Carla Bruni is thought to have inspired Sarkozy's charm offensive, writes LARA MARLOWEin Paris
PRESIDENT NICOLAS Sarkozy has embarked on a charm offensive in an eight-page interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, the favourite news magazine of the left-wing intelligentsia.
Le Nouveau Sarkozywants us to forget his former pit-bull image and think of him as Sarko-zen, senior philosopher-statesman.
“With age I’ve become more tolerant, more open, more serene,” Sarkozy said. At least four times, he spoke of his “concept of” or “respect for” the institution of the French presidency. “It takes time to enter into a function like the one I occupy, to understand how it works, to raise oneself to the level of a responsibility which is, believe me, truly inhuman,” he said, excusing his early mistakes in office.
The beginning of Sarkozy’s presidency was labelled “bling-bling” because he feasted with millionaires and pop stars at Fouquet’s on the night of his election, then jetted off to a yacht in the Mediterranean. “It was a difficult time in my personal life and I was fighting on several fronts,” he said, alluding to his then failing marriage to his second wife, Cecilia. “I didn’t think that soirée was so important. I was wrong. In any case, from the moment something isn’t understood and creates an issue, it’s an error. And if it’s an error, you shouldn’t repeat it.”
Sarkozy regretted telling a heckler at the agricultural fair, “Get lost, asshole,” explaining: “I cannot react like a mere citizen.” And he says he was “sorry” and “shocked” that a man in Marseille was dragged into court for mocking police with the words, “Sarkozy, I see you!”
Sarkozy said he would no longer reply sarcastically to the newspaper editor who provoked him at a press conference, “not only because of my respect for the person in question, but because of my concept of my function . . . When one is president of the republic, one is never right to be aggressive. I think of it constantly.”
The old Sarkozy was determined to impose a “rupture” in French mentalities and habits. The new Sarkozy says: “I must take account of criticism, of difficulties and failings, try to do better. I want to carry out reforms by seeking broad acceptance, by developing discussion. I’m listening. I’m learning. Perhaps I’m making progress.”
Despite Sarkozy’s sudden embrace of soft power, there’s little chance he’ll turn into a contrite and cuddly leader. In the same interview, he made biting comments about the late president Francois Mitterrand’s taste for luxury and the socialist opposition, who he implied were “closed in”, “stiff” and “bunkerised”.
Nor has Sarkozy lost his aptitude for offending. He ruffled feathers in Israel this week when officials there leaked remarks from Sarkozy’s private meeting with Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister. Sarkozy told Netanyahu to “get rid of” his extreme right-wing foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman and bring back former minister Tzipi Livni. “With her and [defence minister Ehud] Barak you can make history,” Sarkozy said.
Netanyahu protested that Lieberman was “a very nice person” in private. Sarkozy replied that Jean-Marie Le Pen, the extreme right-wing leader who calls the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews “a detail of history”, was “also a nice person in private conversation”.
Commentators are unanimous in attributing the new, improved image to Carla Bruni Sarkozy. Le Nouvel Observateur did not ask Sarkozy about Bruni’s influence, perhaps because Denis Olivennes, the director of the magazine and an ex-boyfriend of the first lady, was one of two journalists who conducted the interview.
In an interview last year, Bruni told this correspondent that her husband “is not very aggressive. He’s impulsive”. She is a great believer in correcting character flaws through psychoanalysis. Thanks to Bruni, Sarkozy has reportedly abandoned the worst of French pop culture to read Borges and watch film classics by Kubrick, Chaplin and Capra. He has invited Woody Allen and Michel Houellebecq to the Élysée Palace.
"Carla's Buddies" is the title of the cover story in this week's Le Pointmagazine, beneath a photograph of the new culture minister Frédéric Mitterrand. He and at least a half dozen other friends of the first lady have been given jobs. "I'm not going to forbid myself from appointing people on the pretext that they're close to my wife," says Sarkozy.