Nicolas Sarkozy Totally Explained

Everything about Nicolas Sarkozy totally explained

Nicolas Sarkozy (— born Nicolas Paul Stéphane Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa on January 28, 1955 in the 17th arrondissement of Paris) was elected President of France on 6 May 2007. He thereby became an ex officio Co-Prince of Andorra.
   In the presidential election, he defeated the Socialist Party contender Ségolène Royal. Before his presidency, he was leader of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) centre-right party. Under Jacques Chirac's presidency, he served as Minister of the Interior in Jean-Pierre Raffarin's (UMP) first two governments (from May 2002 to March 2004), then was appointed Minister of Finances in Raffarin's last government (March 2004 May 2005), and again Minister of the Interior in Dominique de Villepin's government (2005-2007).
   Sarkozy was also president of the General council of the Hauts-de-Seine department from 2004 to 2007 and mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine, one of the wealthiest communes of France from 1983 to 2002. He was also Minister of the Budget in Édouard Balladur (RPR, predecessor of the UMP)'s government during François Mitterrand's last term.
   Sarkozy is known for his strong stance on law and order issues and his desire to revitalise the French economy. In foreign affairs, he's promised closer cooperation with the United States and a strengthening of the entente cordiale. His nickname "Sarko" is used by both supporters and opponents.

Personal life

Family background

Nicolas Sarkozy is the son of a Hungarian immigrant father, Pál Sárközy de Nagy-Bócsa (Hungarian: nagybócsai Sárközy Pál; some sources spell it Nagy-Bócsay Sárközy Pál; ) and a mother of French Catholic and Greek Jewish descent, Andrée Mallah. His Greek-born grandfather, Benico Mallah (former Aaron Mallah), was a physician from Thessaloniki. Benico, who left for France to become a doctor, was the son of Mordechai Mallah, one of the eight sons of Aaron Mallah, founder of the Rabbinical School of Thessaloniki.
Pál Sárközy was born in 1928 in Budapest into a family belonging to the lower nobility of Hungary. The family possessed lands and a small castle in the village of Alattyán, near Szolnok, 92 km (57 miles) east of Budapest. (External Link

) Pál Sárközy's father and grandfather held elective offices in the town of Szolnok. Although the Sárközy de Nagy-Bócsa (nagybócsai Sárközy) family was Protestant, Pál Sárközy's mother, Katalin Tóth de Csáford (Hungarian: csáfordi Tóth Katalin), grandmother of Nicolas Sarkozy, was from a Catholic aristocratic family.
As the Red Army entered Hungary in 1944, the Sárközy family fled to Germany. They returned in 1945 but all their possessions had been seized. Pál Sárközy's father died soon afterwards and his mother, fearing that he'd be drafted into the Hungarian People's Army or sent to Siberia, urged him to leave the country and promised she'd eventually follow him and meet him in Paris. Pál Sárközy managed to flee to Austria and then Germany while his mother reported to authorities that he'd drowned in Lake Balaton. 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. He was due to be sent to Indochina at the end of training, but the doctor who checked him before departure, who happened to also be Hungarian, sympathised with him and gave him a medical discharge to save him from possible death at the hands of the Vietminh. He returned to civilian life in Marseille in 1948 and, although he asked for French citizenship only in the 1970s (his legal status was that of a stateless person until then), he nonetheless gallicised his Hungarian name into "Paul Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa". He met Andrée Mallah, Nicolas Sarkozy's mother (known as Dadu), in 1949.
Andrée Mallah, then a law student, was the daughter of Benedict Mallah, a wealthy urologist and STD specialist with a well-established reputation in the mainly bourgeois 17th arrondissement of Paris. Benedict Mallah, originally called Aaron Mallah and nicknamed Benico, was born in 1890 in the Sephardic Jewish community of Salonica (Thessaloniki), Ottoman Empire. Resettled in Provence, southern France, the family had moved to Salonica a century later. Benico Mallah, the son of a jeweller, left Salonica, then part of the Ottoman Empire, with his mother in 1904 at the age of 14 to attend the prestigious Lycée Lakanal boarding school of Sceaux, in the southern suburbs of Paris. He studied medicine after his baccalaureate and decided to stay in France and become a French citizen. A doctor in the French Army during World War I, he met a recent war widow, Adèle Bouvier (1891–1956), from a bourgeois family of Lyon, whom he married in 1917. Adèle Bouvier, Nicolas Sarkozy's grandmother, was a Catholic like the majority of French people. Mallah, for whom religion had reportedly never been a central issue, converted to Catholicism upon marrying Adèle Bouvier, which had been requested by Adèle's parents, and changed his name to Benedict. Although Benedict Mallah converted to Catholicism, he and his family nonetheless had to flee Paris and take refuge in a small farm in Corrèze during World War II to avoid being arrested and delivered to the Germans. During the Holocaust, many of the Mallahs who stayed in Salonica or moved to France were deported to concentration and extermination camps. In total, 57 family members were murdered by the Nazis.

