Nicolas SARKOZY: astrology and birth chart

Biography of Nicolas SARKOZY

Nicolas Sarkozy, born Nicolas Paul Stéphane Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa on 28 January 1955 in Paris, is the current President of France, elected on 6 May 2007 after defeating Socialist Party contender Ségolène Royal during the second round of the 2007 election. Before his presidency, he was leader of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) right wing party. Under Jacques Chirac's presidency, he served as the Minister of the Interior in Jean-Pierre Raffarin (UMP)'s first two governments (from May 2002 to March 2004), then was appointed Minister of Finances in Raffarin's last government (March 2004-May 2005), and again Minister of the Interior in Dominique de Villepin's government (2005-2007). Sarkozy was also president of the General council of the Hauts-de-Seine department from 2004 to 2007 and mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine, one of the wealthiest communes of France from 1983 to 2002. Furthermore, he was also Minister of the Budget in Edouard Balladur (RPR, predecessor of the UMP)'s government during François Mitterrand's last term.

Sarkozy is known for his strong stance on law and order issues and his desire to revitalise the French economy. In foreign affairs, he has promised closer cooperation with the United States. His nickname "Sarko" is used by both supporters and opponents.

Personal life

Family background

Nicolas Sarkozy is the son of a rich Hungarian immigrant father, Pál Sárközy de Nagy-Bócsa (Hungarian: nagybócsai Sárközy Pál; some sources spell it Nagy-Bócsay Sárközy Pál; Hungarian pronunciation (help·info)), and a mother of French and Ottoman Sephardic Jewish descent, Andrée Mallah.

Pál Sárközy was born in 1928 in Budapest into a family belonging to the lower nobility of Hungary. The family possessed lands and a small castle in the village of Alattyán, near Szolnok, 92 km (57 miles) east of Budapest. Pál Sárközy's father and grandfather held elective offices in the town of Szolnok. Although the Sárközy de Nagy-Bócsa (nagybócsai Sárközy) family was Protestant, Pál Sárközy's mother, Katalin Tóth de Csáford (Hungarian: csáfordi Tóth Katalin), grandmother of Nicolas Sarkozy, was from a Catholic aristocratic family.

As the Red Army entered Hungary in 1944, the Sárközy family fled to Germany. They returned in 1945 but all their possessions had been seized. Pál Sárközy's father died soon afterwards and his mother, fearing that he would be drafted into the Hungarian People's Army or sent to Siberia, urged him to leave the country and promised she would eventually follow him and meet him in Paris. Pál Sárközy managed to flee to Austria and then Germany while his mother reported to authorities that he had drowned in Lake Balaton. Eventually, he arrived in Baden Baden, near the French border, where the headquarters of the French Army in Germany were located, and there he met a recruiter for the French Foreign Legion. He signed up for five years, and was sent for training to Sidi Bel Abbes, in French Algeria, where the French Foreign Legion's headquarters were located. He was due to be sent to Indochina at the end of training, but the doctor who checked him before departure, who happened to also be Hungarian, sympathised with him and gave him a medical discharge to save him from possible death at the hands of the Vietminh. He returned to civilian life in Marseille in 1948 and, although he asked for French citizenship only in the 1970s (his legal status was that of a stateless person until then), he nonetheless gallicised his Hungarian name into "Paul Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa". He met Andrée Mallah, Nicolas Sarkozy's mother, in 1949.

Andrée Mallah, then a law student, was the daughter of Benedict Mallah, a wealthy urologist and STD specialist with a well-established reputation in the mainly bourgeois 17th arrondissement of Paris. Benedict Mallah, originally called Aaron Mallah and nicknamed Benico, was born in 1890 in the Sephardic Jewish community of Salonica (Thessaloniki), Ottoman Empire, which at the time had a Jewish majority. According to Jewish genealogical societies, the Mallah family of Salonica anciently came from Spain which they had left in 1492 when the Catholic Monarchs had expelled the Jews. Resettled in Provence, southern France, the family had moved to Salonica a century later. Benico Mallah, the son of a jeweler, left Salonica, then part of the Ottoman Empire, with his mother in 1904 at the age of 14 to attend the prestigious Lycée Lakanal boarding school of Sceaux, in the southern suburbs of Paris. He studied medicine after his baccalaureate and decided to stay in France and become a French citizen. A doctor in the French Army during World War I, he met a recent war widow, Adèle Bouvier (1891–1956), from a bourgeois family of Lyon, whom he married in 1917. Adèle Bouvier, Nicolas Sarkozy's grandmother, was a Catholic like the majority of French people. Mallah, for whom religion had reportedly never been a central issue, converted to Catholicism upon marrying Adèle Bouvier, which had been requested by Adèle's parents, and changed his name to Benedict. Although Benedict Mallah converted to Catholicism, he and his family nonetheless had to flee Paris and take refuge in a small farm in Corrèze during World War II to avoid being arrested and delivered to the Germans. During the Holocaust, many of the Mallahs who stayed in Salonica or moved to France were deported to concentration and extermination camps. In total, 57 family members were murdered by the Nazis.

