(Si ce livre a un sens, peut-être une utilité, c'est que l...)
Si ce livre a un sens, peut-être une utilité, c'est que le moment était venu de la clarté. J'ai voulu faire cet effort d''aller chercher, au fond de moi, ma vérité sur mes erreurs comme sur mes réussites. Je veux vous dire, sans façon, sans artifice, ce que j'ai vraiment fait, ce en quoi je crois pour l'avenir. Le seul verdict qui m'importera vraiment sera le vôtre, celui des lecteurs de tout horizon politique que je cherche moins à séduire qu'à inciter à comprendre la complexité des situations et l'enchaînement des événements. Je connais la terrible crise de confiance que suscitent la politique et les politiques. Je ne veux en aucun cas m'exonérer de ma part de responsabilité personnelle dans cette situation. Mais peut-être verra-t-on dans cet exercice d'écriture une exigence d'authenticité pour rétablir la confiance. Mission impossible ? Peut-être. Mais au moins me serai-je exposé personnellement et aurai-je essayé. Cela fait bien longtemps que j'en avais envie. Chaque fois, je trouvais une " mauvaise raison ; de me dérober. Pas le moment. Pas le temps. Pas l'envie. Aujourd'hui, j'ai franchi le pas. Je ne le conçois que face à face. C'est à vous que je veux parler.;
Nicolas Paul Stéphane Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa is a French politician who served as President of France and ex officio Co-Prince of Andorra from 16 May 2007 until 15 May 2012.
Background
Ethnicity:
Born in Paris, he is of 1/2 Hungarian Protestant, 1/4 Greek Jewish and 1/4 French Catholic origin.
Nicolas Sarkozy was born January 28, 1955, in Paris, France to immigrant Greek and Hungarian parents.
He was the second of three children, and his father abandoned the family when he was a toddler. To support the family, his mother studied and became a lawyer. He was raised Catholic in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a wealthy suburb of Paris, and he later said that while growing up, he felt inferior to his wealthier classmates.
Education
Sarkozy was enrolled in the Lycée Chaptal, a well regarded public middle and high school in Paris' 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 student, but where he nonetheless obtained his baccalauréat in 1973.
Sarkozy enrolled at the Université Paris X Nanterre, where he graduated with an M.A. in private law and, later, with a D.E.A. 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 organization, in which he was very active. He completed his military service as a part-time Air Force cleaner.
After graduating from university, Sarkozy entered Sciences Po, where he studied between 1979 and 1981, but failed to graduate due to an insufficient command of the English language.
After passing the bar, Sarkozy became a lawyer specializing in business and family law and was one of Silvio Berlusconi's French lawyers.
Sarkozy's political career started early. He was elected to his first political office—Municipal Councillor of Neuilly-sur-Seine—at the age of 22. Six years later, he was elected mayor. He served as mayor for nearly 20 years, before entering national politics.
In addition to serving as mayor, Sarkozy served as budget minister from 1993 to 1995. When he snubbed President Jacques Chirac in 1995 by supporting Édouard Balladur for president, however, he lost the position. Although Chirac put his grudge aside in 2002, and appointed Sarkozy as French minister of the interior, Sarkozy's tenure in Chirac's administration was a bumpy one.
The cabinet was reshuffled in 2004, and Sarkozy was appointed as finance minister. He held this position briefly; when Sarkozy became leader of the Union for a Popular Movement later that year, he resigned his post, in accordance with an agreement with Chirac. In 2005, Sarkozy was reappointed as interior minister, without resigning as head of the UMP.
As interior minister, Sarkozy attracted attention during the 2005 Paris riots by referring to troublemaking youth as "scum" and "rabble," and stating that the rundown suburbs should be washed out "with a power hose."
One of Sarkozy's first orders of business was to strengthen France's relationship with the United States, which had been chilly since Jacques Chirac refused to send troops to Iraq in 2003. Sarkozy promised—and delivered—troops to aid in the war, and France rejoined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's military structure in 2009.
Almost immediately after entering the office, Sarkozy began to negotiate with Colombian President Álvaro Uribe and the guerilla group Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, in an attempt to secure the release of hostages, particularly Ingrid Betancourt, a dual French/Colombian citizen. France opposed a military effort and preferred diplomatic negotiations, but in 2008, Colombian forces, with American guidance, successfully rescued 15 hostages without informing France.