Early life

During Sarkozy's childhood, his father refused to give his former wife's family any financial help, even though he'd founded his own advertising agency and had become wealthy. The family lived in a small mansion owned by Sarkozy's grandfather, Benedict Mallah, in the 17th Arrondissement. The family later moved to Neuilly-sur-Seine, one of the wealthiest communes of the Île-de-France région immediately west of the 17th Arrondissement just outside of Paris. According to Sarkozy, his staunchly Gaullist grandfather was more of an influence on him than his father, whom he rarely saw. Sarkozy was, accordingly, raised in the Catholic faith of his household. Nicolas Sarkozy, like his brothers, is a baptised and professing Catholic. Sarkozy also said recently that one of his role models was the late pope John Paul II.
Sarkozy's father Paul didn't teach him or his brothers Hungarian. There is no evidence suggesting that there was an attempt to educate the Sarkozy siblings about their paternal ethnic background.
Sarkozy has said that having been abandoned by his father shaped much of who he's today. As a young boy and teenager, he felt inferior in relation to his wealthy classmates. He suffered from insecurities (his physical shortness of 1.65 m, 5 feet 5 inches, or his family's lack of money, at least relatively to their 17th Arrondissement or Neuilly neighbours), and is said to have harboured a considerable amount of resentment against his absent father. “What made me who I'm now is the sum of all the humiliations suffered during childhood”, he said later.

Education

Sarkozy was enrolled in the Lycée Chaptal, a state-funded (public) middle and high school in Paris's 8th arrondissement, where he failed his sixième. His family then sent him to the Cours Saint-Louis de Monceau, a private Catholic school in the 17th arrondissement, where he was reportedly a mediocre pupil, but where he nonetheless obtained his baccalauréat in 1973. He enrolled at the, where he graduated with a Master in Private law, and later with a DEA degree in Business law. Paris X Nanterre had been the starting place for the May '68 student movement and was still a stronghold of leftist students. Described as a quiet student, Sarkozy soon joined the right-wing student organisation where he was very active. After graduating, he entered the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris (1979-1981) but failed to graduate due to an insufficient command of the English language. After passing the bar, he became a lawyer specializing in business law and family law.

Marriages, divorces and separations

Marie-Dominique Culioli

Sakozy wed his first wife Marie-Dominique Culioli on 23 September 1982; her father was a pharmacist from Vico (a village north of Ajaccio, Corsica). They had two sons, Pierre (born in 1985) and Jean (born in 1987). Sarkozy's marriage witness was the prominent right wing politician Charles Pasqua, later to become a political opponent. Sarkozy divorced Culioli in 1996, although they'd already been separated for several years.

Cécilia Ciganer-Albéniz

As mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine, Sarkozy met former fashion model and public relations executive Cécilia Ciganer-Albéniz (great-granddaughter of composer Isaac Albéniz and of a Russian father), when he officiated at her wedding to television host Jacques Martin. In 1988, she left her husband for Sarkozy, and divorced Martin one year later. Sarkozy married her in October 1996, with witnesses Martin Bouygues and Bernard Arnault. They have one son, Louis, born 23 April 1997.
Between 2002 and 2005, the couple often appeared together on public occasions, with Cécilia Sarkozy acting as the chief aide for her husband. On 25 May 2005, however, the Swiss newspaper Le Matin revealed that she'd left Sarkozy for French-Moroccan national Richard Attias, head of Publicis in New York. There were other accusations of a private nature in Le Matin, which led to Sarkozy suing the paper. In the meantime, he was said to have had an affair with a journalist of Le Figaro, Anne Fulda.
Sarkozy and Cécilia ultimately divorced in October 15, 2007

Carla Bruni

The French weekly magazine L'Express published photos of Sarkozy in Disneyland Paris with singer and ex-model Carla Bruni in December of 2007, sparking international attention. The couple were later spotted spending Christmas holidays together in Egypt. Two months later, the mayor of the 8th district of Paris announced that he'd officiated over their marriage.