Paul Sarkozy and Andrée Mallah settled in the 17th arrondissement in Paris and had three sons: Guillaume, born in 1951, who is an entrepreneur in the textile industry, Nicolas, born in 1955 and François, born in 1957 (an MBA and manager of a healthcare consultancy company ). In 1959 Paul Sarkozy left his wife and his three children. He later remarried twice and had two more children with his second wife.

Early life
During Sarkozy's childhood, his father refused to give his former wife's family any financial help, even though he had founded his own advertising agency and had become wealthy. The family lived in a small mansion owned by Sarkozy's grandfather, Benedict Mallah, in the 17th Arrondissement. The family later moved to Neuilly-sur-Seine, one of the wealthiest communes of the Île-de-France région immediately west of the 17th Arrondissement just outside of Paris. According to Sarkozy, his staunchly Gaullist grandfather was more of an influence on him than his father, whom he rarely saw. His grandfather, a Sephardi Jew by birth, was a convert to Catholicism, and Sarkozy was, accordingly, raised in the Catholic faith of his household. Nicolas Sarkozy, like his brothers, is a baptised and professing Catholic. Sarkozy also said recently that one of his role models was the late pope John Paul II.

Sarkozy's father Paul did not teach him or his brothers Hungarian. There is no evidence suggesting that there was an attempt to educate the Sarkozy siblings about their paternal ethnic background.

Sarkozy has said that having been abandoned by his father shaped much of who he is today. As a young boy and teenager, he felt inferior in relation to his wealthy classmates. He suffered from insecurities (his physical shortness or his family's lack of money, at least relatively to their 17th Arrondissement or Neuilly neighbours), and is said to have harboured a considerable amount of resentment against his absent father. "What made me who I am now is the sum of all the humiliations suffered during childhood", he said later.


Education
Sarkozy was enrolled in the Lycée Chaptal, a state-funded (public) middle and high school in the 8th arrondissement, where he failed his sixième (equivalent to sixth grade in the US and Year 7 in England and Wales). His family then sent him to the Cours Saint-Louis de Monceau, a private Catholic middle and high school in the 17th arrondissement, where he was reportedly a mediocre pupil, but where he nonetheless obtained his baccalauréat in 1973. He enrolled at the Université Paris X Nanterre, where he read law and graduated with a master's degree in Business law. Paris X - Nanterre had been the starting place for the May '68 student movement and was still a strong berth for leftist student unions. Although described as a quiet student, Sarkozy soon joined the right-wing union of the university where he was very active. After graduating, he entered the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris (1979-1981) but failed to graduate from it due to an insufficient command of the English language.. After passing the bar exam, he became a lawyer specializing in French business law and family law.


Marriages, divorces and separations
On 23 September 1982, he married Marie-Dominique Culioli, daughter of a pharmacist from Vico (a village north of Ajaccio, Corsica). They have two sons, Pierre (born in 1985) and Jean (born in 1987). Sarkozy's marriage witness was the prominent right wing politician Charles Pasqua, later to become a political opponent. Sarkozy divorced Culioli in 1996, although they had already been separated for several years.

As mayor of Neuilly, Sarkozy met Cécilia Ciganer-Albéniz (great-granddaughter of composer Isaac Albéniz and of a Russian father), when he officiated at her wedding to TV host Jacques Martin. She is a former fashion model and public relations executive. In 1988, she left her husband for Sarkozy, and divorced Martin one year later. Sarkozy married her in October 1996 (with witnesses Martin Bouygues and Bernard Arnault). They have one son, Louis, born 23 April 1997.

Between 2002 and 2005, the couple often appeared together on public occasions, with Cécilia Sarkozy acting as the chief aide for her husband. On 25 May 2005, however, the Swiss newspaper Le Matin revealed that she had left Sarkozy for French-Moroccan national Richard Attias, head of Publicis in New York. There were other accusations of a private nature in Le Matin, which lead to Sarkozy suing the paper. In the meantime, he is said to have had an affair with a journalist of Le Figaro, Anne Fulda.

