Les Folies Sarkozy
Leader's Antics Give the French Pause

By John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, February 15, 2008

PARIS -- Nine months along, the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy is drawing increasing comparisons to a bad soap opera. He is ruthlessly lampooned on the Internet and portrayed in the media as a monarch and a money-obsessed dilettante, with a documented passion for yachts, country estates and travel on private jets -- with the tabs typically picked up by tycoon friends.

His presidency has been marked by public temper tantrums, a 172 percent pay raise orchestrated by his office, a divorce and then marriage four months later to an Italian supermodel-turned-singer whom he'd known for 80 days.

These and other startling acts have more than a few people here speculating about conditions inside the man's head. "It's a conversation everybody's having," said Nicole Bacharan, a political analyst at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris. "The whole country, especially people who voted for him, are turning into therapists."

Sarkozy invites comparison to Tom Cruise -- intense, headstrong, athletic, dynamic, charismatic. The president has not started jumping up and down on a couch, but there is a sense among many people here that he could, at any moment.

"I sometimes feel that he's totally crazy," said Lois Nathan, 63, an American English professor who has lived in France for 20 years. "When I watch him talk, I often say to myself that he doesn't have a stable psychology. And I often wonder, what on Earth is he doing?"

All this comes from a man who won election with some very sober promises. He would revitalize a stodgy presidency and reinvigorate a morose country. People's hard work would be rewarded with higher pay. He would run a can-do administration, open and modern, that would restore French pride.

"I wonder how his presidency is going to turn out, because it's already a real circus," said Alexandra Boret, 20, an art student in Paris. "He lacks judgment, or he may just have bad advisers."

Sarkozy's approval ratings have plummeted to about 39 percent, with polls showing his party could take a shellacking in municipal elections next month. Pollsters attribute the collapse to two main factors: his failure to improve economic conditions and overexposure to his personal life, elements of which strike some people here as nouveau riche and vulgar.

The popular TV news parody "Les Guignols de l'Info," a nightly puppet show, sometimes mocks Sarkozy's affinity for Rolex watches by giving him an armful. He has also been saddled with a disparaging nickname: Bling-Bling, the hip-hop expression for the gaudy trappings of wealth.

"He is the president of France, and I wish that he was a little more classy," said Felix Noir, 33, a Web developer and communications executive. He faulted Sarkozy for first publicizing his affair with Italian supermodel Carla Bruni with a much-photographed outing to Disneyland Paris in October. "It was pathetic. . . . That was the beginning of the end -- the hunter got captured by the game."

A three-month romance followed, including trips to Egypt and Jordan, lavish parties and exchanges of expensive gifts, all chronicled by both the tabloid and mainstream press. Almost-nude photos of Bruni from her modeling days showed up in the media, with much recounting of her previous liaisons with Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton and Donald Trump.

She and the president were married in a secret ceremony at the presidential ¿lys¿e Palace on Feb. 2.

Laurent Joffrin, top editor at the left-leaning Liberation newspaper, said Sarkozy suffers from the "hubris" that inflicts politicians with "too much success, who think anything is possible, they can walk on water. He doesn't see limits anymore."

"He's had success because he's renouncing the usual standards of behavior," Joffrin said, "but he's going to fail because it's too much and too tiring, and he can't hold the rhythm and stay clear and energetic for such a long time."

His term has offered rich fodder for the Internet, with several spoofs of Bruni singing love songs to Sarkozy, a fake contest to spend Valentine's Day with the first couple at a cheap restaurant on the Champs-¿lys¿es, pictures of pilfered goods in the president's bling-bling collection, and a Sarkozy look-alike promoting a sexual potency drug.

If the French think they've seen everything, they can think again. Three books are just hitting the shelves that deconstruct the Sarkozy-Bruni love affair in glorious detail. Such as Bruni supposedly telling a friend, "I want a man with nuclear power." Such as the former model reportedly inviting Sarkozy up to her apartment for a cup of coffee when he drove her home after their first dinner together, and Sarkozy replying, "Never on a first date."

Tuesday night, L'Express magazine posted excerpts from Bruni's first interview as first lady on its Web site, in which she put the relationship on further display. "Between Nicolas and me, it wasn't quick, it was immediate," she declared.

She rejected sensational stories about her past and assertions that the wedding happened too quickly. "I understand that people are worried about what I am, especially with these portraits of me that are often fantastical and sometimes awful. But I want to reassure the French. I am 40, I am normal, serious, aware, simple, even if I am privileged," she was quoted as saying.

"Just as Nicolas doesn't resemble his predecessors, I would like me, too, while respecting the dignity of the post, to keep my personality," she said. "I don't yet know what I might do as first lady, but I know how I will do it: seriously."

She also issued an apology for her harsh words about the editors of a French Web site, which reported that days before the wedding, Sarkozy sent his former wife a text message: "If you come back, I cancel everything." Bruni had compared the journalists to collaborationists who denounced Jews during World War II. She and Sarkozy also deny the report.

While many French seem captivated by the spectacle of a rock star president at the same time they are repulsed by it, people in other European countries sometimes find the show endearing.

"Sarkozy is behaving like a teenage boy who just got his first girlfriend -- it's weird, but there's something flamboyantly French about it," television producer Alan Eyres, 35, said while sitting at a central London coffee shop.

"He's had everything out in the open, and it's hard to have a go at him because of that," Eyres said. "Sarkozy says, it's here, you know what's happening. He's so wrapped up in it he wants to share it and he's entirely unembarrassed by it."

Special correspondents Corinne Gavard in Paris and Karla Adam in London contributed to this report.