Personal wealth

Sarkozy declared to the Constitutional Council a net worth of €2 million, most of the assets being in the form of life insurance policies. As the French President, he earns a yearly salary of € 101,000 and is entitled to a mayoral pension because he was mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine until 2002. He also receives a yearly council pension, because he's been previously a member of the council of the Hauts-de-Seine department. Sarkozy's salary will more than double to € 240,000 as a result of an amendment to the 2008 budget.

Member of National Assembly

Sarkozy is recognised by the right and left as a skilled politician and striking orator. His supporters within France emphasise his charisma, political innovation and willingness to "make a dramatic break" amid mounting disaffection against “politics as usual"; some see him as wanting to depart from traditional French social and economic principles in favour of American-style economic reform. Overall, he's considered more pro-U.S. and pro-Israeli than most French politicians.
Since November 2004, Sarkozy has been president of the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP), France's major right political party, and he was Minister of the Interior in the government of Dominique de Villepin, with the honorific title of Minister of State, making him effectively the number three man in the French State after President Jacques Chirac and the prime minister. His ministerial responsibilities included law enforcement and working to co-ordinate relationships between the national and local governments, as well as Minister of Worship (in this guise he created the CFCM, French Council of Muslim Faith). 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.

In government

Sarkozy's political career began at 22 when he became a city councillor in Neuilly-sur-Seine. A member of the Neo-Gaullist party RPR, he went on to be elected mayor of that town, after the death of the incumbent mayor Achille Peretti. Sarkozy had been close to Peretti, as his mother was Peretti's secretary. The senior RPR politician in the time, Charles Pasqua, wanted to become mayor, and asked Sarkozy to organise his campaign. Instead Sarkozy profited from a short illness of Pasqua to propel himself into the office of mayor. He was the youngest ever mayor of any town in France with a population of over 50,000. He served from 1983 to 2002. In 1988, he became a deputy in the National Assembly.
   In 1993, Sarkozy was in the national news for personally negotiating with the "Human Bomb", a man who had taken small children hostage in a kindergarten in Neuilly. The “Human Bomb” was killed after two days of talks by policemen of the RAID, who entered the school stealthily while the attacker was resting.
   From 1993 to 1995, he was Minister for 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. During his tenure, he increased France's public debt more than any other French Budget Minister except his predecessor, by the equivalent of €200 billion ($260 billion) (FY 1994-1996). The first two budgets he submitted to the parliament (budgets for FY1994 and FY1995) assumed a yearly budget deficit equivalent to 6% of GDP. According to the Maastricht Treaty, the French yearly budget deficit may not be bigger than 3% of France's GDP.
   In 1995, he spurned Chirac and backed Balladur for President of France. After Chirac won the election, Sarkozy lost his position as Minister for the Budget and found himself outside the circles of power.
   However, he came back after the right-wing defeat at the 1997 parliamentary election, as number 2 in the RPR. When the party leader Philippe Séguin resigned, in 1999, he took the leadership of the Neo-Gaullist party. But it obtained its worst result at the 1999 European Parliament election, winning 12.7% of the votes, less than the dissident Rally for France of Charles Pasqua. Sarkozy lost the RPR leadership.
   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 Sarkozy's support of Edouard Balladur for French President in 1995. Following Jacques Chirac's 14 July keynote speech on road safety Sarkozy as interior minister pushed through new legislation leading to the mass purchase of speed cameras and a campaign to increase the awareness of dangers on the roads.
   In the cabinet reshuffle of 31 March 2004, Sarkozy became 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".
   In party elections of November 2004, Sarkozy became leader of the UMP with 85% of the vote. In accordance with an agreement with Chirac, he resigned as Finance 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 Légion d'honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honour) by President Chirac in February 2005. He was re-elected on 13 March 2005 to the National Assembly (as required by the constitution, he'd had to resign as a deputy when he'd 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 2 June 2005, when the members of the government were officially announced.