In January 2006, a reconciliation took place. In early 2006, Sarkozy suggested to the press that he had welcomed his wife back from the USA, although the exact circumstances of the reconciliation are not known.

On 18 October 2007, the presidential office announced that the Sarkozys had divorced by mutual consent (divorce par consentement mutuel) on 15 October. It is of interest to note that she could not have filed a divorce case against him, due to his presidential immunity.

On 17 December 2007, the French weekly magazine L'Express published photos of Sarkozy in Disneyland Paris with singer and ex-model Carla Bruni which became the center of international media attention and caused significant speculation due to the fact that the Élysée has not confirmed that Sarkozy and Bruni are indeed an item. The couple have also spent the Christmas Holidays together in Egypt. On January 8, President Sarkozy confirmed their relationship is a serious matter and that they might wed at an unspecified date.

Wikinews has related news:
Reports claim French President marries girlfriendOn February 2 2008, the mayor of the 8th district of Paris has announced he had married Carla Bruni and Nicolas Sarkozy, the bride was dressed in white.

Personal wealth

Sarkozy declared to the Constitutional Council a net worth of €2 million, most of the assets being in the form of life insurance policies. As the French President, he earns a yearly salary of € 81,012 and is entitled to a mayoral pension because he was mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine until 2002. He also receives a yearly council pension, because he has been previously a member of the council of the Hauts-de-Seine department.

Member of National Assembly
Sarkozy is generally recognised by the right and left as a highly skilled politician and striking orator . His supporters within France emphasise his charisma, political innovation and willingness to "make a dramatic break" amidst mounting disaffection against "politics as usual"; some see him as wanting to depart from traditional French social and economic principles in favour of American-style economic reform. Overall, he is generally considered to be somewhat more pro-U.S. than most French politicians.

Since November 2004, Sarkozy has been president of the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP), France's major right political party, and he was Minister of the Interior in the government of Dominique de Villepin, with the honorific title of Minister of State, making him effectively the number three man in the French State after President Jacques Chirac and the prime minister. His ministerial responsibilities included law enforcement and working to co-ordinate relationships between the national and local governments, as well as Minister of Worship (in this guise he created the CFCM, French Council of Muslim Faith). Previously, he was a deputy to the French National Assembly. He was forced to resign this position in order to accept his ministerial appointment. He previously also held several ministerial posts, including Finance Minister.


In government

Sarkozy's political career began at the age of 22, when he became a city councillor in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a wealthy and exclusive western suburb of Paris (in the Hauts-de-Seine département). A member of the Neo-Gaullist party RPR, he went on to be elected mayor of that town, after the death of the incumbent mayor Achille Peretti. Sarkozy had been close to Peretti, as his mother was Peretti's secretary. The senior RPR politician in the time, Charles Pasqua, wanted to become mayor, and asked Sarkozy to organise his campaign. Instead Sarkozy profited from a short illness of Pasqua to propel himself into the office of mayor. He was the youngest ever mayor of any town in France with a population of over 50,000. He served from 1983 to 2002. In 1988, he became a deputy in the National Assembly.

In 1993, Sarkozy was in the national news for personally negotiating with the “Human Bomb”, a man who had taken small children hostage in a kindergarten in Neuilly. The “Human Bomb” was killed after two days of talks by policemen of the RAID, who entered the school stealthily while the attacker was resting.

From 1993 to 1995, he was Minister for the Budget and spokesman for the executive in the cabinet of Prime Minister Édouard Balladur. Throughout most of his early career, Sarkozy had been seen as a protégé of Jacques Chirac. During his tenure, he increased France's public debt more than any other French Budget Minister except his predecessor, by the equivalent of 200 bn EUR (which equals $260 bn) (FY1994-1996). The first two budgets he submitted to the parliament (budgets for FY1994 and FY1995) assumed a yearly budget deficit equivalent to 6% of GDP. According to the Maastricht Treaty, the French yearly budget deficit may not be bigger than 3% of France's GDP.

However, in 1995 he spurned Chirac and backed Balladur for President of France. After Chirac won the election, Sarkozy lost his position as Minister for the Budget and found himself outside the circles of power. It is widely believed that ever since 1995 Chirac has considered Sarkozy's siding with Balladur as treason, and that the two men now loathe one another.

