss newspaper Le Matin revealed that Ciganer-Albeniz had left Sarkozy for Moroccan national Richard Attias, head of the Publicis Events company (who had organised the UMP meeting in 2004.) It was then reported that she had done so after obtaining proof that Sarkozy had cheated on her, reportedly meeting mistresses while pretending to be jogging in a Parisian park while he was Minister of the Interior, and in other situations ^{[#endnote_lematin1]}. This led Sarkozy to sue Le Matin ^{[#endnote_lematin2]}.

Such revelations are unusual in France, where generally the press does not inquire into the private lives of politicians, unless it influences their public actions. In this case, however, some commentators justified the move because the Sarkozy couple themselves had put their relationship in the spotlight. The events seemed to have taken Sarkozy aback for a while, and he appeared to be suffering under the stress.

According to several French and Swiss newspapers, Sarkozy was assumed to be in the process of divorcing his wife, and was in a relationship with Anne Fulda, a journalist from Le Figaro. Finally, in January 2006, a reconciliation with Ciganer-Albeniz took place and they again are living together.

He has also had a brief affair with one of Jacques Chirac's daughters. This fact is confirmed in books such as France in Crisis and On the Brink.

Political career

In 1993, Sarkozy was in the national news for personally dealing with the "Human Bomb," a man who had taken small children hostage in a kindergarten in Neuilly. The "Human Bomb" was killed that day by policemen of the RAID, who entered the school stealthily while the attacker was resting.

From 1993 to 1995, he was Minister of the Budget and spokesman for the executive in the cabinet of Prime Minister Édouard Balladur. Throughout most of his early career, Sarkozy had been seen as a protégé of Jacques Chirac. However, in 1995 he spurned Chirac and backed Édouard Balladur for President of France. After Chirac won the election, Sarkozy lost his position as Minister of the Budget and found himself outside the circles of power. It is widely believed that ever since 1995 Chirac has considered Sarkozy's having sided with Balladur as a form of treason, and that the two men now loathe one another.

In 2002, however, after his re-election as President of the French Republic (see French presidential election, 2002), Chirac appointed Sarkozy as French Minister of the Interior in the cabinet of Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, despite the widely acknowledged friction between the two.

Following the cabinet reshuffle of 31 March, 2004, Sarkozy was moved to the position of Finance Minister. Tensions continued to build between Sarkozy and Chirac and within the UMP party, as Sarkozy's intentions of becoming head of the party after the resignation of Alain Juppé became clear. It became increasingly apparent that Sarkozy would go on to seek the presidency in 2007; in an often-repeated comment made on television channel France 2, when asked by a journalist whether he thought about the presidential election when he shaved in the morning, Sarkozy commented, "not just when I shave" ^{[#endnote_shaving]}.

In November 2004 after party elections, Sarkozy became leader of the UMP with 85% of the vote. In accordance with an agreement with Chirac, he resigned his position as minister. Sarkozy's ascent was marked by the division of UMP between sarkozystes, such as Sarkozy's "first lieutenant", Brice Hortefeux, and Chirac loyalists, such as Jean-Louis Debré.

Sarkozy was made Chevalier de la Legion d'honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honor) by President Jacques Chirac in February 2005. He was re-elected on March 13, 2005, to the National Assembly (as required by government habits, he had had to resign as a deputy when he had become minister in 2002).

On 31 May, 2005, the main French news radio station France Info reported a rumour that Sarkozy was to be reappointed Minister of the Interior in the government of Dominique de Villepin without resigning from the UMP leadership. This was confirmed on June 2, 2005, when the members of the government were officially announced.

Recent politics

Raffarin government

Minister of the Interior

Nicolas Sarkozy, here with then prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, took pains during his first stint as Minister of the Interior to show that he cared about law enforcement (here, with some bicycle-mounted officers of the French National Police).

Towards the end of his first term as Minister of the Interior, in 2004, Sarkozy was the most popular conservative politician in France, according to polls conducted at the beginning of 2004. His actions as a minister have made him a controversial figure, however. He became Minister of the Interior at a time when France was facing significant social and public order problems, including a spate of anti-Semitic violence by Islamic youths (the seriousness of such violence is itself disputed, with many alleging that the media, especially TF1, exaggerated the issue.)

His "tough on crime" policies, which included increasing the police presence on the streets and introducing monthly crime performance ratings, were popular with many. However, he was criticised for putting forward legislation that some felt infringed on civil rights, and adversely affected disadvantaged sections of the population, such as the homeless, prostitutes, and young people from housing estates. Another criticism was that Sarkozy's actions were more show than real substance, and that they simply relocated delinquency from some wealthy areas to some less-fashionable ones.