First term as Minister of the Interior

Towards the end of his first term as Minister of the Interior, in 2004, Sarkozy was the most popular and also the most unpopular conservative politician in France, according to polls conducted at the beginning of 2004. His “tough on crime” policies, which included increasing the police presence on the streets and introducing monthly crime performance ratings, were popular with many and unpopular for many others.
Sarkozy has sought to ease the sometimes tense relationships between the general French population and the Muslim community. Unlike the Catholic Church in France with their official leaders or Protestants with their umbrella organisations, the French Muslim community had a lack of structure with no group that could legitimately deal with the French government on their behalf. 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 the Muslim Faith”), an organisation meant to be representative of French Muslims. 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 so that they're less reliant on money from outside of France.

Minister of Finance

During his short appointment as Minister of Finance, Sarkozy was responsible for introducing a number of policies. The degree to which this reflected libéralisme (a hands-off approach to running the economy) or more traditional French state dirigisme (intervention) is controversial. He resigned the day following his election as president of the UMP.

In September 2004, Sarkozy oversaw the reduction of the government ownership stake in France Télécom from 50.4% to 41%.
Sarkozy backed a partial nationalisation of the engineering company Alstom decided by his predecessor when the company was exposed to bankruptcy in 2003.
Sarkozy reached in June an agreement with the major retail chains in France to concertedly lower prices on household goods by an average of 2%; the success of this measure is disputed, with studies suggesting that the decrease was close to 1% in September.
Taxes: Sarkozy avoided taking a position on the ISF (solidarity tax on wealth). This is considered an ideological symbol by many on the Left and Right. Some in the business world and on the Liberal Right, such as Alain Madelin, wanted it abolished. For Sarkozy, that would have risked being categorised by the Left as a gift to the richest classes of society at a time of economic difficulties.

Villepin government

Second term as Minister of the Interior

During his second term at the Ministry of the Interior, Sarkozy was initially more discreet about his ministerial activities: instead of focusing on his own topic of law and order, many of his declarations addressed wider issues, since he was expressing his opinions as head of the UMP party. However, the civil unrest in autumn 2005 put law enforcement in the spotlight again. Sarkozy was accused of having provoked the unrest by calling young delinquents from housing projects “rabble” (“racaille”) in Argenteuil near Paris. After the accidental death of two youths, which sparked the riots, Sarkozy first blamed it on “hoodlums” and gangsters. These remarks were sharply criticised by many on the left wing and by a member of his own government, Delegate Minister for Equal Opportunities Azouz Begag.
After the rioting, he made a number of announcements on future policy: selection of immigrants, greater tracking of immigrants, and a reform on the 1945 ordinance government justice measures for young delinquents.

Action as UMP's leader

Before he was elected French President, Sarkozy was 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 a "yes" vote in the French referendum on the European Constitution but the "No" vote won.
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 8 September 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. 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 pressed for a reduction in the budget deficit, claiming that the French state has been living off credit for some time. Such policies are what are called in France libéral (that is, in favour of laissez-faire economic policies, although this judgment is made by French standards) or, with a pejorative undertone, ultra-libéral. Sarkozy rejects this label of libéral and prefers to call himself a pragmatist instead. Besides his dirigisme on economical subjects is far from laissez-faire politics.
Sarkozy opened another avenue of controversy by declaring that he wanted 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, saying that it enables foreign students to take open-ended curricula in order to obtain residency in France; instead, he wants to select the best students to the best curricula in France.
In early 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 organised 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.