However, he came back after the right-wing defeat at the 1997 parliamentary election, as number 2 of the RPR. When the party leader Philippe Séguin resigned, in 1999, he took the lead of the Neo-Gaullist party. But it obtained its worst result at the 1999 European Parliament election, winning 12.7% of the votes, less than the dissident Rally for France of Charles Pasqua. Sarkozy lost the RPR leadership.

In 2002, however, after his re-election as President of the French Republic (see French presidential election, 2002), Chirac appointed Sarkozy as French Minister of the Interior in the cabinet of Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, despite the widely acknowledged friction between the two. Following Jacques Chirac's 14th of July keynote speech on road safety Sarkozy as interior minister pushed through new legislation leading to the mass purchase of speed cameras and a campaign to increase the awareness of dangers on the roads.

Following the cabinet reshuffle of 31 March 2004, Sarkozy was moved to the position of Finance Minister. Tensions continued to build between Sarkozy and Chirac and within the UMP party, as Sarkozy's intentions of becoming head of the party after the resignation of Alain Juppé became clear. It became increasingly apparent that Sarkozy would go on to seek the presidency in 2007; in an often-repeated comment made on television channel France 2, when asked by a journalist whether he thought about the presidential election when he shaved in the morning, Sarkozy commented, “not just when I shave”.

In November 2004 after party elections, Sarkozy became leader of the UMP with 85% of the vote. In accordance with an agreement with Chirac, he resigned his position as minister. Sarkozy's ascent was marked by the division of UMP between sarkozystes, such as Sarkozy's “first lieutenant”, Brice Hortefeux, and Chirac loyalists, such as Jean-Louis Debré.

Sarkozy was made Chevalier de la Legion d'honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honour) by President Chirac in February 2005. He was re-elected on 13 March 2005 to the National Assembly (as required by the constitution, he had had to resign as a deputy when he had become minister in 2002).

On 31 May 2005 the main French news radio station France Info reported a rumour that Sarkozy was to be reappointed Minister of the Interior in the government of Dominique de Villepin without resigning from the UMP leadership. This was confirmed on 2 June 2005, when the members of the government were officially announced.


First term as Minister of the Interior

Towards the end of his first term as Minister of the Interior, in 2004, Sarkozy was the most popular and also the most unpopular conservative politician in France, according to polls conducted at the beginning of 2004. His “tough on crime” policies, which included increasing the police presence on the streets and introducing monthly crime performance ratings, were popular with many and unpopular for many others. However, he was criticised for putting forward legislation which can be questioned as an infringement on civil rights, and adversely affected disadvantaged sections of the population.

Sarkozy has sought to ease the sometimes tense relationships between the general French population and the Muslim community. Unlike the Catholic Church in France with their official leaders or Protestants with their umbrella organisations, the French Muslim community had a lack of structure with no group that could legitimately deal with the French government on their behalf. Sarkozy felt that the foundation of such an organisation was desirable. He supported the foundation in May 2003 of the private non-profit Conseil français du culte musulman (“French Council of the Muslim Faith”), an organisation meant to be representative of French Muslims. In addition, Sarkozy has suggested amending the 1905 law on the separation of Church and State, mostly in order to be able to finance mosques and other Muslim institutions with public funds so that they are less reliant on money from outside of France.

Minister of Finance
During his short appointment as Minister of Finance, Sarkozy was responsible for introducing a number of policies. The degree to which this reflected libéralisme (a hands-off approach to running the economy) or more traditional French state dirigisme (intervention) is controversial. He resigned the day following his election as president of the UMP.

In September 2004, Sarkozy oversaw the reduction of the government ownership stake in France Télécom from 50.4% to 41%.
Sarkozy backed a partial nationalisation of the engineering company Alstom decided by his predecessor when the company was exposed to bankruptcy in 2003.
Sarkozy reached in June an agreement with the major retail chains in France to concertedly lower prices on household goods by an average of 2%; the success of this measure is disputed, with studies suggesting that the decrease was close to 1% in September.
Taxes: Sarkozy avoided taking a position on the ISF (solidarity tax on wealth). This is considered an ideological symbol by many on the Left and Right. Some in the business world and on the Liberal Right, such as Alain Madelin, wanted it abolished. For Sarkozy, that would have risked being categorised by the Left as a gift to the richest classes of society at a time of economic difficulties. So Sarkozy preferred reducing the ISF with the bouclier fiscal.

Villepin government

Second term as Minister of the Interior

During his second term at the Ministry of the Interior, Sarkozy was initially more discreet about his ministerial activities: instead of focusing on his own topic of law and order, many of his declarations addressed wider issues, since he was expressing his opinions as head of the UMP party.

