FRANCE:French president Nicolas Sarkozy denies he has flaunted his private life to distract attention from France's economic difficulties, writes Lara Marlowein Paris.
However, the possibility of his imminent marriage to a jet-setting former supermodel dominated coverage of his first big press conference at the Élysée Palace yesterday.
"The whole world is waiting for this question!" the French leader joked when a fawning television journalist wished him "health, love and happiness" in 2008 and asked for confirmation of reports that Sarkozy will wed model-turned-singer Carla Bruni a month from now.
"Being president of the republic doesn't give you more or less right to happiness," Sarkozy answered. "The life of a president on essential questions like love is like the life of anyone else."
He had "thought a lot" about the question and "decided to break with a deplorable tradition of our political life, that of hypocrisy and lies".
Sarkozy delighted in repeating "Carla and I" and noted that he spoke for them as a couple.
"With Carla, we decided not to lie. We don't want to manipulate news, but we didn't want to hide ourselves. I didn't want someone taking a shady picture of me in the morning . . . You've understood, it's serious. But it's not [ a newspaper] that will set the date. There's a good chance you'll learn about it when it's already done."
The French president held up his left hand, as if to tell journalists to watch for a wedding band.
Sarkozy divorced for the second time in October, and began dating Bruni in November. The couple were first seen at Disneyland Paris in December with Bruni's two-year-old son from her relationship with philosopher Raphael Enthoven.
Earlier in her career, Bruni was linked romantically with rock stars Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton, and US billionaire Donald Trump. Monogamy bores her, she told Figaro Madame magazine last winter.
Bruni (40) and Sarkozy (52) have since travelled together to Egypt and Jordan. Arab politicians objected to their sharing a hotel room while unmarried, and a Saudi diplomat told the Associated Press that Bruni will not be welcome when Sarkozy visits the kingdom next weekend. India has said it would raise protocol questions for her to come to Delhi with Sarkozy in late January.
The public affair has been blamed for the sudden drop in the president's popularity. An opinion poll published on January 6th gave him a 48 per cent approval rating, compared to 65 per cent last July.
Older, more conservative French people disapprove most of his liaison with Bruni and a flashy lifestyle which includes exotic holidays paid for by billionaire friends.
Libération newspaper has dubbed Sarkozy "the bling-bling president" and L'Est Républican noted "the French people didn't elect him to be a rock star".
Declining purchasing power is the other main reason for disillusionment with Sarkozy. "I will be the president of purchasing power," he promised during the campaign. But he evaded a question on the issue yesterday, asking: "What do you expect me to do? Empty coffers that are already empty?"
He may have been too busy courting Bruni to help draft the hour-long speech he delivered at the beginning of the press conference. The text, a philosophical amble about the need for a "policy of civilisation", bore the marks of his speech writer, a "social Gaullist" named Henri Guaino.
Juxtaposed with the subsequent question-and-answer session, in which Sarkozy was his usual belligerent self, it gave an unsettling impression of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
The speech-reading president spoke of his determination to give workers a better deal by forcing employers to share profits with them.
The spontaneous, question-answering Sarkozy said he would this year scrap the 35-hour working week.
As recently as the end of November, he called the measure a "social right" and proposed that workers cash in leisure time for extra pay.
The Socialist Party accused him of "wanting to put an end to a legal limit on working hours" and said ending the 35-hour week would be "a backward step unprecedented in the past century".
In a New Year's Eve speech, also written by Guaino, Sarkozy said he was "taking account of the need for social dialogue and negotiation", because "I don't believe in brutality as a method of governing".
Asked whether poor global economic prospects made his reforms more difficult, Sarkozy replied: "Even if there were 18 per cent growth in the world and France was stuck with the 35-hour week and a labour law that prevents hiring and job training that leaves 500,000 jobs untaken, it wouldn't change anything . . . We're going to fight for the reforms that have worked elsewhere in the world. It's a question of conviction and I'll see it through to the end."
Razzy Hammadi, the "national secretary for riposte" for the opposition Socialists, said the speech showed the president was in the process of "Chirac-isation".
Sarkozy's predictions that France would be "the soul of the new renaissance that the world needs" and that "France, the country of human rights, will show the way to all men" were typical of his predecessor.
Sarkozy promised that he would "push a policy of civilisation" during the French EU presidency, which begins on July 1st. "Europe needs to humanise itself. It needs to debureaucratise itself. It needs more politics and less technocracy," he said.
He intends to promote common European policies on immigration, defence, energy and the environment.
Sarkozy has humiliated his cabinet by announcing that a private consultancy firm will evaluate ministers' performance.
Brice Hortefeux, the minister for immigration and national identity, for example, fell 1,000-2,000 short of the goal of expelling 25,000 illegal immigrants in 2007.
Sarkozy boasted that the heads of the Spanish and Italian governments have told him they will no longer legalise illegal immigrants en masse. "They both asked me for France, Italy and Spain to engage in collective expulsions," he added.