In July of 2007, Sarkozy announced that France, along with other European countries, had obtained the release of the six Bulgarian nurses who had been held in Libya for more than eight years. In order to secure their extradition, he signed security, health-care and immigration pacts with Muammar Gaddafi. He also signed an arms trade agreement, sparking controversy and a criticism that he had bartered arms for hostages with a "rogue state." Sarkozy, as well as Bulgarian officials, denied that the two deals were related.
Over the five years of his presidency, Sarkozy's approval ratings fell from the highest in the country's history to the lowest, at 26 percent, and he was considered a long-shot for re-election. He maintained that he would make a comeback and prevail, but in May of 2012, he was defeated in his bid for re-election by Socialist François Hollande. In his concession speech, Sarkozy said he assumed "full responsibility for this defeat," and suggested retiring from the political spotlight.
Shortly before his 2012 election loss, Sarkozy was part of an investigation into alleged illegal campaign assistance from L'Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt. The charges were dropped the following year, but a related investigation soon opened and a judge ordered the former president to stand trial in 2017.
In March 2018, Sarkozy was placed under formal investigation for illicit campaign financing, passive bribery and concealment of embezzlement of Libyan public funds. Although he voluntarily submitted to questioning, he lashed out at the charges, declaring he was "accused without any physical evidence."
Late in the month, the former president was ordered to stand trial in another case, on charges of corruption and influence-peddling in an attempt to illegally obtain confidential information from a magistrate years earlier.
Achievements
He was bestowed with the Knight of the Legion of Honor in 2004 which was promoted to Grand Cross Legion of Honor in 2007 when he took the office of the President of France. Same time, he was also conferred upon with Grand Cross of the National Order of Merit.
He is also the proud recipient of honorary awards and decorations from various other countries including Belgium, Bulgaria, Brazil, Georgia, Italy, Holy See, Monaco, Spain, Ukraine, and United Kingdom.
Sarkozy received a Christian education, and is actually the first French president to display religious practice, including a visit to the Pope in the company of Jean-Marie Bigard, a stand-up comedian renowned for his particularly crude sexual and scatological jokes. Some suspect his faith is not genuine, and in fact a tool to pander to the Christian electorate. He also declared that "France should reconnect with its cultural roots", and accused secularism of having broken them. While it is a break from the century-old secularism of the French Republic, Sarkozy doesn´t exclusively support the Catholic community, as he helped the creation of the French council of the Muslim Faith. His book "La République, la religion, l´espérance" (The Republic, religion, hope), even though critical of secularism, managed to piss off some Chrsitans, because "he only cares about Islam", apparently.
Politics
After he withdrew in 2012, his party the UMP was left in shambles, drowned in funding scandals and infighting for leadership, and he decided to come back to save it. Somehow, none of the potential candidates seemed to gather as much success from the voters. In 2015, the party was renamed The Republicans, because yes, Sarkozy is quite fond of Murica. He now speaks of running for president again. It may be worth noting that the French President automatically has immunity against prosecution.
For the 2017 election, he accepted the principle of a primary election, boasting he would win it easily. He then lost that race in a big way to his old prime minister, ending up third, and subsequently announced his third complete withdrawal from political life.
Sarkozy's environmental policies were more popular. During the 33rd G8 summit, he announced that France would attempt to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 50 percent by 2050, in an effort to reduce global warming. In 2010, France was ranked No. 1 on Yale University's Environmental Performance Index.
Historically, the president of the French Republic has focused on foreign relations; and the nation's prime minister has focused on domestic policy. Sarkozy, however, took a more active role in domestic issues. As part of his economic stimulus package, he reduced the inheritance tax and enacted the TEPA Law, which offered tax cuts to wealthy households. He also took a tough stance on immigration, and forced mass deportations of the Gypsy (Roma) population.
Additionally, under Sarzoky's leadership, a new program was enacted to use fingerprints to profile passengers at airports, and to integrate that database into both the criminal justice and national security databases.
In 2007, Sarkozy also broke with the Bastille Day tradition of offering amnesty for traffic tickets and releasing some prisoners from jail—a French custom that was started by Napoleon in 1802, to commemorate the storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution. In protest, public sector workers went on strike. University protests erupted at the same time, in protest of a polemical law that Sarkozy had established.