Main article: Response to the 2005 civil unrest in France
However, the civil unrest in autumn 2005 put law enforcement in the spotlight again. Sarkozy was accused of having provoked the unrest by calling young delinquents from housing projects "rabble" ("racaille") in Argenteuil near Paris. After the accidental death of two youths, which sparked the riots, Sarkozy first blamed it on "hoodlums" and gangsters. These remarks were sharply criticised by many on the left wing and by a member of his own government, Delegate Minister for Equal Opportunities Azouz Begag.

After the rioting, he made a number of announcements on future policy: selection of immigrants, greater tracking of immigrants, and a reform on the 1945 ordinance government justice measures for young delinquents.


Action as UMP's leader

Before he was elected French President, Sarkozy was president of UMP, the French conservative party, elected with 85% of the vote. During his presidency, the number of members has significantly increased. In 2005, he supported a "yes" vote in the French referendum on the European Constitution but the "No" vote won.

Throughout 2005, Sarkozy became increasingly vocal in calling for radical changes in France's economic and social policies. These calls culminated in an interview with Le Monde on 8 September 2005, during which he claimed that the French had been misled for 30 years by false promises, and denounced what he considers to be unrealistic policies. Among other issues:

he called for a simplified and “fairer” taxation system, with fewer loopholes and a maximum taxation rate (all direct taxes combined) at 50% of revenue;
he approved measures reducing or denying social support to unemployed workers who refuse work offered to them;
he pressed for a reduction in the budget deficit, claiming that the French state has been living off credit for some time.
Such policies are what are called in France libéral (that is, in favour of laissez-faire economic policies, although this judgment is made by French standards) or, with a pejorative undertone, ultra-libéral. Sarkozy rejects this label of libéral and prefers to call himself a pragmatist instead. Besides his dirigisme on economical subjects is far from laissez-faire politics.

Sarkozy opened another avenue of controversy by declaring that he wanted a reform of the immigration system, with quotas designed to admit the skilled workers needed by the French economy. He also wants to reform the current French system for foreign students, saying that it enables foreign students to take open-ended curricula in order to obtain residency in France; instead, he wants to select the best students to the best curricula in France.

In early 2006, the French parliament adopted a controversial bill known as DADVSI, which reforms French copyright law. Since his party was divided on the issue, Sarkozy stepped in and organised meetings between various parties involved. Later, groups such as the Odebi League and EUCD.info alleged that Sarkozy personally and unofficially supported certain amendments to the law, which enacted strong penalties against designers of peer-to-peer systems.

Candidacy for President
Main article: French presidential election, 2007

On 14 January 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy was chosen by the UMP to be its candidate in the 2007 presidential election. Sarkozy, who was running unopposed, won 98% of the votes. Of the 327,000 UMP members who could vote, 69% participated in the online ballot.

In February 2007 Sarkozy appeared on a televised debate on TF1 where he expressed his support for affirmative action for minorities and the freedom to work overtime. Despite his opposition to same-sex marriage, he advocated civil unions and the possibility for same-sex partners to inherit under the same regime as married couples. The law has been voted in July 2007.

On 7 February, Nicolas Sarkozy finally decided in favour of a projected second, non-nuclear, aircraft carrier for the national Navy (adding to the nuclear Charles de Gaulle), during an official visit in Toulon with Defence Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie. "This would allow permanently having an operational ship, taking into account the constraints of maintenance", he explained.

On 21 March, President Jacques Chirac announced his support for Sarkozy, adding that he had his vote. Chirac pointed out that Sarkozy had been chosen as presidential candidate for the ruling UMP party, and said: "So it is totally natural that I give him my vote and my support." To focus on his campaign, Sarkozy stepped down as interior minister on 26 March.

During the campaign, rival candidates had accused Sarkozy of being a "candidate for brutality" and of presenting overly hardline views about France's future. He was also criticised by opponents for allegedly courting conservative voters in policy-making in a bid to capitalise on right-wing sentiments among some communities. However, his popularity was sufficient to see him polling as the frontrunner throughout the later campaign period, consistently ahead of rival Socialist candidate, the tuttler, Ségolène Royal.

The first round of the presidential election was held on 22 April 2007. Nicolas Sarkozy came in first with 31.18% of the votes, ahead of Ségolène Royal of the Socialists with 25.87%. In the second round, Sarkozy came out on top to win the election with 53.06% of the votes ahead of Ségolène Royal with 46.94%. In his speech immediately following the announcement of the election results, Sarkozy stressed the need for France's modernisation, but also called for national unity, mentioning that Royal was in his thoughts. In that speech, he claimed “The French have chosen to break with the ideas, habits and behaviour of the past. I will restore the value of work, authority, merit and respect for the nation.”

