Nicolas Sarkozy

A lawyer by training, Nicolas Sarkozy began his political career in the 1970s as a grassroots organizer for the Gaullist movement. His career progressed through triumphs and setbacks, revealing a complex and captivating political personality. His history reveals an open, passionate, and provocative style that ensured his success and contrasts sharply with a stagnant French political culture dominated by elites.

Demonstrating an unusual candor, Sarkozy describes in this work the difficulties that France has faced in recent years – unemployment, social tensions, educational problems, a government incapable of responding to the country's economic and social problems. In international relations, without hiding his admiration for the United States, he calls for a new approach to how France positions itself in relation to the world. His perspective on Europe is equally ambitious and far-reaching; his iconoclastic views on Israel and the Arab world, Africa, globalization, immigration, and the environment herald a significant break with the past.

The ideas of the French president are probably bolder, more coherent, and more fascinating than those of any other French leader in decades. Audacious, pragmatic, with a taste for risk-taking, Nicolas Sarkozy is setting an attractive new direction for France as it enters the 21st century.