Nicolas Sarkozy's straight talking is popular with many French voters
Posted on 04/24/2007 9:59:21 AM PDT by Maelstorm
Nicolas Sarkozy casts himself as a moderniser, championing a clean break with France's traditional ruling elite.
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Nicolas Sarkozy's straight talking is popular with many French voters
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His strong showing in the first round of the presidential election set up an intriguing contest against Socialist candidate Segolene Royal.
As a highly combative interior minister and UMP leader he has sharply divided opinion in France - not least by adopting a tough stance on immigration.
He famously described young delinquents in the Paris suburbs as racaille, or "rabble".
That blunt comment - made before the 2005 riots - encouraged some critics to put him in the same category as far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Integration policy
Mr Sarkozy, 52, pushed through measures to curb illegal immigration - including deportations - and to integrate skilled migrants into French society.
 Mr Sarkozy is a gift to cartoonists
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But he has also advocated positive discrimination to help reduce youth unemployment - a challenge to those wedded to the French idea of equality. His call for state help for Muslims to build mosques was also controversial.
Unlike most of the French ruling class, Mr Sarkozy did not go to the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, but trained as a lawyer.
The son of a Hungarian immigrant and a French mother of Greek Jewish origin, he was baptised a Roman Catholic and grew up in Paris.
One of his main political influences is not French but British, according to his other biographer, Nicolas Domenach.
"He admires Tony Blair hugely - for many reasons," he says.
"Tony Blair was able to seduce the media, in the way Sarkozy does. And Sarkozy looks at how Tony Blair was able to sell his political ideology."
Mr Sarkozy has called for "a rupture with a certain style of politics", saying he wants to encourage social mobility, better schools and cuts in public sector staff.
Rise through the ranks
He served as mayor of the affluent Paris suburb of Neuilly from 1983 to 2002, then became interior minister. He also had a brief spell as finance minister in 2004.
 President Chirac famously fell out with Mr Sarkozy
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"He's hyperactive, he's ambitious, he's a heavy worker, a workaholic, he never rests," says Anita Hausser, who wrote a biography of Mr Sarkozy and is political editor at the French broadcaster LCI.
She says his appeal is simple.
"He was a lawyer, so he seems close to the people, and he wants to show them that he understands their problems and that he will solve their problems."
It seems that rather than a new ideology, he is a pragmatist who will use any solution as long as it works, the BBC's Caroline Wyatt in Paris says.
Initially a protege of President Chirac, the two fell out dramatically when Mr Sarkozy backed a Chirac rival for the presidency in 1995 - a slight that has never been forgotten.
Even those on the left in France admit Mr Sarkozy is a formidable political force.
He has shown strong protectionist instincts - pouring state funds into saving the ailing French company Alstom. Yet he also promises to make the French less scared of economic success.
He is often described as an Atlanticist, but he too was against the war in Iraq. He is not too keen on the old Franco-German alliance - but upset new EU members by saying those with lower taxes than old Europe should not receive EU subsidies.
He has voiced opposition to Turkey's bid to join the EU.
Twice married, Mr Sarkozy has three children - the third by his current wife Cecilia.
The majority of the French Press portrays him as an almost Nazi-like figure, when they aren’t calling him a madman and rabble-rouser.
Well you know he has to be good then. lol I think he has a fair shot. All he has to do is to convince those who voted for the other conservative leaning candidates to back him and he wins.
All he has to do is to repeatedly show the videos of last summer Muslim riots in the suburbs of just about every French city and remind the people that they have imported the disease that will ultimately kill them in the name of a 35 hour work week and retirement at 40.
He has to refocus the French people on their real mission in life; the reborn Carolingian Empire or Frankenreich (i.e. the EU), as a bulwark against the advancing Islamic hoardes and as a means to keep France (and Europe) politically and economically viable.
His father, Pal Sarkoczy, was a minor Hungarian nobleman who fled the Soviet occupation of Hungary. Pal's father was a Hungarian Reformed Christian, his mother a Roman Catholic. Sarkoczy joined the French Foreign Legion, served honorably for five years, and then later took advantage of the French law which says that anyone who serves in the FFL for that long is entitled to French citizenship. He was eventually issued a new passport under the name Paul Sarkozy.
He started a small advertising firm and married Andree Mallah.
Andree Mallah was the daughter of a French Catholic woman, Adele Bouvier, and a Sephardic Jewish man, Benedict Mallah, who had left the Ottoman Empire for France. Benedict Mallah converted to Catholicism in the 1920s and Andree was raised Catholic.
Despite his conversion, he still had to hide underground from the Nazis during WWII.
Paul Sarkozy left Andree when his second son Nicolas was four, so Nicolas was raised by his mother and grandparents.
His grandfather was always very sympathetic toward Israel, the UK and the United States and Sarkozy attributes his attitude toward these countries to his grandfather's influence.
His immigrant, mixed-religious background, his family's status as refugees from Communist and Muslim states, and his grandfather's politics seem to be the main reasons for his unusually rational (for a Frenchman) geopolitical perspectives.
I know that the riots changed the opinion of many in Europe as to the seriousness of radical Muslim hoards.
He gets my vote! It's about time someone in France calls a spade, a spade. I had a chance to (try to) listen to the socialist party Segolene Royal on C-Span. Ugh. She is blind to the complete failure of the already too socialized and unionized French workers and their at-the-ready strikes, she wants to expand on that? I admit, I only listened to a little of it, I could barely tolerate her socialist rhetoric. Even if I knew nothing of Sarkozy, he'd get my vote, just based on that - okay, for the most part. Thanks - a very informative profile on Sarkozy. If France is smart (and some seem to be catching on), he should be elected.
Wow, thanks. I think, too, his views on immigration had to be influenced on his own personal experiences of immigration done right - legally, with willingness to work and to abide by the new country’s laws, something the ‘rabble’ are unwilling to do. He seems perfectly suited for the situation France is in right now, a real godsend. Let’s hope a majority of French agree.
It is amazing that the group that most complains is young men who if they would spend time bettering themselves instead of idolizing the debased life they were born into they could make a good life for themselves. Is the left that claims to care for the disadvantaged trying to motivate them to better things? No they motivate the poor to elect them so the poor can stay exactly where they are at their feet groveling for more.
> almost Nazi-like figure
Which is French for “socialist but less socialist than his opponent”
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