Sarkozy has sought to ease the sometimes-tense relationships that the general French population has with the Muslim community. Because Islam, contrary to Roman Catholicism, does not have an official church, and unlike Protestantism did not have an umbrella organisation to speak for it before the French government, Sarkozy felt that the foundation of such an organisation was desirable. He supported the foundation in May 2003 of the private non-profit Conseil français du culte musulman (French council of Muslim worship), an organisation meant to be representative of French Muslims ^{[#endnote_joassoc]}. In addition, Sarkozy has suggested amending the 1905 law on the separation of Church and State, mostly in order to be able to finance mosques and other Muslim institutions with public funds.

Supporters of this measure contend that it is better that they should be funded by French money than to be under the influence of foreign donors and foreign governments, such as that of Saudi Arabia, which are suspected of pushing radical clerics. Opponents argue that such a state control is not a guarantee against fundamentalism and that the government should concentrate on education and social policies instead.

Minister of Finances

Second term as Minister of the Interior

However, the 2005 civil unrest in France put law enforcement in the spotlight again. Nicolas Sarkozy made a number of tough declarations, first blaming the unrest on "hoodlums" and gangsters. After the rioting, he made a number of announcements on future policy: selection of immigrants, better tracking of immigrants, and a reform on the 1945 ordinance government justice measures for young delinquents. See Response to the 2005 civil unrest in France.

In spring 2006, Nicolas Sarkozy is to present a bill to Parliament which would reform French immigration rules and procedures.

Action as UMP's president

Nicolas Sarkozy at the Congress of the UMP, 2004

Sarkozy currently is the president of UMP, the French conservative party, elected with 85% of the vote. During his presidency, the number of members has significantly increased. In 2005, he supported the Yes in the French referendum on the European Constitution.

Throughout 2005, Sarkozy became increasingly vocal in calling for radical changes in France's economic and social policies. These calls culminated in an interview with Le Monde on September 8, 2005, during which he claimed that the French had been misled for 30 years by false promises, and denounced what he considers to be unrealistic policies ^{[#endnote_meilleur]}. Among other issues:

• he called for a simplified and "fairer" taxation system, with fewer loopholes, and a maximum taxation rate (all direct taxes combined) at 50% of revenue;
• he approved measures reducing or denying social support to unemployed workers who refuse work offered to them;
• he has pressed for a reduction in the budget deficit, claiming that the French state has been living off credit for some time.

As with other words ending in isme, it also suffers from the current French scepticism for ideologies — "ideological" now often having the pejorative meaning of "blind application of a theory without much regard for reality." This is probably why Sarkozy rejects this label of libéral and calls himself a pragmatist — that is, a person who takes a practical approach and chooses the appropriate solution, even though it does not fit some pre-established political theory.

Sarkozy opened another avenue of controversy by declaring that he desired a reform of the immigration system, with quotas designed to admit the skilled workers needed by the French economy. He also wants to reform the current French system for foreign students, claiming that it enables foreign students to take open-ended curricula in order to get residency in France; instead, he wants to select the best students to the best curricula in France.

In Spring 2006, the French parliament adopted a controversial bill known as DADVSI, which reforms French copyright law. Since his party was divided on the issue, Sarkozy stepped in and organized meetings between various parties involved. Later, groups such as the Odebi League and EUCD.info alleged that Sarkozy personally and unofficially supported certain amendments to the law, which enacted strong penalties against designers of peer-to-peer systems.

Criticisms

Sarkozy tries to portray himself as an energetic man (backed up by communications campaign for this purpose), intent on solving France's problems. He often accuses (directly or indirectly) other politicians of not really working for the French. This posturing is criticised by many, especially among the Left, which, generally speaking, accuses him of being an authoritarian demagogue, with more talk than substance, ready to trade away civil liberties for political gains. Some of these accusations are echoed by French civil rights organisations (which are generally politically left-wing). He is also accused of being a populist who favors far-right ideas.

His political style, which relies heavily on communication (some say media manipulation), is highly criticised by some, as are the controversial statistical figures he uses. Some of his declarations with respect to crime and law enforcement have been criticised as demeaning for the people that Sarkozy was supposed to help, and potentially stoking unrest. As an example, responding to what the press have called the 2005 Paris riots in the banlieue of La Courneuve, he vowed to clean the area out "with a Kärcher" (nettoyer la cité au Kärcher), Kärcher being a well-known brand of pressure cleaning equipment), and referred to the troublemakers as voyous, and racaille, a slang term which can be translated into English as dregs or riff-raff.

As a Minister of the Interior, Sarkozy systematically has made bold statements following heinous crimes reported in the media. As a consequence, he has been accused in certain cases of failing to respect the separation of powers between the executive and the judiciary, by trying to apply pressure in certain cases.

