Nicolas Sarkozy

Nicolas Sarkozy (born January 28, 1955, Paris, France) is a French politician who served as president of France (2007–12).

Early life and political start

Sarkozy was born to immigrant Greek and Hungarian parents. He qualified as a lawyer (1981) and pursued advanced studies in political science at the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris (1979–81). An ambitious and highly skilled politician, Sarkozy in 1983 was elected mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine, where he served until 2002. He first made his mark on the national scene in 1993 when he became budget minister and official spokesman in the government of Prime Minister Édouard Balladur. Balladur had been put forward by rightist politicians, including Jacques Chirac, to serve as prime minister under Socialist Pres. François Mitterrand, with the idea that someone—such as Chirac—would contest the 1995 presidential election. Sarkozy, however, encouraged Balladur to run for president himself and thereby earned the lasting enmity of Chirac, to whom he had once been very close. Balladur lost to Chirac, and Sarkozy was shut out of the subsequent centre-right government of 1995–97.

Rise to UMP leader

In 2002, after Chirac’s reelection as president was quickly followed by the election of another centre-right administration, Sarkozy returned to office as interior minister, a post he held for nearly two years until he became finance minister in March 2004. Soon after, however, Chirac asked him to choose between his government post and becoming president of the centre-right Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party, the neo-Gaullist successor party to the Rally for the Republic that Chirac had founded. Sarkozy chose the UMP job and quit the government in November 2004. In the wake of the May 2005 referendum in which French voters rejected the proposed European Union (EU) constitution, Chirac invited Sarkozy to return as interior minister in a new government to be headed by Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin.

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France: The Sarkozy administration

In late 2005 Sarkozy had to contend with three weeks of rioting in the less-affluent suburbs of Paris and other cities. Although critics blamed him for inciting the car-burning protesters by calling them “scum,” his supporters approved of his hard-line stance on law and order as well as his call for tougher immigration laws. In 2007 Sarkozy ran for president of France. He finished first in the initial round of voting on April 22, winning 31 percent of the vote. In the runoff election on May 6, Sarkozy defeated Ségolène Royal of the Socialist Party, capturing 53 percent of the vote. Sarkozy was sworn in as president on May 16, 2007. He promised a “rupture” with France’s past, including radical economic reforms that would reduce taxes and liberalize the country’s labour market, and closer relations with the United States.

Presidency

In the parliamentary elections of June 2007 Sarkozy’s UMP did less well than expected but still well enough to provide a comfortable majority for the new government of François Fillon, whom Sarkozy had appointed as prime minister just after assuming the presidency. In the subsequent cabinet reshuffle, Sarkozy made several surprising appointments, including the country’s first woman finance minister (Christine Lagarde), the first full cabinet member of North African origin (Rachida Dati), and a maverick Socialist (Bernard Kouchner) as foreign minister. Sarkozy also chose Socialists for several other key appointments.

In the first few months of his presidency Sarkozy carried out some of his promised labour market and tax-cutting reforms. He decided not to scrap the 35-hour maximum on the standard workweek (a landmark Socialist law) but rather to use tax relief on overtime pay to moderate the law’s rigidity. Other new business-friendly laws restricted the right to strike and cut off unemployment payments to people who turned down certain job offers. Sarkozy also won narrow approval from the legislature for a constitutional change to limit the presidency to two five-year terms.

While maintaining Europe as the prime focus of his foreign policy, Sarkozy was relatively pro-American compared with his predecessors. He showed signs of being more accommodating to the United States (especially with his active interest in a positive outcome in Iraq) and of being somewhat more troublesome to some of his euro zone partners (with his criticism of restrictive European Central Bank monetary policy). He also stressed EU complementarity to NATO, friendship with Israel, and a tough attitude toward Iranian nuclear weapons.

