BRANDPOWER NICOLAS SARKOZY

Sarko the American

It hard to imagine a worse scenario for a newly-elected president than one that encountered Nicolas Sarkozy when he first took office.

Text: Marko Petrović, November 2008

During his first few months as French leader, not only the French, but many other people throughout the world were more interested in his love life than his plans to reform the country. They focused more on the speculation that he was going to divorce Cecilia Albeniz, his wife of eleven years, and marry former Italian supermodel Carla Bruni, who had just started out on her new career as a singer, than they did on his immigration policy. In December 2007, only two months after his divorce, conservative daily Figaro, a strong Sarkozy supporter, went so far as to devote a quarter of its front page, usually reserved for political news, to a photo of Carla Bruni beneath the headline, “The President`s Girlfriend”. Her photo was sitting right next to reports of a hard week ahead for Sarkozy, who faced talks with trade unions leaders threatening strike action over the president’s planned reforms.

COMMUNICATION VIA GAFFE

Nor did Sarkozy do himself any favours and try to improve his own image. His gaffes began while he was interior minister, when in 2005, just before the suburbs of Paris and other big cities were to become gripped by civil unrest, he called the young delinquents from those areas “scum”. That`s why some critics put him in the same basket as Jean-Marie Le Pen. In October 2007, he broke off an interview with American TV station CBS after he was asked about his then wife Cecilia. That interview was meant to herald his first official visit to the USA. He summed up the whole interview as “stupid” in front of the cameras and called his press attaché, who had scheduled the interview, “an imbecile”.

The clip of Sarkozy scolding a technician attaching a microphone to his tie for not saying “Hello” back to him also became a real hit on the Internet. One other unflattering clip on the internet shows Sarkozy actually swearing at a man who refused to shake hands with him.

THE FIRST LADY In an interview with Vanity Fair, Sarkozy`s wife admitted that she was shocked to have become the French First Lady. “Everything seemed unbelievable. How is it possible for me, an Italian, to become the French First Lady?” “My mistake was to fall madly in love and not be in a position to appreciate the enormity of what was going on”, she says. As a famous singer, she released a new album entitled “As If Nothing Had Happened” at the beginning of the month. In one of the songs, the one that probably got most tongues wagging, she softly sings about her thirty lovers – including her husband, the French president – and admits “I am a child, despite my forty years, despite my thirty lovers.”