In September 2005, some youths were acquitted of the arson of a police station in Pau, for lack of proof, and Sarkozy was accused of having pushed for a hasty enquiry — Sarkozy had vowed that the perpetrators would be arrested within 3 months ^{[#endnote_observateur2]}. On 22 June, 2005, he announced to law enforcement officials that he had questioned the Minister of Justice about the future of "the judge" who had freed a man on parole, enabling him to commit a murder ^{[#endnote_lemonde]}. These comments were criticised by both moderate and left-wing magistrates, especially since Sarkozy, Minister of the Interior and a former attorney, must have been aware that this decision had been taken by 3 judges.

Sarkozy has personal friendships with some of the most powerful figures in the French business world; for example, Martin Bouygues (from the Bouygues group, owner of the TF1 channel, as well as telecommunications and public works companies) and Bernard Arnault (from LVMH) were his marriage witnesses. His brother, Guillaume, is a senior executive of the MEDEF, the foremost business union in France; in 2005, he renounced running for the top position of that union, supposedly in order not to hinder his brother's political career.

Sarkozy was an elected official in one of the most wealthy and exclusive suburbs of Paris; as a minister, he pushed for tax breaks that critics contend benefit the wealthiest at the expense of the poor. As a consequence, critics contend that, despite his claims to care about the "common people" of France, he is too much under the influence of the most privileged sections of society.

His political connections in the Hauts-de-Seine also are controversial. Sarkozy is close to Patrick Balkany, another right-wing politician, who was convicted of misuse of public funds, and also accused of misusing firearms. His mentor (and witness to his first wedding) was Charles Pasqua, who has been accused in a variety of corruption scandals but not convicted.

Sarkozy, a Roman Catholic, has caused controversy because of his views on the relationship between religion and state. In 2004, he published a book called La République, les religions, l'espérance ("The Republic, Religions, and Hope") ^{[#endnote_figaro]}, in which he argued that the young should not be brought up solely on secular or Republican values. He also advocated reducing the separation of church and state, including the government subsidy of mosques in order to encourage Islamic integration into to French society ^{[#endnote_mosques] [#endnote_vallet]}. There has also been controversy over his attitude to the Church of Scientology — which has itself been the subject of significant controversy in France — after meeting with Tom Cruise ^{[#endnote_canard]}.

Sarkozy calls for ambitious reforms of the tax system. Left-wing opponents contend that those reforms are little more than tax cuts for the wealthiest, while the burden on common people will not be eased.

During September 2005, several thousand French internet users received an email asking them to vote for Nicolas Sarkozy in the next presidential election in 2007, and to donate money to the UMP.^{[#endnote_UMP]} While the party said that the legality of this action was justified by the recipients being subscribed to Maximiles, an advertising program, several mailing lists and robot addresses, which could never have had contacted Maximiles, also received this email.^{[#endnote_email]}

Another critical point is the xenophobic demagoguery that he seems to use to gain support among citizens annoyed by problems related to immigration. His comments before and during the disturbances in French marginal districts (2005) seemed "to heat up" the atmosphere more than to cool it.

Nicolas Sarkozy caused quite a stir when he posted a comment on the blog of film director Mathieu Kassovitz, who has been critical of his policies.[link]

In December 2005, he had the distinction of being possibly the first major French politician to do an interview by Podcast.[link]

According to a recent study [(politibuzz1.pdf)], Nicolas Sarkozy is the focus of 42 % of the "buzz" or comments generated by political blogs in France.

Ambition for the future

On the other hand, Sarkozy's presidential ambition does not sit well with Chirac. Chirac once hoped to promote Alain Juppé as his successor. However, this plan collapsed when Alain Juppé was condemned by the criminal court of Nanterre for corruption in January 2004. Subsequently Chirac started to push Dominique de Villepin. De Villepin became popular in France for eloquently expressing France's opposition against the Iraq war in 2003. But this popularity totally collapsed due to Villepins unsensible handling of the CPE-reform and his supposed involvement in the Clearstream scandal. As of May 2006, Sarkozy is the sole credible presidential candidate on the right wing.

Thus the key barrier to Sarkozy's ambitions is the left-wing opposition. They are likely (and have started) to portray him as a political showman "cosy with big business". They also state that Sarkozy has given tax breaks to the wealthy and to corporations, and that he preys upon the security fears of citizens and uses the police forces for publicity purposes. Perhaps the best help that Sarkozy can receive in that respect is the disarray and conflicting ambitions that plague the French Socialist Party, which has been in open crisis since the defeat of the proposed European Constitution in a referendum.