Views
Sarkozy was president from 2007 to 2012 but was defeated by Socialist Francois Hollande when he ran for re-election. He has since faced a series of investigations into alleged corruption, fraud, favoritism and campaign-funding irregularities.
Under French law, a suspect is not formally charged with a crime unless he is sent to trial.
Sarkozy’s lawyers had previously argued that magistrates investigating the alleged secret Libyan funding exceeded their powers and went on a “fishing expedition” by tapping his conversations with them between September 2013 and March 2014, breaching lawyer-client privilege.
Based on the intercepts, Sarkozy is accused of having discussed offering a promotion to a prosecutor in return for tip-offs on an investigation into accusations that his former party treasurer and others exploited the mental frailty of France’s richest woman, Liliane Bettencourt, to extract political donations in cash.
He promised before his election in 2007 that his party (UMP) would legalize civil unions for homosexual couples, which was never done, and the promise was not included in his 2012 campaign. He then ditched the idea on the grounds that it wasn´t really in accordance with the constitution. During his comeback in 2014, he blamed the crisis for dropping it out. Meanwhile, the new government had legalized homosexual marriage with the so-called Taubira law, named after Christiane Taubira, the minister who made it happen. In anticipation of the 2017 elections, he said he would revoke the Taubira law. But even his own party (The Republicans) finds this step back dubious, and suspect it is yet another trick to satisfy the religious electorate.
Quotations:
“If we are not careful, the risks of a disintegration of French society will grow until they become inevitable” — Nicolas Sarkozy
“Crimea chose Russia, we cannot blame them for it” — Nicolas Sarkozy
Membership
He was a member of the European Parliament: July–September 1999 (resignation). Elected in 1999, member of the National Assembly of France for Hauts-de-Seine (6th constituency) and a member of the Constitutional Council of France: since 2012.
Personality
Sarkozy was named the 68th best-dressed person in the world by Vanity Fair, alongside David Beckham and Brad Pitt. However, Sarkozy has also been named as the third worst-dressed person in the world by GQ, a listing that has been disputed. Beside publicizing, at times, and at others, refusing to publicise his ex-wife Cécilia Ciganer-Albéniz's image, Sarkozy takes care of his own personal image, sometimes to the point of censorship—such as in the Paris Match affair, when he allegedly forced its director to resign following an article on his ex-wife and her affair with Publicis executive Richard Attias, or pressures exercised on the Journal du dimanche, which was preparing to publish an article concerning Ciganer-Albéniz's decision not to vote in the second round of the 2007 presidential election. In its edition of 9 August 2007, Paris Match retouched a photo of Sarkozy in order to erase a love handle. His official portrait destined for all French town halls was done by Sipa Press photographer Philippe Warrin, better known for his paparazzi work.
Quotes from others about the person
“I have known Nicolas since he was 18. I was already elected in Courbevoie and we would meet with a common friend to eat ice-creams at the drugstore of Neuilly. He was already telling us he would be president of the republic one day” - Andre Santini, a centrist parliament member of France.
Connections
The wedding bells first rang for him on September 23, 1982 when he tied the knot with Marie Dominique Culioli. The couple was blessed with two children, Pierre and Jean. Following years of separation, they legally divorced in 1996.
In 1996, he married for a second time to Cecilia Ciganer-Albeniz. Following year, they were blessed with a son, Loius. The relationship which was smoothly sailing had a turbulent phase during which both Cecilia and he had extra marital affairs, which lead up to divorce in 2007.
In 2008, he wedded for a third time to Carla Bruni, an Italian born singer. She bore him a daughter in 2011, Giulia.
Father:
Pál István Ernö Sárközy de Nagy-Bocsa Pal Sarkozy
(born in Budapest on May 5, 1928)
Mother:
Andrée Jeanne Mallah
(born in Paris on October 12, 1925 died 13 December 2017 in Paris)
Spouse (1):
Marie-Dominique Culioli
(23 September 1982 - 1989 - divorced, 2 children)
Spouse (2):
Cecilia Albeniz
(23 October 1996 - 18 October 2007 - divorced, 1 child)
