An estimated 85 percent of France’s 44.5 million registered voters cast their ballots and elected Nicolas Sarkozy as the president of France.
Some background about him:
Nicolas Sarkozy, known to friends and enemies alike as “Sarko,” is the 52-year-old son of a Hungarian immigrant who fled communism and a French mother of Greek Jewish origin, he was baptised a Roman Catholic and grew up in Paris.
He has two sons from a first marriage and a young son from his current wife, Cecilia.
Unlike most of the French ruling class, Mr. Sarkozy did not go to the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, but trained as a lawyer.
By 28, he was mayor of Neuilly, the most chic of Parisian suburbs.
He was a deputy at 34 and a minister at 38.
He is an outsider.
Like his Socialist rival, Segolene Royal, Mr Sarkozy depicts himself as set apart from his political family and the Chirac system, despite being an integral part of it for years.
In a country deeply disillusioned by its political rulers, he promises to replace the corruption and nepotism that plagued Mr. Chirac’s tenure with an “irreproachable republic.”
Chirac protégé; for a time, he even dated Chirac’s youngest daughter, Claude.
Nicolas Sarkozy, like almost all French politicians, disapproved of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, but was nonetheless critical of the way Jacques Chirac and his foreign minister Dominique de Villepin expressed France’s opposition to the war.
Sarkozy admires Tony Blair deeply for his pragmatism and ability to sell his political ideology, and the two are said to be good friends.
“I am not Mrs. Thatcher, I am not Mr. Reagan, I am Nicolas Sarkozy, with my own convictions, my own take on France and the French. I have always been a free man,” he recently said.
“He’s hyperactive, he’s ambitious, he’s a heavy worker, a workaholic, he never rests,” says Anita Hausser, who wrote a biography of Mr Sarkozy and is political editor at the French broadcaster LCI.
He has voiced opposition to Turkey’s bid to join the EU.