Born in Paris, Nicolas Sarkozy is of Hungarian, Greek-Jewish, and French origin. From 1983 to 2002, he served as mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine. He was minister of the budget in the government of Édouard Balladour (1993–1995) and minister of interior and minister of finance during Jacques Chirac´s second presidential term (2002–2007). Nicolas Sarkozy won the 2007 French presidential election by a 53.1% to 46.9% margin against Ségolène Royal, the candidate of the Socialist Party. In the 2012 French presidential election, Sarkozy was defeated by the PS candidate, François Hollande, by a 3.2% margin.
Making political Waves
Sarkozy, who said he was leaving politics in 2012, still holds political sway in France, where he has set himself up as a kingmaker for the conservative Les Republicans party for the 2027 presidential election, anointing interior minister Gérald Darmanin as his preferred candidate.
In the memoirs, the president´s comments on the Russian war in Ukraine caused a stir not only among the French but also among the world audience. “It is said we are fighting a war against Russia without fighting it. Clearly, we are not engaged on the ground, but we are delivering weapons to one of the belligerents,” he writes. “Russia will remain our neighbour whether we like it or not. We must find ways and means to re-establish neighbourly, or at least calmer, relations.” His former intelligence advisor, Jérôme Poirot, said the president´s comments were “shameful”.
Sarkozy’s support of Russia is consistent with France’s view of the “special relationship” between Moscow and Paris that emerged at the end of the 1960s under wartime leader Charles de Gaulle, a view still shared by many across the French political spectrum.
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Observations of political Colleagues
The book is punctuated with acerbic observations of peers and rivals at home and abroad. According to Sarkozy, German chancellor Angela Merkel disliked “debates that were too intellectual (…) She wanted the solid, the heavy, the consistent, and too bad if it was boring”.
Boris Johnson was “soon swept away by the same lack of seriousness and lack of convictions that had led him to support the heresy of Brexit out of purely personal calculation”. Barack Obama is described as “quite cold, introverted, and only marginally interested in those around him”.
If there is a person he likes extremely, it is the former British prime minister, David Cameron. “Young, intelligent, jovial, and really very nice. I’ve rarely met a foreign political man with whom I’ve spontaneously wished to become friends. His courtesy and his absence of ego in his personal relationships impressed me.” However, Cameron’s ceding to rightwing elements of the Conservative party, leading to the “long and fatal descent into the hell of Brexit”, was disappointing and a serious mistake, Sarkozy says.