Presidency (2007—)
Main article: Presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy
On May 16, 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy became the sixth President of the French Fifth Republic. (He is also the 23rd President in the history of the French Republic, but Presidents of France prior to the Fifth Republic with the notable exception of Napoléon the Third had no significant political power.)

The official transfer of power from Jacques Chirac took place on 16 May at 11:00 am (9:00 UTC) at the Élysée Palace, where he was given the authorization codes of the French nuclear arsenal and presented with the Grand Master's Collar, symbol of his new function of Grand Master of the Legion of Honour. At that point, he formally became president. Leyenda, by Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz was played in honour of the president's wife, who is Albeniz's great-granddaughter. Both Sarkozy's mother Andrée, who sat on a regal chair, and his formerly estranged father Pal—with whom Sarkozy had reached a reconciliation--attended the ceremony, as did Sarkozy's children. The presidential motorcade, with the President on board the presidential Peugeot 607 Paladine, then travelled from the Élysée to the Champs-Élysées for a public ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe. Then the new president went to the Cascade du Bois de Boulogne of Paris for a homage to the French Resistance and to the Communist resistant Guy Môquet — he proposed that all high-school students read Guy Moquet's last letter to his parents, which was criticised by a number of leftists as a cynical form of reappropriation of French history by the right.

In the afternoon, the new President flew to Berlin to meet with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin was replaced by François Fillon. Sarkozy appointed Bernard Kouchner, the left-wing founder of Médecins Sans Frontières, as his foreign minister, leading to Kouchner's expulsion from the Socialist Party. In addition to Kouchner, three more Sarkozy ministers are from the left, including Eric Besson, who served as Ségolène Royal's economic adviser at the beginning of her campaign. Sarkozy also appointed seven women to form a total cabinet of 15; one, Justice Minister Rachida Dati, is the first woman of Northern African origin to serve in a French cabinet. Of the 15, two attended the elite Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA). The ministers were reorganised, with the controversed creation of a Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Co-Development — given to his right-hand man Brice Hortefeux — and of a Ministry of Budget, Public Accounts and Civil Administration — handed out to Éric Wœrth, supposed to prepare the replacement of only a third of all civil servants who retire. However, after the 17 June parliamentary elections, the Cabinet has been adjusted to 15 ministers and 16 deputy ministers, totalling 31 officials.

Shortly after taking office, President Sarkozy began negotiations with Colombian president Álvaro Uribe and the left-wing guerrilla FARC, regarding the release of hostages held by the rebel group, especially Franco-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt. According to some sources, Sarkozy himself asked for Uribe to release FARC's "chancellor" Rodrigo Granda. . Furthermore, he announced on 24 July, 2007, that French and European representatives had obtained the extradition of the Bulgarian nurses detained in Lybia to their country. In exchange, he signed with Gaddafi security, health care and immigration pacts — and a $230 million (168 million euros) MILAN antitank missile sale . The contract was the first made by Lybia since 2004, and was negotiated with MBDA, a subsidiary of EADS. Another 128 millions euros contract would have been signed, according to Tripoli, with EADS for a TETRA radio system. The Socialist Party (PS) and the Communist Party (PCF) criticised a "state affair" and a "barter" with a "Rogue state" . The leader of the PS, François Hollande, requested the opening of a parliamentary investigation .

On June 8, 2007, during the 33rd G8 summit in Heiligendamm, Sarkozy set a goal of reducing French CO2 emissions by 50% by 2050 in order to prevent global warming. He then pushed forward the important Socialist figure of Dominique Strauss-Kahn as European nominee to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) . Critics alleged that Sarkozy proposed to nominate Strauss-Kahn as managing director of the IMF to deprive the Socialist Party of one of its more popular figures.

The UMP, Sarkozy's party, won a majority at the June 2007 legislative election, although by less than expected. In July, the UMP majority, seconded by the Nouveau Centre, ratified one of Sarkozy's electoral promises, which was to partially revoke the inheritance tax. The inheritance tax formerly brought eight billion euros into state coffers.