Candidacy for President

On 14 January 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy was chosen by the UMP to be its candidate in the 2007 presidential election. Sarkozy, who was running unopposed, won 98% of the votes. Of the 327,000 UMP members who could vote, 69% participated in the online ballot.
   In February 2007 Sarkozy appeared on a televised debate on TF1 where he expressed his support for affirmative action for minorities and the freedom to work overtime. Despite his opposition to same-sex marriage, he advocated civil unions and the possibility for same-sex partners to inherit under the same regime as married couples. The law has been voted in July 2007.
   On 7 February, Nicolas Sarkozy decided in favour of a projected second, non-nuclear, aircraft carrier for the national Navy (adding to the nuclear Charles de Gaulle), during an official visit in Toulon with Defence Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie. “This would allow permanently having an operational ship, taking into account the constraints of maintenance”, he explained.
   On 21 March, President Jacques Chirac announced his support for Sarkozy, adding that he'd his vote. Chirac pointed out that Sarkozy had been chosen as presidential candidate for the ruling UMP party, and said: “So it's totally natural that I give him my vote and my support.” To focus on his campaign, Sarkozy stepped down as interior minister on 26 March.
   During the campaign, rival candidates had accused Sarkozy of being a “candidate for brutality” and of presenting overly hardline views about France’s future. He was also criticised by opponents for allegedly courting conservative voters in policy-making in a bid to capitalise on right-wing sentiments among some communities. However, his popularity was sufficient to see him polling as the frontrunner throughout the later campaign period, consistently ahead of rival Socialist candidate, Ségolène Royal.
   The first round of the presidential election was held on 22 April 2007. Nicolas Sarkozy came in first with 31.18% of the votes, ahead of Ségolène Royal of the Socialists with 25.87%. In the second round, Sarkozy came out on top to win the election with 53.06% of the votes ahead of Ségolène Royal with 46.94%. In his speech immediately following the announcement of the election results, Sarkozy stressed the need for France’s modernisation, but also called for national unity, mentioning that Royal was in his thoughts. In that speech, he claimed “The French have chosen to break with the ideas, habits and behaviour of the past. I'll restore the value of work, authority, merit and respect for the nation.”

Presidency (2007–present)

On 16 May 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy became the sixth person elected President of the French Fifth Republic (the seventh overall; Alain Poher served twice in an interim role as President of the French Senate), and the 23rd president over all five Republican governments in the history of France. He is the first French President to have been born after World War II.
   The official transfer of power from Jacques Chirac took place on 16 May at 11:00 am (9:00 UTC) at the Élysée Palace, where he was given the authorization codes of the French nuclear arsenal and presented with the Grand Master’s Collar, symbol of his new function of Grand Master of the Legion of Honour. At that point, he formally became president. Leyenda, by Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz was played in honour of the president’s wife, who is Albeniz’s great-granddaughter. Both Sarkozy’s mother Andrée, who sat on a regal chair, and his formerly estranged father Pal – with whom Sarkozy had reached a reconciliation – attended the ceremony, as did Sarkozy’s children. The presidential motorcade, with the President on board the presidential Peugeot 607 Paladine, then travelled from the Élysée to the Champs-Élysées for a public ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe. Then the new president went to the Cascade du Bois de Boulogne of Paris for a homage to the French Resistance and to the Communist resistant Guy Môquet – he proposed that all high-school students read Guy Moquet’s last letter to his parents, which was criticised by a number of leftists as a cynical form of reappropriation of French history by the right.
   In the afternoon, the new President flew to Berlin to meet with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
   Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin was replaced by François Fillon. Sarkozy appointed Bernard Kouchner, the left-wing founder of Médecins Sans Frontières, as his foreign minister, leading to Kouchner’s expulsion from the Socialist Party. In addition to Kouchner, three more Sarkozy ministers are from the left, including Eric Besson, who served as Ségolène Royal’s economic adviser at the beginning of her campaign. Sarkozy also appointed seven women to form a total cabinet of 15; one, Justice Minister Rachida Dati, is the first woman of Northern African origin to serve in a French cabinet. Of the 15, two attended the elite Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA). The ministers were reorganised, with the controversial creation of a Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Co-Development – given to his right-hand man Brice Hortefeux – and of a Ministry of Budget, Public Accounts and Civil Administration – handed out to Éric Wœrth, supposed to prepare the replacement of only a third of all civil servants who retire. However, after the 17 June parliamentary elections, the Cabinet has been adjusted to 15 ministers and 16 deputy ministers, totalling 31 officials.
   Shortly after taking office, President Sarkozy began negotiations with Colombian president Álvaro Uribe and the left-wing guerrilla FARC, regarding the release of hostages held by the rebel group, especially Franco-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt. According to some sources, Sarkozy himself asked for Uribe to release FARC’s “chancellor” Rodrigo Granda. Furthermore, he announced on 24 July 2007, that French and European representatives had obtained the extradition of the Bulgarian nurses detained in Libya to their country. In exchange, he signed with Gaddafi security, health care and immigration pacts – and a $230 million (168 million euros) MILAN antitank missile sale. The contract was the first made by Libya since 2004, and was negotiated with MBDA, a subsidiary of EADS. Another 128 millions euros contract would have been signed, according to Tripoli, with EADS for a TETRA radio system. The Socialist Party (PS) and the Communist Party (PCF) criticised a “state affair” and a “barter” with a “Rogue state”. The leader of the PS, François Hollande, requested the opening of a parliamentary investigation. Critics alleged that Sarkozy proposed to nominate Strauss-Kahn as managing director of the IMF to deprive the Socialist Party of one of its more popular figures.
   The UMP, Sarkozy’s party, won a majority at the June 2007 legislative election, although by less than expected. In July, the UMP majority, seconded by the Nouveau Centre, ratified one of Sarkozy’s electoral promises, which was to partially revoke the inheritance tax. The inheritance tax formerly brought eight billion euros into state coffers.
   After winning the election, Sarkozy’s UMP majority has reduced taxes, in particular for upper middle-class people, allegedly in an effort to boost GDP growth, but didn't reduce state expenditures. He was criticised by the European Commission for doing so. Furthermore, Sarkozy broke with the custom of amnestying traffic tickets and of releasing thousands of prisoners from overcrowded jails on Bastille Day, a tradition that Napoleon had started in 1802 to commemorate the storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution Sarkozy then went on vacation to the United States, taking his family to Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. He stayed in the 11-bathroom shorefront mansion of former Microsoft executive Michael Appe. one of his presidential planes flew him on 10 August to Paris and then back to America. On 21 August he returned to France by a commercial jet.
   Sarkozy’s government issued a decree on 7 August 2007 to generalise a voluntary biometric profiling program of travellers in airports. The program, called Parafes, was to use fingerprints. The new database would be interconnected with the Schengen Information System (SIS) as well as with a national database of wanted persons (FPR). The Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés (CNIL) protested against this new decree, opposing itself to the recording of fingerprints and to the interconnection between the SIS and the FPR.

