Nicolas Sarkozy

Nicolas Paul Stéphane Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa (born 28 January 1955) is a French politician who served as President of France from 2007 to 2012.

Born in Paris, he is of Hungarian, Greek Jewish, and French origin. Mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine from 1983 to 2002, he was Minister of the Budget under Prime Minister Édouard Balladur (1993–1995) during François Mitterrand’s second term. During Jacques Chirac’s second presidential term he served as Minister of the Interior and as Minister of Finances. He was the leader of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party from 2004 to 2007.

He won the 2007 French presidential election by a 53.1% to 46.9% margin against Ségolène Royal, the Socialist Party (PS) candidate. During his term, he faced the financial crisis of 2007–2008 (causing a recession, the European sovereign debt crisis), the Russo-Georgian War (for which he negotiated a ceasefire) and the Arab Spring (especially in Tunisia, Libya, and Syria). He initiated the reform of French universities (2007) and the pension reform (2010). He married Italian-French singer-songwriter Carla Bruni in 2008 at the Élysée Palace in Paris.

In the 2012 French presidential election, Sarkozy was defeated by the PS candidate François Hollande, by a 3.2% margin. After leaving the presidential office, Sarkozy vowed to retire from public life before coming back in 2014, being subsequently reelected as UMP leader (renamed The Republicans in 2015). Being defeated at the Republican presidential primary in 2016, he retired from public life. He was charged with corruption by French prosecutors in two cases, notably concerning the alleged Libyan interference in the 2007 French elections. In 2021, Sarkozy was convicted of corruption in two separate trials. His first conviction resulted in him receiving a sentence of three years, two of them suspended and one in prison; he has appealed against the ruling. For his second conviction, he received a one-year sentence, which he is allowed to serve under home confinement.

Sarkozy was born in Paris, and is the son of Pál István Ernő Sárközy de Nagy-Bócsa (Hungarian: nagybócsai Sárközy Pál—in some sources Nagy-Bócsay Sárközy Pál István Ernő), (born 5 May 1928), a Protestant Hungarian aristocrat, and Andrée Jeanne “Dadu” Mallah (12 October 1925 – 12 December 2017), whose Ottoman Greek Jewish grandfather converted to Catholicism to marry Sarkozy’s French Catholic maternal grandmother.] They were married in the Saint-François-de-Sales church, 17th arrondissement of Paris, on 8 February 1950, and divorced in 1959.

During Sarkozy’s childhood, his father founded his own advertising agency and became wealthy. The family lived in a mansion owned by Sarkozy’s maternal grandfather, Benedict Mallah, in the 17th arrondissement of Paris. The family later moved to Neuilly-sur-Seine, one of the wealthiest communes of the Île-de-France région immediately west of Paris. According to Sarkozy, his staunchly Gaullist grandfather was more of an influence on him than his father, whom he rarely saw. Sarkozy was raised Catholic. …

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