After winning the election, Sarkozy's UMP majority has reduced taxes, in particular for upper middle-class people, allegedly in a effort to boost GDP growth, but did not reduce state expenditures. He was criticised by the European Commission for doing so. Furthermore, Sarkozy broke with the custom of amnestying traffic tickets and of releasing thousands of prisoners from overcrowded jails on Bastille Day, a tradition that Napoleon had started in 1802 to commemorate the storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution

Sarkozy then went on vacation to the United States, taking his family to Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. He stayed in the 11-bathroom shorefront mansion of former Microsoft executive Michael Appe . He was brought there by a commercial jet, however, after the death of Cardinal Lustiger, archbishop of Paris, whose funeral he was to attend, one of his presidential planes flew him on 10 August to Paris and then back to America. On 21 August he returned to France by a commercial jet.

Sarkozy's government issued a decree on 7 August, 2007 to generalise a voluntary biometric profiling program of travellers in airports. The program, called Parafes, was to use fingerprints. The new database would be interconnected with the Schengen Information System (SIS) as well as with a national database of wanted persons (FPR). The CNIL protested against this new decree, opposing itself to the recording of fingerprints and to the interconnection between the SIS and the FPR .


Main members of Sarkozy's staff
General secretary - Claude Guéant
Chief of the private military staff - Vice-amiral d'escadre Édouard Guillaud
Special advisor to the President - Henri Guaino
Advisors to the President - Raymond Soubie and Catherine Pégard
Diplomatic advisor and sherpa - Jean-David Levitte
Deputy secretary general - François Pérol.
Head of cabinet - Emmanuelle Mignon
Advisors to the Presidency - Georges Marc Benamou, Arnold Munnich and Patrick Ouart
Spokesman - David Martinon
Head of cabinet - Cédric Goubet

Image of Sarkozy
It has been asserted that Sarkozy carefully controls his public image. He was named the 68th best dressed person by the US magazine Vanity Fair, alongside David Beckham and Brad Pitt. Beside publicizing, at times, and at others, refusing to publicise his wife's image, Sarkozy takes care of his own personal image, sometimes to the point of censoring (such as in the Paris Match affair, when he allegedly forced its director to resign following an article on Cécilia and her affair with Publicis executive Richard Attias, or pressures exercised on the Journal du dimanche, which was preparing to publish an article concerning Cécilia's decision not to vote in the second round of the 2007 presidential election. In its August 9, 2007 edition, Paris Match retouched a photo of Sarkozy in order to erase a love handle. His official portrait destined for all French townhalls was done by SIPA photographer Philippe Warrin, better known for his paparazzi work.

Former Daily Telegraph journalist Colin Randall has however highlighted Sarkozy's tighter control of his image and frequents interventions in the media: "he censors a book, or fires the chief editor of an hebdomary."


Controversies
Generally speaking, Sarkozy is a bête noire of the Left, and is also criticised by some on the right, most vocally by the supporters of Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin, such as Jean-Louis Debré.

Critics have accused him of being an authoritarian demagogue, ready to trade away civil liberties for political gains. Some of these accusations are echoed by French civil rights organisations. He is also accused by the Left of being a populist who favours far-right ideas.

Kärcher remark
In the midst of a tense period and following a shooting that killed an 11-year-old boy in the banlieue of La Courneuve in June 2005, Sarkozy quoted a local resident and vowed to clean the area out “with a Kärcher” (nettoyer la cité au Kärcher, Kärcher being a well-known brand of pressure cleaning equipment), and two days before the 2005 Paris riots he referred to the youth of the housing projects as voyous (thugs) and racaille, a slang term which can be translated into English as rabble, scum or riff-raff, this being criticised as being inappropriate language.

Separation of powers
As Minister of the Interior, Sarkozy has made bold statements following heinous crimes reported in the media. As a consequence, he has been accused in certain cases of failing to respect the separation of powers between the executive and the judiciary by trying to apply pressure in certain cases. Most famously, he was criticised, not only by the left-wing Syndicat de la magistrature judges' union, but also by the centrist Union syndicale des magistrats for attacks on the independence of the judiciary.

In September 2005 some youths were acquitted of an arson attack on a police station in Pau for lack of proof and Sarkozy was accused of having pushed for a hasty inquiry—Sarkozy had vowed that the perpetrators would be arrested within three months. On 22 June 2005, he announced to law enforcement officials that he had questioned the Minister of Justice about the future of “the judge” who had freed a man on parole, enabling him to commit a murder. These comments were criticised by both moderate and left-wing magistrates since the decision had been made by three judges.