Main members of Sarkozy’s staff

General secretary - Claude Guéant

Chief of the private military staff - Vice-amiral d'escadre Édouard Guillaud

Special advisor to the President - Henri Guaino

Advisors to the President - Raymond Soubie and Catherine Pégard

Diplomatic advisor and sherpa - Jean-David Levitte

Deputy secretary general - François Pérol

Head of cabinet - Emmanuelle Mignon

Advisors to the Presidency - Georges Marc Benamou, Arnold Munnich and Patrick Ouart

Spokesman - David Martinon

Head of cabinet - Cédric Goubet

Image of Sarkozy

He was named the 68th best dressed person by the Vanity Fair magazine, alongside David Beckham and Brad Pitt. Beside publicizing, at times, and at others, refusing to publicise his ex-wife’s image, Sarkozy takes care of his own personal image, sometimes to the point of censoring — such as in the Paris Match affair, when he allegedly forced its director to resign following an article on Cécilia and her affair with Publicis executive Richard Attias, or pressures exercised on the Journal du dimanche, which was preparing to publish an article concerning Cécilia’s decision not to vote in the second round of the 2007 presidential election. In its August 9, 2007 edition, Paris Match retouched a photo of Sarkozy in order to erase a love handle. His official portrait destined for all French townhalls was done by SIPA photographer Philippe Warrin, better known for his paparazzi work.
Former Daily Telegraph journalist Colin Randall has however highlighted Sarkozy’s tighter control of his image and frequents interventions in the media: “he censors a book, or fires the chief editor of an hebdomary."

Controversies

Generally speaking, Sarkozy is a of the Left, and is also criticised by some on the right, most vocally by the supporters of Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin, such as Jean-Louis Debré.
Critics have accused him of being an authoritarian demagogue, ready to trade away civil liberties for political gains. He is also accused by the Left of being a populist who favours far-right ideas.

Kärcher remark

In the midst of a tense period and following a shooting that killed an 11-year-old boy in the banlieue of La Courneuve in June 2005, Sarkozy quoted a local resident and vowed to clean the area out “with a Kärcher” (nettoyer la cité au Kärcher, Kärcher being a well-known German brand of pressure cleaning equipment), and two days before the 2005 Paris riots he referred to the youth of the housing projects as voyous (thugs) and racaille, a slang term which can be translated into English as rabble, scum or riff-raff; this was criticised as being inappropriate language.

