Nicolas Sarkozy (President of France)

Sarkozy is a Frenchman of mixed national and ethnic ancestry. He is the son of Pál István Ernő Sárközy de Nagy-Bocsa, (Hungarian: nagybócsai Sárközy Pál; some sources spell it Nagy-Bócsay Sárközy Pál István Ernő; Pal_sarkozy.ogg Hungarian pronunciation (help·info) nɒɟ͡ʝboːt͡ʃɒi ʃaːrkøzi paːl) a Hungarian aristocrat, and Andrée Jeanne "Dadu" Mallah (b. Paris, 12 October 1925), who is of French Catholic and Ottoman-Sephardic Jewish descent.They were married at Saint-François-de-Sales, Paris XVII, on 8 February 1950 and divorced in 1959.

Pál Sárközy was born on 5 May 1928 in Budapest into a family belonging to the lesser Hungarian nobility. They 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, belonged to a Catholic noble 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 to Paris. Pál Sárközy fled 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, 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 was also 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 (known as Dadu) in 1949.

Andrée Mallah, then a law student, was the daughter of Benedict Mallah, a well-off urologist and STD specialist with a well-established reputation in the mainly bourgeois 17th arrondissement of Paris. Benedict Mallah, originally named Aaron Mallah (and nicknamed Benico), was born in 1890 in the Sephardic Jewish community of (modern day Thessaloniki, Greece). The family had originally been from Spain, then resettled in Provence, southern France, and later moved to Salonica into the Jewish community established there by other Spanish expellees victims of the Spanish Inquisition. Benico Mallah, the son of jeweller Mordechai Mallah and Reyna Magriso, left Salonica, then still 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 of Paris and had three sons: Guillaume, born in 1951, who is an entrepreneur in the textile industry and current vice president of the MEDEF (French union of employers); Nicolas, born in 1955; and François, born in 1957 (an MBA and manager of a health care consultancy company. In 1959, Paul Sarkozy left his wife and his three children. He later remarried three times and had two more children. His third wife, Christine de Ganay, married U.S. ambassador Frank G. Wisner.

Sarkozy's half-brother, Olivier, was chosen by the Carlyle Group in March 2008 as co-head and managing director of its recently launched global financial services division.

During Sarkozy's childhood, his father refused to give his 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. Sarkozy was, accordingly, raised Catholic.

Sarkozy said that being abandoned by his father shaped much of who he is today. He also has said that, in his early years, he felt inferior in relation to his wealthier classmates."What made me who I am now is the sum of all the humiliations suffered during childhood", he said later.

Sarkozy was enrolled in the Lycée Chaptal, a state-funded public middle and high school in Paris's 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. He enrolled at the Université Paris X Nanterre, where he graduated with a Master in Private law, and later with a DEA 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, he entered the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris (1979-1981) but failed to graduate due to an insufficient command of the English language.After passing the bar, he became a lawyer specializing in business and family law, and was one of Silvio Berlusconi's top French advocates.


Marie-Dominique Culioli
Sarkozy married his first wife, Marie-Dominique Culioli, on 23 September 1982; her father was a pharmacist from Vico (a village north of Ajaccio, Corsica). They had two sons, Pierre (born in 1985), now a hip-hop producer,and Jean (born in 1986) now a regional councillor in the city of Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. Sarkozy's best man 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.



Cécilia Ciganer-Albéniz
As mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine, Sarkozy met former fashion model and public relations executive Cécilia Ciganer-Albéniz (great-granddaughter of composer Isaac Albéniz and daughter of a Moldovan father), when he officiated at her wedding to television host Jacques Martin. 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 led to Sarkozy suing the paper.In the meantime, he was said to have had an affair with a journalist of Le Figaro, Anne Fulda.

Sarkozy and Cécilia ultimately divorced on 15 October 2007, soon after his election as President. She was his second wife.


Carla Bruni
Less than a month after separating from Cecilia, Sarkozy met Italian-born singer Carla Bruni at a dinner party, and soon entered a relationship with her. They married on 2 February 2008 at the Élysée Palace in Paris.


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, one of his first actions was to give himself a raise: his yearly salary went from €101,000 to €240,000 (to match his European/French peers). He is also entitled to a mayoral pension as a former mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine. He also receives a yearly council pension as a former member of the council of the Hauts-de-Seine department.

In government
Sarkozy's political career began when he was 22, when he became a city councillor in Neuilly-sur-Seine. 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 at the time, Charles Pasqua, wanted to become mayor, and asked Sarkozy to organize his campaign. Instead Sarkozy profited from Pasqua's short illness to propel himself into the office of mayor. He was the youngest 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 billion (USD260 billion) (FY 1994-1996). The first two budgets he submitted to the parliament (budgets for FY1994 and FY1995) assumed a yearly budget deficit equivalent to six percent of GDP. According to the Maastricht Treaty, the French yearly budget deficit may not exceed three percent of France's GDP.