Timeline of career

• 1977, becomes councillor in the town of Neuilly-sur-Seine.
• 1977, member of the central committee for the RPR.
• 1978 – 1979, national youth delegate for the RPR.
• 1979 – 1981, president of the national youth delegates under Jacques Chirac for the presidential election of 1981.
• 1983, becomes mayor in the town of Neuilly-sur-Seine
• 1988, national secretary of the RPR, in charge of youth and teaching issues.
• Co-director of the list "Union pour les Élections européennes".
• 1992 – 1993, secrétaire général-adjoint du RPR, chargé des Fédérations. (Assistant secretary of the RPR in charge of the militants organisations)
• Since 1993, member of the RPR political office.
• 1993 – 1995, Minister for the Budget in the cabinet of Edouard Balladur.
• 1995 – 1997 spokesman for the RPR.
• 1998 – 1999, Secretary General of the RPR.
• 1999, interim president of the RPR.
• 1999, head of the RPR-DL electoral list of the European elections in June
• May 2000, elected President of the committee of the RPR for the département of Hauts-de-Seine
• 2002 – March 2004, Minister of the Interior in the cabinet of Jean-Pierre Raffarin.
• March 2004 – November 2004, Minister of the Economy, Finance and Industry in the cabinet of Jean-Pierre Raffarin
• November 2004, elected the new head of President Jacques Chirac's governing UMP party.
• June 2005, Minister of State and Minister of the Interior in the cabinet of Dominique de Villepin

Quotations

• Merit and labour are values that should be rewarded more and more. We must applaud and be thankful to the France that gets up early.
• To be a young Gaullist is to be a revolutionary! (National meeting of UDR in Nice, June 1975)
• I'm the son of a Hungarian immigrant expelled by Communism. My father fled Hungary, hidden under a train, in 1949. (Libération, 1991)
• The Chiraquian EEG is flat. This is no longer [Paris] City Hall, this is the antechamber of the morgue. Chirac is dead, only the 3 last shovelfuls are needed. (before the 1995 presidential elections)
• We live in a world where people don't all have the same scruples, where all blows can be given, and where, in order to down somebody, all means can be used. Nothing will lead me astray from the path that I have chosen. (Le Monde, 2005)
• How can one be fascinated by those fights of obese guys with brylcreemed buns? Sumo is not an intellectual's sport! (Hong Kong, 9 January, 2004; Jacques Chirac has a taste for watching sumo)
• June 2005: following these two declarations, Nicolas Sarkozy was reprimanded during the Council of Ministers by president Chirac and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin
• * We shall clean the Cité des 4000 [in La Courneuve] with a Kärcher
• * The judge who freed Mrs. Cremel's murderer will pay for his mistake.
• Success and social promotion are not some right that anybody can claim after queuing at some [government office]. It is better: it is a right, a right that one can merit because of one's sweat. (Summer meeting of the Young Populars in La Baule, 4 September, 2005)
• All these squatted habitations, all these buildings must be closed in order to prevent those tragic events, and this is what I asked the Prefect of Police because these people are poor human beings who are housed in inacceptable conditions. After accepting people to whom, sadly, we cannot propose work or housing, we end up in a situation that results in tragedies like these. (France Inter, 30 August, 2005, after several cases where poor black immigrant families from Africa had died when the derelict buildings in which they lived burnt down)
• You've had enough, haven't you? Enough of this rabble? Well, we're going to get rid of them for you. (Comments preceding the three weeks of urban violence, 25 October, 2005)
• The worst risk is not to take one.

References

1. ↑  [Bleu Blanc Blog, 27 May 2005]
2. ↑  [Le Matin, 12 July 2005]
3. ↑  [Broadcast of "France 2"], 19 November, 2003
4. ↑  JO associations, 28 May, 2003
5. ↑  [Le gouvernement finalise la privatisation de France Télécom]
6. ↑  [Le Quotidien de l'Expansion, 30 September, 2004]
7. ↑  [Le Nouvel Observateur, press review, 21 October 2004]
8. ↑  [Interview with Le Monde, 8 September, 2005]
9. ↑  [Le Nouvel Observateur, 1 October 2005]
10. ↑  [Le Monde, 23 June, 2005]
11. ↑  [Le Figaro Magazine, October 2004]
12. ↑  ["L’Etat Doit-Il Financer La Construction de Mosquees?"]
13. ↑  ["Faut-il dépoussiérer la loi de 1905?"] — Pierre Vallet blog, 17 November 2004
14. ↑  Le Canard Enchaîné, 20 July, 2005
15. ↑  [L'UMP inaugure l'e-marketing politique]
16. ↑  [E-mail message]
17. ↑  [New Statesman, 5 January 2004]
18. ↑  [Voice of America news, 30 November, 2004]
19. ↑  [Le Monde]
20. ↑  [Totalement Cretin(s)]

External links