Sarkozy  emerging  as  a  leading  global  figure

President Nicolas Sarkozy heads to Asia this week to broach the idea of bringing India and China together with G-8 nations in a 'Bretton Woods II' framework of economic rules.

October 22, 2008

Paris - A year ago, France's new president raced around Europe looking frenetic. Nicolas Sarkozy's wife had left him, critics pointed to a lack of discipline and a royal style of rule – a man who moved but didn't shake – and his popularity nosedived.

This week Mr. Sarkozy worked with President Bush to set up a series of meetings to reform the global economy, and he's now off to Asia to broach the idea of bringing India and China together with G-8 nations in a "Bretton Woods II" framework of economic rules. This comes just weeks after he moved with alacrity to broker a cease-fire deal to end the Georgia-Russia war.

Critics still point to Sarkozy's proclivity to turn politics into a show and to unashamedly take credit whenever possible. Yet in the space of a summer he has consolidated his power and blended substance with showmanship, and is now winning praise as a crisis leader in a more multipolar world.

"I think today that everyone, even those who had misgivings, acknowledge that [Sarkozy] not only has great political energy, but also exceptional leadership qualities," commented José Manuel Barroso, the EU chief who accompanied Sarkozy to Camp David this weekend.

The French president's peripatetic style is proving useful for a major crisis with multiple elements – which plays into his ability to do many things at once.

He's been blessed with good political winds: with Russia's invasion of Georgia, and with US world stock at an ebb, it is Europe's hour at a time when the EU presidency is held by France.

Europe boldly took the lead in response to the global financial crisis by offering a plan devised by Gordon Brown and, later, Sarkozy that recapitalized banks to aid the economy.

While the White House moved quickly to propose a $700 billion bailout, it finally adopted Europe's plan to address liquidity and agree to a series of Bretton Woods-style meeting after the US presidential elections on Nov. 4.

Sarkozy has quickly adopted a bully pulpit for Europe and its traditionally more measured approach to markets. In Strasbourg Tuesday, speaking to the European Parliament, he stated that Europe "must carry the idea of a new foundation of global capitalism. What happened [with toxic assets and derivatives that created a credit crisis] was a treason of the values of capitalism," he said. "The market economy itself is not called into question."

France moved this week to lend 10.5 billion euros ($14.12 billion) to six banks to boost their capital reserves.

Man of action

"He can walk into a crisis and take action. That's what a leader does; it's what Sarkozy is good at," says a former French political consultant to the prime minister's office. "He chases down an answer, he doesn't let it go. The 27 EU nations need someone who gets an agreement. We are in a crisis, and he stayed calm amid serious market fear. With no crisis, it might be a different story."

Sarkozy has had issues with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose aides complained that Sarkozy would step in and steal headlines and the hard-earned thunder of a German leader who did her homework when Germany led the EU in 2007.

But German newspapers, such as the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and German analysts have praised quick French action in mediating between Russia and Georgia, and point to Sarkozy's good faith bargaining in the final hours of the crucial Lisbon Treaty to unify Europe last year, where he and Ms. Merkel achieved a historic agreement.

"He's become more of a diplomat and political manager than a personality show," argues Henning Riecke of the Berlin-based German Council of Foreign Relations.

There's been some back and forth between the British and French press over who deserves the lead position in Europe on the credit crisis, Gordon Brown – who Nobel laureate Paul Krugman said "saved the world" with his plan – or Sarkozy. But the spat doesn't appear to be originating at the top.

Cool in a crisis?

It was as a cool crisis manager that Sarkozy first came to broad attention in France.

As mayor of the tony Paris suburb of Neuilly in 1993, Sarkozy faced a hostage situation where a man calling himself the "human bomb" entered a nursery school with a rifle and explosives.

Sarkozy went directly into the school, negotiated with the disturbed man, and walked out surrounded by the children.

The police later shot the man; but no one had seen a politician act like this before.

Still, a year ago after a hard-fought campaign, Sarkozy looked like the incredible shrinking president.

His marriage had collapsed, he faced strikes by transport workers that shut down France's subway system, and efforts to create a "tax shield" for wealthy French citizens was deeply unpopular in a country where vanishing "purchasing power" was on many French lips.

Monsieur 'bling bling'

Sarkozy was criticized for lavish vacations, for garish "bling bling" tastes, for putting his personal life in front of the media as he courted supermodel Carla Bruni, whom he later married. His approval rating fell from 65 to 32 percent.

A rude epithet by Sarkozy to a critic at a farm show outside Paris was posted on YouTube in February. Even in July, hopes for a glorious French presidency of the EU that would bring a ratification of the Lisbon Treaty looked dashed, as Ireland refused to ratify it. He faced pressure in August after a Taliban attack killed nearly a dozen French troops.

Yet what the presidents of Denmark and Luxembourg have called Sarkozy's "intensity" in negotiating with Moscow, and with Washington in pushing a European model of reform – has put Sarkozy's approval up to 49 percent.