In 1995, he spurned Chirac and backed Édouard 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.

However, he returned after the right-wing defeat at the 1997 parliamentary election, as the number two candidate of the RPR. When the party leader Philippe Séguin resigned, in 1999, he took the leadership 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 Sarkozy's support of Edouard Balladur for French President in 1995. Following Chirac's 14 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.

In the cabinet reshuffle of 31 March 2004, Sarkozy became 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.

In party elections of November 2004, Sarkozy became leader of the UMP with 85% of the vote. In accordance with an agreement with Chirac, he resigned as Finance 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 Légion 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 to resign as a deputy when he became 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.


Electoral mandates
* Member of the National Assembly of France for Hauts-de-Seine : 1988-1993 (became minister in 1993) / 1995-2002 (became minister in 2002) / reelected between March-June 2005 (became minister in June 2005)
* Mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine : 1983-2002
* Municipal councillor of Neuilly-sur-Seine : 1977-1983
* Regional councillor of Ile-de-France : 1983-1988
* General councillor of Hauts-de-Seine : 1985-1986
* Vice-president of the General Council of Hauts-de-Seine : 1986-1988
* President of the General Council of Hauts-de-Seine : 2004-2007 (became President of the French Republic in 2007)


Governmental functions
* Minister of Budget and government's spokesman : 1993-1995
* Minister of Communication and government's spokesman : 1994-1995
* Minister of State, minister of Interior, of the Internal Security and Local Freedoms : 2002-2004
* Minister of State, minister of Economy, Finance and Industry : March-November 2004
* Minister of State, minister of Interior and Planning : 2005-2007


Public image
Sarkozy was named the 68th best-dressed person in the world by Vanity Fair, alongside David Beckham and Brad Pitt. 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 9 August 2007 edition, 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 photographer Philippe Warrin, better known for his paparazzi work.

Former Daily Telegraph journalist Colin Randall has highlighted Sarkozy's tighter control of his image and frequent interventions in the media: "he censors a book, or fires the chief editor of a weekly." Sarkozy is reported by Reuters to be sensitive about his height (believed to be 5 ft 5in or 5 ft 6in). He has been noted[by whom?] as wearing substantially heeled shoes and standing on hidden platforms, while the French media have pointed out that Bruni frequently wears flats when in public with him. In 2009, this was the subject of a political row, when a worker at a factory where Sarkozy gave a speech said she was asked to stand next to him because she was of a similar height (this story was corroborated by some union officials). The president's office called the accusation "completely absurd and grotesque", while the Socialist Party mocked his fastidious preparation.

Sarkozy, alongside Tony Blair, is part of the inspiration for Mathieu Amalric's portrayal of Dominic Greene, the villain of the 22nd James Bond film, Quantum of Solace.

Sarkozy lost a suit against a manufacturer of Sarkozy voodoo dolls, in which he claimed that he had a right to his own image.

French honours
* Grand Cross of the Légion d'honneur (2007 - Automatic when taking office)
o Was previously Knight of the Légion d'honneur (since 2004)
* Grand Cross of the Ordre national du Mérite (2007 - Automatic when taking office)


Other countries
* Honorary Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath (2008 - United Kingdom)[120]
* Grand Cross of the Order of Charles III (2004 - Spain)
* Commander of the Ordre de Léopold (Belgium)
* Stara Planina (Bulgaria)
* Proto-canon of the Papal Basilica of St. John Lateran (2007 - Holy See). The post is held ex officio by the French Head of State.

"What made me who I am now is the sum of all the humiliations suffered during childhood." Of all the statements by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, this is the most compelling. It's why he doesn't accept victimization as an excuse for failure, criminality or self-pity. But at the same time, it explains why he has shown compassion to those who he truly believes have been humiliated and has raised them to platforms they have rarely held in Europe. As France's Minister of the Interior, Sarkozy empowered immigrant women. As President, he has given three appointments in his Cabinet to women from African-immigrant families. In an homage to Simone Veil, the former President of the European Parliament, Sarkozy said, "Every time a woman is martyred in the world, that woman should be recognized as a French citizen, and France will stand at her side." In his compassion for the weak and outrage against injustice, he may sometimes overpromise — but so do all politicians.

Sarkozy, 54, has withstood mounting public disapproval since taking office. He disregards his critics and sometimes seems to thrive on such criticism. Perhaps based on the wisdoms of his childhood, he lives by a philosophy that can be summed up as: Do not whine; move on. When his wife abandoned him after his presidential victory, he accepted it, found the most beautiful woman in France and married her.

This man finds himself in power at a time of dramatic change, when the world might be pushed at any moment into a nuclear disaster by a rogue regime like Iran's or by the fatal anarchy of Pakistan. Sarkozy has always been open about his pro-U.S. sentiment; given his power and political skills, he could be America's best ally in Europe. Can Sarkozy be Europe's Churchill, or is he just another Frenchman with a dramatic childhood?