NICOLAS SARKOZY was last night resting at his country retreat after he was discharged from hospital following a collapse while jogging.
While the French president’s political allies insisted that he was on the mend, political commentators questioned his hyperactive lifestyle.
The president emerged from a military hospital in Paris looking tired but smiling, waving at onlookers and shaking hands with doctors. He was accompanied by his wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy.
He had been taken in for tests on Sunday after feeling faint at the end of a 45-minute midday run in temperatures of more than 30 degrees in the park of the Palace of Versailles.
Although the president’s entourage said he had continued to liaise with political staff from his hospital bed, a trip to Normandy’s Mont-Saint-Michel today was cancelled after doctors ordered the president to take some “relative rest”.
The Élysée said that doctors had found no signs of heart or neurological trouble and that the 54-year-old’s fainting was down to his workload and over-exertion.
“The diagnosis is a faintness from a sustained physical effort in great heat,” the Élysée said, adding that the president “had not lost consciousness”.
Many asked whether the president’s action man image as “Speedy Sarko” would be damaged. Le Monde said it was “unlikely” that Mr Sarkozy’s image as the omnipresent “president who governs – alert and dashing, present on all fronts and exhausted by nothing” would leave hospital intact.
Mr Sarkozy, currently resting at La Lanterne, his weekend hunting lodge in the grounds of Versailles, is expected to chair the last cabinet meeting of the political season on Wednesday before taking three weeks' holiday at his wife's family retreat on the Cote d'Azur. – ( Guardianservice)