Sarkozy’s Houdini Act: Is France’s Former President Trying to Hide From Prosecution Laying the Groundwork for a Big Comeback?
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When Nicolas Sarkozy was battling his way toward the presidency in 2007, he often seemed like the Energizer Bunny of French politics: frenetic, relentless, and troublingly ubiquitous. Like that deranged, effervescent, pink rabbit, he broke through barriers and intruded into the darnedest places
Long before he took office in the Élysée Palace, he had manufactured an image based on tough talk and hard-charging actions that could fill kiosks full of newsweekly covers and thus inspire the relentless dedication of legions of newspaper correspondents. (When he was a government minister under President Jacques Chirac, he would actually brag about his impact on magazine sales and television ratings.) The Sarko Show devolved into a national soap opera: His wife was his chief of staff, then left him for another man, but came back in time for his election to the presidency. Soon after, he gave France its first presidential divorce, speed-wooed former supermodel Carla Bruni, and provided the country with a rare presidential wedding and, better yet, its first presidential birth. In the end, it was hard to tell whether they were France’s Camelot, with Bruni as Jackie Kennedy, or its political Brangelina. Sarkozy’s jumpy voice seemed to play in a loop for years, accompanying people’s café and croissants over the morning radio, or barging in on family dinners during prime-time news broadcasts.
The country was so overwhelmed by his omnipresence (the media actually dubbed him the “omni-president”) that it began to suffer from what might be called Sarkozia — a mental disorder defined by the fraught disorientation of spending so much time around a politician who relishes destabilizing others.
And then, in little more than the time that it took for the electorate to reject him in May, Sarkozy was gone. The man who drove the French media insane for much of the last decade has tried to disappear like Houdini.