Nicolas Sarkozy

Sarkozy is known for his conservative stance on law and order issues and his admiration for a new economic model for France, suggesting that the country should have a more liberalised economy, inspired by the American and British examples. Until 26 March 2007, he served as the Minister of the Interior of France. His nickname Sarko is used by both supporters and opponents.

Personal life

Family background

Nicolas Sarkozy is the son of a Hungarian immigrant father, Pál Sárközy de Nagy-Bócsa[1] (Hungarian: nagybócsai Sárközy Pál; some sources spell it Nagy-Bócsay Sárközy Pál; Hungarian pronunciation), and a French mother 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[2]. 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”. Paul Sarkozy moved to Paris where he used his artistic skills to enter the advertising industry. 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 Thessaloniki (Salonica), Greece, 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 familly 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.

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 former 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 of 1.65 m, 5 feet 5 inches, 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.

Studies

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. Later he obtained a bachelor’s degree in law from the Université Paris X Nanterre.

He attended the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (more commonly known as Sciences Po), but did not graduate because he failed his exam in English [5]. He enrolled himself at Nanterre University in law, already run down some years after May ’68.

After passing the bar exam, he became a lawyer specializing in French business law and family law, skills which he would later put to use in divorcing his first wife and helping his mother take legal action against his father in order to raise alimony.

Personal wealth

Sarkozy declared to the Constitutional Council disposing of two million euros, mostly in life insurances.

Political career

General traits

Nicolas Sarkozy speaking at the congress of his partyHe is generally recognized by the right and left as a highly skilled politician and striking orator.

Supporters of Sarkozy within France emphasize 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 favor of American-style economic reform. Overall, he is generally considered to be somewhat more pro-U.S. than most French politicians.

Since November 2004, he 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 Cults (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.

Career

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.[8] 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. 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 a form of 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.

Raffarin government

First term as Minister of the Interior

Nicolas Sarkozy, here with then prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, meeting with bicycle-mounted officers of the French National Police.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 criticized 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 Muslim Worship”), 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 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 closer to 1%.

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

Sarkozy as Minister of the Interior with American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, after their bilateral meeting in Washington D.C.

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 “rifraff” (“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

Sarkozy currently is the 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.

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.

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.

Controversy

Generally speaking, Sarkozy is a bête noire of the left (see below), and is also criticized by some on the right, most vocally by the supporters of Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin, such as Jean-Louis Debré, but also by social Catholics such as Christine Boutin; Boutin however, in the end, gave up her presidential bid and became a political advisor to Sarkozy.

Critics have accused him of being an authoritarian demagogue, ready to trade away civil liberties for political gains.[19] Some of these accusations are echoed by French civil rights organisations.[citation needed] He is also accused by the Left of being a populist who favours far-right ideas.

Kärcher remark

Since his famous Kärcher remark, Nicolas Sarkozy has been lampooned about his fondness for cleaning out the riff-raff; here, electoral posters of Sarkozy were posted on a Kärcher car wash.

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, he 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 rioters as voyous (thugs) and racaille, a slang term which can be translated into English as dregs or riff-raff, this being criticised as being too hard on the rioters.

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.

Religion and state

Sarkozy, a Catholic, has caused controversy because of his views on the relationship between 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 dangerous sect in France.