Paris Calling

God save the President

It's a childhood dream maybe, an accomplishment of  a life clawing  to the top: Nicolas Sarkozy goes to England to meet the queen. Mother is not  in tow -too ill they say- but Carla Bruni is there, her mother too.

Charles Bremner tells us this is the centerpiece of a new drive to give a more stately image to the Sarkozy presidency. But the shrinks, quoted here in Le Monde, aren't convinced he can hold it together.

After the happiest day there ever was in NY (see photo), can Nicolas just move on already? Tough call.

Oops she did it again

I'm willing to bet a cheeseburger flipped on the grill by George W. himself that President Sarkozy told the Bushes that Cecilia Sarkozy couldn't make it because his couple is going through a difficult time (and NOT because of the sore throat).

In this AFP wire, Sarkozy even complains that Cecilia is his only challenge. The French press corp is slowly aiming its sights towards the couple and it's hard to see whatever is going on between the two love birds go on unreported for much longer.

In a similar vein, the presence of Rachida Dati at the Sarkozy holiday retreat is almost certainly pissing off the right-wing (old-white-male) barons, all the way up to Sarko's closest lieutenants. Not only is she a woman; not only is she arabic; but now she goes on f-ing holiday with the man. France's monarchic republic is a jealous place and the royal court blowback is only a question of time.

Mme Sarkozy in Libya Redux

Cecilia Sarkozy is back in Libya.

The news dropped late Sunday night. In the French newsroom where I work, jaws dropped.

All last week, word was that British and Brussels negotiators were annnnngry! that the Sarkozy's had jumped all over this dossier, a sensitive one to say the least. The main source of the story, an editor in chief at Le Point magazine, said that France's presidential jet was at Tripoli airport waiting to whisk off the beleaguered nurses.

Minutes after the first news came word that the European negotiator was there with Cecilia (and President Sarko's chief of staff). Monday lunch time, we still wait for news...

Sarkzoy and the Bulgarian Nurses

No one can quite figure out what exactly President Sarkozy sees in the Bulgarian nurses case and why he has made it his mission to get them freed. We now have news that wife Cecilia flew to meet with the nurses yesterday, with Elysee chief of staff Claude Gueant in tow. The first lady of France reportedly met with Qadaffi to plead the case too.

There just has to be something to this story we are not seeing. It's not necessarily nefarious, but of all the bugs that get into President Sarkozy's ear, why this one now?

My only answer thus far is that its a gimme, as the golfers say. If he pulls it off (and word is that he expects to) than a whole swathe of clash of civilization Europeans will be grateful. He'll become an instant hero to right wing Europe, especially in the Eastern part of the continent. The answer, then, as to why he's so focused on the nurses may very well be, why not?

UPDATE: According to l'Express, feathers in Brussells are officially ruffled. Also, Cecilia's other priority seems to be Rachida Dati, the new Minister of Justice who is both a woman and of Arabic origin as the French say. According to Le Monde, Cecilia had this to say about the minister, whose brother is about to be sentenced for drug dealing in Eastern France:

She's more than a friend. She's a sister. I'll never let her go. She's the child of gods.

The Politics of Cecilia

He lets his guard down for one second and the next thing you know he's on a medium-sized luxury yacht off the coast of Malta. It's all fine of course, except that about 12 hours after being handed a big pile of political capital he began spending it. Not a great sign but it's only day three of the Sarkozy era.

What's interesting about the Malta excursion of course is the Cecilia factor, which for the time being remains crucial. Political observers have nothing else to go on.

Paris Match, Sarkozy-friend Lagardere's best selling weekly, is plugging the first couple full-on with a cover showing her pecking him on the cheek election night. It's positively Pravda-esque, since it's also quite obvious that the couple have yet to quite hammer things out about their future together.

As has been well reported, Cecilia has never been shy in telling the world that she'd rather pick up stakes and move to New York. While her dalliance with PR guru Richard Attias is evidently well over, the fact that he was a high flying midtown bachelor with no connection to the grime of French politics goes a long way to tell us where she'd rather see Nicolas going.

Which leads me to believe that the Malta trip was an offering to Cecilia. By accepting fat cat Vincent Bollore's freebies, Sarkozy risks political decorum to yet again woo back his wife who'd rather be a queen of the Upper East Side than a ribbon-cutter in la France profonde.

This may all seem superficial, but in fact it gets at the heart of the matter. Sarkozy brilliantly united an unlikely coalition of right wing voters in order to secure his clear victory. On the one side he has a basically racist blue collar block who sincerely believe that he's going to reinforce some concept of whites-on-top France that some think is being lost in the globalized world and on the other, the fat cats and yuppies of France who just want to get on with it and be free to establish Manhattan-sur-Seine, unencumbered by Chirac's supposed cowardice towards the welfare state.

Needless to say, Cecilia represents the latter half of that rightist coalition. So as she tugs her man in her own direction, we can be sure that he's going to have to compensate in the other. For each image of globalized ostentation, the blue-collar folks will be expecting their bone. That reward, most likely, can be of two sorts. On the one hand, less aggression towards the much maligned Social model or conversely, a healthy does of race baiting.

Brace yourself Turkey.

(NB: I'm no specialist on these matters, but I think the Bollore yacht is somewhat average, right? A dwarf if it moored itself in Cannes for the festival this month, for example.)