Separation of powers

As Minister of the Interior, Sarkozy has made bold statements following heinous crimes reported in the media. As a consequence, he's 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. Most famously, he was criticised, not only by the left-wing Syndicat de la magistrature judges' union, but also by the centrist Union syndicale des magistrats for attacks on the independence of the judiciary.
In September 2005 some youths were acquitted of an arson attack on a police station in Pau for lack of proof and Sarkozy was accused of having pushed for a hasty inquiry – Sarkozy had vowed that the perpetrators would be arrested within three months. On 22 June 2005, he announced to law enforcement officials that he'd questioned the Minister of Justice about the future of “the judge” who had freed a man on parole, enabling him to commit a murder.
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 because he said he didn't want to hinder his brother’s political career. French presidents have long had links with the business sector, but Sarkozy’s have been especially extensive, and especially publicly discussed. His vacation on the yacht of a wealthy industrialist, immediately after his election, drew particular comment, although Sarkozy was unapologetic.

Religion and state

In 2004, he published a book called La République, les religions, l'espérance (“The Republic, Religions, and Hope”), in which he argued that the young shouldn't be brought up solely on secular or republican values. He also advocated reducing the separation of church and state, arguing for the government subsidy of mosques in order to encourage Islamic integration into French society. He flatly opposes financing of religious institutions with funds from outside France. After meeting with Tom Cruise, Sarkozy was criticised by some for meeting with a member of the Church of Scientology, which is classified as a cult (secte translates “cult”) in France (see Parliamentary Commission on Cults in France).
Sarkozy visited the Pope on December 20, 2007, and received the title of Honorary Chanoine of the Basilica of St. John Lateran. A chanoine is a member of the clergy. On his visit to the Pope, Sarkozy was accompanied by French comedian Jean-Marie Bigard, was late, and text-messaged during the audience. This behavior has some people pretending that he isn't cultured enough to be in office.

War in Iraq

Nicolas Sarkozy disapproved of the US-led invasion of Iraq, but was nonetheless critical of the way Jacques Chirac and his foreign minister Dominique de Villepin expressed France’s opposition to the war. Talking at the French-American Foundation in Washington, D.C. on 12 September 2006, he denounced what he called the “French arrogance” and said: “It is bad manners to embarrass one’s allies or sound like one is taking delight in their troubles." He also added: “We must never again turn our disagreements into a crisis.” Jacques Chirac reportedly said in private that Sarkozy’s speech was “appalling” and “a shameful act”. that he thinks disorders such as paedophilia and depression have a genetic as well as social basis, famously stating “I don't agree with you, I'd be inclined to think that one is born a paedophile, and it's actually a problem that we don't know how to cure this disease"; he also claimed that suicides among youth were linked to genetic predispositions by stating, “I don't want to give parents a complex. It’s not exclusively the parents' fault every time a youngster commits suicide." These claims were criticised by some scientists, including controversial geneticist Axel Kahn. Sarkozy later said, “What part is innate and what part is acquired? At least let’s debate it, let’s not close the door to all debate."

African speech

On Friday, July 27, 2007, Sarkozy delivered a speech in Senegal, written by Henri Guaino, in which he made reference to “African peasants" (note that the French word “paysans” can be translated as either “peasants” or as “rural people”) and said that colonialism wasn't the cause of all of Africa’s problems,

While quickly crossing the hall Saturday morning, in the middle of the crowd, Sarkozy encounters a recalcitrant visitor who refuses to shake his hand. “Ah no, don't touch me!”, said the man. The president retorted immediately: “Get lost, then.” “You're making me dirty”, yelled the man. With a frozen smile, Sarkozy says, his teeth glistening, a refined “Get lost, then, poor dumb-ass, go."

This exchange has been cause for much humour and debate regarding its propriety in the French press. It should also be noted that a precise translation into English has many possible variations.

Awards and honours

French honours

Grand Cross of the Légion d'honneur (2007 - Automatic when taking office)
Was previously Knight of the Légion d'honneur (since 2004)

Grand Cross of the Ordre national du Mérite (2007 - Automatic when taking office)
Other countries

Honorary Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath (2008 - United Kingdom)

Grand Cross of the Order of Charles III (2004 - Spain)

Commander of the Ordre de Léopold (Belgium)

Stara Planina (Bulgaria)Further Information
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