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Who is Sarkozy?
07/05/2007 14:43 - (SA)
Paris - France's new president-elect, Nicolas Sarkozy, represents a new type of leader for the country in many ways.
Nicolas Paul Stephane Sarkozy de Nagy-Bocsa was born in Paris on January 28, 1955, to an exiled Hungarian aristocrat and the daughter of a Greek-Jewish doctor who had converted to Catholicism.
Sharp-tongued and unabashedly ambitious, Sarkozy famously announced his intention to run for the presidency in 2004 on a television talk show. When asked if he ever thought about becoming president of France, he replied "Whenever I look into the mirror".
A tough-talking defender of law and order, a workaholic who wants to make the French work more, Sarkozy won Sunday's runoff election against Socialist Segolene Royal because he made the French voters believe he deserved to be president on merit.
After a falling out with his former mentor Jacques Chirac because he supported a rightist rival in the 1995 presidential election, Sarkozy spent seven years in the political wilderness after Chirac was elected.
But a strong showing by right-wing extremist Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002, because of law-and-order concerns by a nervous French electorate, prompted Chirac to name Sarkozy interior minister, in an attempt to attract far right-wing voters.
Sarkozy carried out that mission with relish. In a 2005 visit to a suburban ghetto north of Paris, he vowed to rid it of crime by using a high-pressure industrial cleaning machine.
Several months later, during the riots that shook these rundown neighbourhoods throughout the country, he referred to rampaging minority youths as "scum".
As a result, he reduced Le Pen's score in the first round of the presidential election to just 10.44% of the vote, his lowest score since the first time he ran for president, in 1974, and one million votes fewer than he received in 2002.
Affirmative action
However, Sarkozy was also the only politician in France to prescribe the US-style remedy of affirmative action for the inequalities and discrimination in education and employment that led to the three weeks of rioting.
But the trial balloon he floated was rejected nearly universally, and he rarely mentioned the idea on the campaign trail.
Affirmative action is not the only American value that the new French president brings to the office. What may strike the French after he has spent some time in the Elysee Palace are values that are similar to those of the US neo-conservatives.
Sarkozy rarely gives voice to these values in public, but he did on several occasions during the campaign.
The first such occasion was in a discussion he had with philosopher Michel Onfray, which was reprinted in the magazine Philosophie.
Paedophiles, suicide
"I tend to believe that paedophiles are born," Sarkozy said, expressing a typically neo-con belief in the primacy of genetics over environment.
He later added: "There are 1 200 to 1 300 youths who commit suicide in France every year. This is not because their parents did not treat them well, but because, genetically, they had a weakness, a pre-existent pain."
At a large political rally in Paris, on April 29, Sarkozy invoked another favourite neo-conservative tenet: the great damage wrought on society by the excesses of the 1960s, and the need to eradicate that generation's influence.
In the speech, Sarkozy accused the generation of the French student and worker unrest of May 1968 of destroying morals and authority in France.
"The heirs of May 1968 have imposed the idea that anything goes, that there is no longer any difference between good and evil, no difference between the true and the false, between the beautiful and the ugly ... That the victim counts less than the criminal."
Supports Israel, US
Like the American neo-conservatives, Sarkozy is also a strong supporter of Israel, which is contrary to previous French policy, including that of Chirac, who was often critical of Jerusalem and often supported Palestinian interests.
And finally, during a September 2006 visit to Washington, Sarkozy was happy to shake the hand of US President George W Bush, who is generally reviled in France.
Following a brief meeting with Bush, Sarkozy and his aides made certain that a photograph of the two men, both shown warmly smiling, was distributed among the media.
Sapa-dpa
- SAPA
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