![]() ![]() “The national conversation changed to the price of watches,” Mano said. He soon became known as “ le Président Bling-Bling” in a country where good taste is sacred. ![]() Once their patience was strained, the French people were unforgiving in their condemnation of Sarkozy’s flashy style. As Jean-Luc Mano, a political adviser of Sarkozy’s, told me, “These people can’t change their wives every week.” None of this rash activity went down well, particularly with his older, more conservative constituents. Perhaps sensing that that might get him in trouble with Jewish voters, Sarkozy next announced that each French elementary-school student should adopt the soul of a French Jewish child killed in the Holocaust. After Sarkozy’s wife, Cécilia, went to Libya to spearhead the release of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who were accused of infecting children with H.I.V., for example, the new president allowed Colonel Muammar Qaddafi literally to pitch his tent on the lawn across the street from the Élysée Palace for five days. Once the economy started sinking, Sarkozy’s grand reforms, which included dumping the 35-hour workweek, reducing pension benefits for state employees, and revamping the university system, met with massive demonstrations, which forced him to pull back somewhat on his ambitious agenda. France guarantees workers five weeks of paid leave annually and allows them to turn down job offers while on unemployment if what’s offered is not up to their standards. Part of Sarkozy’s problem is that in his campaign he promised more than he could deliver. In May, his approval rating hit a low of 32 percent, after having been in the 50s and 60s for the six months following his election. Expectations ran high after he appointed a diverse Cabinet, including Socialists, a number of good-looking women, and the daughter of North African immigrants as minister of justice. He got elected in May 2007 on a right-wing, pro-American platform of la rupture, promising to break many of the traditions and laws of a calcified Fifth Republic. ![]() Photograph by Mark Schäfer.|||Įven though I have heard that Sarkozy wants to be perceived and photographed as a man of action, it is nevertheless startling to see him race through a room just the way so many political cartoons have portrayed him. View an archive of her reportorial prowess. special correspondent Maureen Orth makes a point of leaving no stone unturned-and no secret unrevealed. “ Bonjour!” he calls out as he barrels into his wife’s office and shuts the door. Suddenly the door opposite me bursts open, and Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of France, comes sprinting into the room. As I wait outside her office in a large, ornate sitting room filled with elegant Second Empire furniture, I glance out the tall windows to the sun-drenched garden, where a boxwood maze is framed by blooming wisteria. At the Élysée Palace, in Paris, the new First Lady of France, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, is finishing lunch with Sarah Brown, the wife of Great Britain’s prime minister, Gordon Brown. ![]()
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