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In July 2007 Sarkozy drew worldwide attention for the prominent part he and his wife Cécilia played in gaining the release of six Bulgarian medics (charged with infecting children with HIV) who had been held in Libya since 1999. While applauding the release, some in France and the EU criticized Sarkozy’s high-profile involvement as well as his wife’s participation. Meanwhile, to the relief of many EU partners, Sarkozy agreed to put forward a revamped EU treaty for approval by the French parliament and not by referendum (as Chirac had tried and failed to do in 2005). His efforts in support of this agreement, the so-called Lisbon Treaty, were rewarded when the parliament ratified it in February 2008. Sarkozy continued to play a vocal role in European affairs once France assumed the presidency of the EU, which rotates among member countries, that July. The same month, Sarkozy oversaw the launch of the Mediterranean Union, an international organization made up of Mediterranean rim countries in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.

Although the French media had traditionally avoided close examination of the private lives of French leaders, Sarkozy’s personal problems were well known even before his presidency because of the publicity surrounding a temporary separation from Cécilia, his second wife. His divorce from her in October 2007 and his marriage to singer Carla Bruni in February 2008 drew increased media scrutiny. Many in France viewed the interest in Sarkozy’s private life as distasteful and inappropriate, and some accused Sarkozy himself of cultivating a flashy image to distract the public from negative aspects of his administration.

Having fared poorly in French regional elections in March 2010, the UMP retained control of only 1 of 22 régions. The results appeared to reflect French voters’ growing dissatisfaction with the president and his conservative party during a time of high unemployment and economic uncertainty. Domestic support for Sarkozy continued to erode throughout 2011, even as his profile rose internationally, because of his leadership role in the response to the European debt crisis. As the 2012 presidential campaign began in earnest, Sarkozy trailed Socialist challenger François Hollande in opinion polls and attempted to bolster his numbers with a return to the theme of immigration reform. On April 22, 2012, Sarkozy finished a close second to Hollande in the first round of presidential balloting, and the two faced each other again in a runoff two weeks later. On May 6, 2012, Hollande defeated Sarkozy, making Sarkozy only the second French president to fail in a reelection bid since the foundation of the Fifth Republic in 1958.

Legal troubles and attempted comeback

Although Sarkozy announced that the loss signaled his retirement from political life, it was widely believed that he was simply biding his time for an eventual return. Sarkozy was considered a possible UMP candidate for the presidency in 2017, but his potential political ambitions were frustrated by a string of legal troubles related to the funding of his 2007 election campaign. In March 2013 he was investigated for improperly extracting donations from Liliane Bettencourt, the elderly, mentally frail heiress to the L’Oréal cosmetics empire. Those proceedings were dropped in October 2013, but information obtained during that investigation, as well as a case involving some €50 million (almost $70 million) in illegal contributions from Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi, led to additional legal woes for Sarkozy and his inner circle. In July 2014 Sarkozy, his lawyer, and a French magistrate were formally charged with corruption. Investigators alleged that Sarkozy had promised the magistrate a plum position in Monaco in exchange for privileged information about charges pending against him. That investigation was suspended in September 2014, just days after Sarkozy announced his intention to seek the UMP presidency at the party congress in November 2014. He won the leadership contest easily, but legal issues, including a new scandal involving alleged kickbacks from the sale of 45 helicopters to Kazakhstan, threatened to disrupt his political comeback.

A strong showing by the UMP in regional elections in March 2015 enhanced Sarkozy’s position, and in May 2015 he led the effort to rebrand the UMP as the Republicans. In the first round of Republican presidential primary voting in November 2016, however, Sarkozy finished a distant third behind former prime ministers François Fillon and Alain Juppé. For the second time in four years, Sarkozy announced that he was withdrawing from politics. His memoir, La France pour la vie (“France for Life”), was published in 2016. Sarkozy’s retirement from public life did not put an end to his legal troubles, however. The various cases against him proceeded, and in March 2021 he was found guilty of corruption in connection with the Monaco influence-peddling scheme. He was sentenced to three years in prison, although two years of the sentence were suspended, and he was allowed to serve the remaining year under house arrest.