Even columnists like Jean Quatremer, for the left-wing Liberation, not a bastion of Sarkozy support, have been feeling pride in the president's achievements: "Apart from the British," Quatremer wrote this week, "who have always had a hard time acknowledging positive developments from the continent in general, and France in particular, everyone is seduced by Sarkozy's activism and ability to compromise."

"A lot of this moment could be as in the past, public relations and spin" says a long time Parisian commentator, pointing out that in Sarkozy's negotiations with Russian President Medvedev last month, both men emerged with dramatically different accounts of what had been decided. "We'll have to wait and see.

EU  President  Nicolas Sarkozy shines  in  a crisis

October 21, 2008

Paris -- French President Nicolas Sarkozy belongs to a breed of politicians who seem to function in perpetual crisis mode.

At times his style -- reminiscent of, say, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani -- comes off as abrasive. But during bona fide crises like the global economic meltdown, Sarkozy hits his stride and charges into the fray.

Even some detractors say that when the crisis struck, Sarkozy turned out to be the ideal figure to have at the helm of the European Union, a sluggish, fractious, 27-member organization whose meetings on tough issues generally end with decisions to hold a future meeting.

Instead, Sarkozy charmed and cajoled fellow European leaders into a historic agreement for a coordinated, multibillion-dollar bank rescue plan that calmed hysterical markets last week.

Then Sarkozy, who holds the rotating EU presidency, zoomed to the United States, where he, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and President Bush announced plans for a summit at which world leaders would work on the financial crisis. The French president hit the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Tuesday and trumpeted a typically ambitious plan for "a refoundation of world capitalism."

Like Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain, Sarkozy has won new popularity at home and praise abroad. After 16 uneven months in office, he seized the chance to reassert French power on the world stage at a moment when several Western leaders are politically weak.

"I think he achieved his true stature as a man of state," said Nicolas Baverez, an economist and historian who is among a group of informal advisors consulted by the president. "He is a man with a real capacity to manage events."

Despite talk of competition between Brown and Sarkozy for the mantle of European leadership, their relationship has been necessarily cooperative and complementary, Baverez said. Because Britain retains the pound sterling currency rather than the euro, it wields influence but cannot speak for the EU the way France has.

"These are two men who know each other for some time and understand each other well," Baverez said. "I really don't think there is a competition, because Brown is too weakened at the level of domestic politics. Also, because the United Kingdom does not belong to the Eurozone, that is an arena where Sarkozy had to lead."

Brown, the quiet technocrat, displayed his economic prowess in developing a British bank bailout that served as the model for the European plan. Sarkozy supplied political muscle and public relations flash to forge an international consensus after uneasy days in which nations such as Germany and Ireland favored unilateral policies that worsened the chaos.

"I think that today everyone recognizes, even those who had doubts at first, that President Sarkozy not only has a great political energy, but also exceptional qualities as a leader," Barroso said in an interview with Le Figaro newspaper Tuesday.

Sarkozy seems the right man at the right place in terms of ideology as well as temperament. His center-right predecessor, Jacques Chirac, was a ponderous, cautious figure who feuded with American and European counterparts.

Sarkozy came to office last year as a hard-nosed center-rightist who nonetheless opened his government to centrist and leftist Cabinet ministers. On the foreign affairs front, he espoused a vision that balanced France's traditional independence with an unusually pro-American attitude and a willingness to take risks.

And he has not hesitated, in classic French fashion, to respond with the power of a robust state to the breakdown of a marketplace overwhelmed by greed and disorder.

As the crisis began to escalate about six weeks ago, Sarkozy scolded a roomful of bankers and corporate executives for their role in runaway speculation and toxic investments, according to an account in L'Express magazine.

"It's been years that you have played, that you have bought whatever you wanted in the United States, that you got all excited in the marketplace," Sarkozy declared, according to the account. "And today when things go bad, you come running to the state!"

Sarkozy needled by 'voodoo doll'

The doll comes with pins and a manual with instructions on how to put the evil eye on the president.

Users can stick the pins into choice quotes from Mr Sarkozy which are printed on the doll.

Mr Sarkozy's lawyer said the president had the "exclusive and absolute rights" over his own image.

Publishers K&B have issued 20,000 editions of the kit and have also produced a similar doll of Segolene Royal - Mr Sarkozy's Socialist party rival in the presidential elections last year.

Her lawyer said she is considering legal action, calling the doll an affront to her human dignity.

The publisher said Mr Sarkozy's reaction was "totally disproportionate" and has so far refused to pull the doll from shops.

The product went on sale on 9 October.

The quotes on the Sarkozy doll include "work more to earn more" and "get lost, jerk" - which he reportedly said to a bystander who refused to shake his hand at an event last year.

It is not the first time Mr Sarkozy has resorted to litigation. Last week he sued Yves Bertrand for libel and invasion of privacy after extracts from the former spy chief's diaries were leaked and published.

Voodoo has become associated with zombies and sticking pins into dolls to curse an enemy, but practitioners say this misrepresents their religion.