Sarkozy has personal friendships with some of the most powerful figures in the French business world; for example, Martin Bouygues (from the Bouygues group, owner of the TF1 channel, as well as telecommunications and public works companies) and Bernard Arnault (from LVMH) were his marriage witnesses. His brother, Guillaume, is a senior executive of the MEDEF, the foremost business union in France; in 2005, he renounced running for the top position of that union because he said he did not want to hinder his brother's political career. French presidents have long had links with the business sector, but Sarkozy's have been especially extensive, and especially publicly discussed. His vacation on the yacht of a wealthy industrialist, immediately after his election, drew particular comment, although Sarkozy was unapologetic.


Religion and state
In 2004, he published a book called La République, les religions, l'espérance (“The Republic, Religions, and Hope”), in which he argued that the young should not be brought up solely on secular or republican values. He also advocated reducing the separation of church and state, arguing for the government subsidy of mosques in order to encourage Islamic integration into French society. He flatly opposes financing of religious institutions with funds from outside France. After meeting with Tom Cruise, Sarkozy was criticised by some for meeting with a member of the Church of Scientology, which is classified as a cult (secte translates "cult") in France (see Parliamentary Commission on Cults in France).

War in Iraq
Nicolas Sarkozy, like almost all French politicians, disapproved of the US-led invasion of Iraq, but was nonetheless critical of the way Jacques Chirac and his foreign minister Dominique de Villepin expressed France's opposition to the war. Talking at the French-American Foundation in Washington, D.C. on 12 September 2006, he denounced what he called the "French arrogance" and said: "It is bad manners to embarrass one's allies or sound like one is taking delight in their troubles." He also added: "We must never again turn our disagreements into a crisis." This speech, given without the assent of the French president by a member of the French government traveling abroad (Sarkozy was still Minister of the Interior), was criticised by many in France. Jacques Chirac reportedly said in private that Sarkozy's speech was "appalling" and "a shameful act".

Even though his current foreign minister Bernard Kouchner (excluded from the Socialist party after his inclusion in François Fillon's government) had been one of the few supporters in France of removal of Saddam Hussein from power, Sarkozy's stance on the war has not changed.


View on genetic predispositions
A few weeks before the first round of the 2007 presidential elections, Nicolas Sarkozy said during an interview with philosopher Michel Onfray that he thinks disorders such as paedophilia and depression have a genetic as well as social basis, famously stating "I don't agree with you, I'd be inclined to think that one is born a paedophile, and it is actually a problem that we do not know how to cure this disease"; he also claimed that suicides among youth were linked to genetic predispositions by stating, "I don't want to give parents a complex. It's not exclusively the parents' fault every time a youngster commits suicide." These claims were criticised by some scientists, including controversial geneticist Axel Kahn.

Sarkozy later said, "What part is innate and what part is acquired? At least let's debate it, let's not close the door to all debate."


African speech
On Friday, 27 July 2007, Sarkozy delivered a speech in Senegal, in which he made reference to "African peasants" and said that colonialism was not the cause of all of Africa's problems, and denied that France had ever exploited an African country.

“ The tragedy of Africa is that the African has never really entered into history ... They have never really launched themselves into the future ... The African peasant, who for thousands of years has lived according to the seasons, whose life ideal was to be in harmony with nature, only knew the eternal renewal of time ... In this imaginary world, where everything starts over and over again, there is room neither for human endeavour, nor for the idea of progress ... The problem of Africa ... is to be found here. Africa's challenge is to enter to a greater extent into history ... It is to realise that the golden age that Africa is forever recalling will not return, because it has never existed. ”
—Sarkozy, at a speech in Senegal,


The remarks were greeted with disappointment and widely condemned by African intellectuals; some viewed them as racist. Alpha Oumar Konare, head of the African Union commission, said "This speech was not the kind of break we were hoping for ... It reminded us of another age, especially his comments about peasants." Other criticism was levelled at Sarkozy's failure to acknowledge the previous role of France in propping up abusive regimes. The French government defended Sarkozy's speech, saying that he also criticised the laissez faire economics of globalisation and proposed a partnership to help Africa confront it.

A purported letter from South African president Thabo Mbeki praising Sarkozy for the speech and calling him a "citizen of Africa" raised an outcry among the South African media.

Awards and honours
Grand Cross of the Légion d'honneur (2007 - Automatic when taking office)
Was previously Knight of the Légion d'honneur (since 2004)
Grand Cross of the Ordre national du Mérite (2007 - Automatic when taking office)
Commander of the Ordre de Léopold (Belgium)
Stara Planina (Bulgaria)

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René Dosière, 'L'argent caché de l'Élysée', Seuil, 2007

Source : Wikipedia

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