He's got a supermodel on his arm and the media still loves him, but Nicolas Sarkozy appears to be losing the affection of the French people, writes Lara Marlowein Paris.
The honeymoon is over. Not president Nicolas Sarkozy's pre-nuptial idyll with the patrician Italian supermodel-turned-singer Carla Bruni. We'll see the next instalment of that soap opera when Sarko and Carla visit the Taj Mahal next week.
No, disenchantment has infected Sarkozy's other love, the French people who elected him last May with a resounding 53 per cent of the vote. This week, for the first time, in a BVA poll for L'Express magazine, negative opinions of the president (48 per cent) surpassed those who approve of him (45 per cent). Meanwhile, the hard-working, low-profile prime minister, François Fillon, grows more popular.
Are the French people jealous of the Sarko-Carla romance? Were it not for her extravagant consumption of men, Bruni appears eminently qualified to become France's first lady. She is beautiful, well-educated, speaks four languages and is equally at ease with statesmen and pop stars.
Bruni's "golden childhood" in a castle in northern Italy features on the cover of this week's Paris Match magazine, which like most of France's media is owned by one of Sarkozy's close friends. "Love, beauty, power," the magazine gushes. The romance is a "fairy tale" that "brings together all the ingredients of a best-seller." Match calls Bruni a "princess and heroine of modern times".
The French can be forgiven for gagging on their croissants. Three new books about the former first lady Cécilia provide a starkly different view of Sarkozy, described by his ex as a stingy ladies' man who "loves no one, not even his children". Cécilia Sarkozy made a feeble attempt to have the book banned.
The most damning quote, relayed by the journalist Anna Bitton in Cécilia, confirms the worst suspicions about Sarkozy's egomania. In December 2006, Sarkozy allegedly warned: "If wants to come back, she'd better hurry. There's a long list of women who'd like to take her place. I can have any woman."
More than a few observers fear Bruni will make kitty croquettes out of Sarkozy. In Le Point magazine, Patrick Besson offers "24 pieces of advice to the president of the republic with a view to his marriage with Miss Bruni . . . Number 9: If you lose the next presidential election, expect to become single again . . . Number 20: One trip you shouldn't take Carla on - Washington, in the event Barack Obama is elected president. You never know."
FRENCH POLITICAL LIFE, says the commentator Alain Duhamel, "has reached an unprecedented degree of frivolity". Duhamel blames that latest French crime against the English language (from the word "people") la pipolisation - "the natural result of a democracy based on opinion."
Rumours of the presidential marriage are a prime example. An item on L'Est Républicain newspaper's website last Monday quoted "a source close to a witness" who claimed the couple married at the Élysée last week. French and international media scrambled after the non-story. When CNN dispatched a special envoy to Paris, the anchor in Atlanta noted that she was woken in the middle of the night and braved storms to get there.
On a tour of Gulf sheikhdoms, Sarkozy frenetically exchanged text messages with Bruni while meeting with the Saudi King Abdullah. The ring finger he told us to watch for confirmation of his marriage remains bare.
Talk of the Almighty has never gone down well in this staunchly secular country. The French president horrified the Socialist Party, freemasons and several newspapers by citing God 13 times in a speech to the Saudi consultative council in Riyadh.
"Perhaps Muslims, Jews and Christians do not believe in God in the same way," Sarkozy said. "But at the end of the day, who could doubt that their prayers are addressed to the same God? Transcendent God who is in the thoughts and heart of every man. God who does not enslave man but frees him . . ."
Sarkozy's plan to use the upcoming French presidency of the EU to make his friend Tony Blair the first president of Europe was torpedoed by his own allies this week. In a syrupy appearance at a UMP National Council, Sarkozy praised the former British prime minister as a "great European", while Blair, in an off-colour allusion to the president's sexual prowess, noted he was "energetic in every field".
The French commissioner for transport, Jacques Barrot, warned that "Tony Blair doesn't have such a good image in Europe." Sarkozy's former mentor Édouard Balladur said Blair is too close to Washington. "The future president must be in sync with the majority in his own country, and belong to a country that respects European rules," the former president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing chided.
As if these public relations flops didn't sting enough, Sarkozy's advisers are telling him: "It's the economy, stupid." Eight months after Sarkozy was elected, the economic growth and increased purchasing power he promised have not materialised. The French will simply have to work harder, he said this week. And this from a leader who yesterday was revealed to have spent €34,445 on make-up during his presidential campaign, including some sessions billed at €450 per hour.
DISILLUSIONMENT WITH THE economic reforms promised by Sarkozy is summed up by the UMP deputy Hervé Mariton: "Things are changing fast, but are they really changing?" Sarkozy abolished the régimes spéciaux that allowed some public sector workers to retire earlier than everyone else, but he bought off transport workers with such generous pay rises that the reform won't save money.
Sarkozy has announced three initiatives on the 35-hour working week in eight months: tax-free overtime, cash instead of holidays and exemptions from the 35-hour law where employers agree with trade unions. But when Sarkozy said on January 8th that he wanted to abolish the 35-hour week, he was forced to backtrack within 24 hours.
Sarkozy also abandoned his promise to establish a single labour contract because it would have been unpopular in the run-up to the municipal elections in March. Instead, four of five main trade unions this week accepted an imprecise plan for Danish-style "flexicurity", under which management will have more latitude to fire, while those who lose their jobs will enjoy greater benefits. No one is sure how the plan will be financed, and France is in danger of violating the Maastricht cap on 3 per cent deficit spending during its EU presidency.
Sarkozy's relations with the media have also come under scrutiny. His friend Serge Dassault, the aircraft manufacturer and owner of Le Figaro, expressed his new year's greetings to France's "dynamic and courageous" president in a front-page headline. Only one hostile question was asked at the president's January 8th "hyper press conference" before 800 journalists. No one asked follow-up questions. Neither privately owned media, almost entirely in the hands of the president's friends, nor state-owned media - whose directors are chosen by the president - dare criticise him.
One of Sarkozy's more startling recent proposals was to stop all advertising on state-owned television and radio. The president consulted neither the head of France Télévision nor his culture minister before making the announcement.
The share price of TF1, owned by his close friend Martin Bouygues, shot up in the expectation that the private channel will benefit from hundreds of millions of euros in advertising lost to state-owned France 2.
According to the investigative newspaper Canard Enchaîné, this umpteenth example of conflict of interest was the brainchild of Alain Minc, a friend and advisor to Sarkozy who has also spearheaded the drive to bring France's best newspaper, Le Monde, under the control of Arnaud Lagardère, another of the president's billionaire friends. Journalists at Le Monde have demanded Minc's resignation as president of the newspaper's supervisory board. As a shareholder, Guillaume Sarkozy, the president's brother, is also demanding a seat on the board.