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Will to prove father wrong helped him succeed
When Nicolas Sarkozy's father, an exiled Hungarian aristocrat, told his schoolboy son to lower his ambitions, he could not have guessed it would trigger a determination to succeed that culminated on Sunday night in winning France's highest office.
- The Telegraph
- Published: 00:00 May 8, 2007
Paris: When Nicolas Sarkozy's father, an exiled Hungarian aristocrat, told his schoolboy son to lower his ambitions, he could not have guessed it would trigger a determination to succeed that culminated on Sunday night in winning France's highest office.
Unimpressed with young Nicolas's mediocre results, his father disparagingly predicted: "With the name you carry and the results you obtain, you will never succeed in France."
Sarkozy received a stinging reminder of those words during the campaign when far-Right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen claimed he was "not French enough" to run for president.
Such barbs dissolved when the victory cheers rang out at campaign headquarters, as the French marvelled at the journey this extraordinarily energetic, quixotic, and driven Right-winger has undergone.
"I have changed," declared Sarkozy at the start of his campaign after being chosen to run for the Union for a Popular Movement.
"Throughout this campaign I have set out to meet the French with my story, with what I have learned in life, with my memories, with my emotions," Sarkozy said on his final rally in Montpellier last week. "I went out with a will to change things. I went out with my childhood dreams that have never left me."
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Sarkozy's Oedipal tussle has been at the heart of that transformation. Pal Sarkozy, a flamboyant advertising designer who owned several houses, two yachts and collected paintings from Picasso and Matisse, abandoned the four-year old Nicolas, and his two brothers, Francois and Guillaume with their mother.
Unlike most of the ruling class, Sarkozy did not go to the Ecole Nationale d'Administration, but trained as a lawyer. In politics, his ascent was swift - at 19, he joined Chirac's Rally for the Republic. He was a deputy at 34 and a minister at 38.
The upside of Sarkozy's confrontational style is his bravery, which he proved while mayor of Neuilly: in 1993 he walked unarmed into a classroom to negotiate the release of dozens of children taken hostage by a man wearing an explosive belt. "My back was soaked, I could hear the sweat trickling down it: it was fear, fear of doing a bad job," he said afterwards.
It is this "man of action" status that has won him popularity. But his pledge to hose down high-immigrant suburban estates to flush out criminals, whom he described as "rabble", also earned him the enmity of many in the "banlieues", who say his words stoked the 2005 riots.
While the result showed that a clear majority believe his virile brand of politics are needed to pull France away from decline, a large minority see him as a dangerous authoritarian with brutal, divisive methods that threaten the social fabric.
The French like the idea of a man of action but they also expect their president to remain above the fray. They will find out on May 17, when he moves into the Elysee palace, if he can be both.
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