Nicolas Sarkozy, What a Guy, Well, Wait, What Kind of Guy?

The French are aflutter with their newly-elected leader, Nicolas Sarkozy. A prominent writer has penned a "lucid, maternal . . . caustic, and at times, cruel . . . and always savory," biography of the man who has already decided to vacation in New Hampshire and has now called for the US withdrawal from Iraq. The French are reading the book, and at the same time, the usual French-correspondent suspects are writing up what they expect in the coming months and years. What follows is a roundup of reports from major publications on the coming age of Sarkozy.

(And for what it's worth, it's pronounced: zar-ko-ZEE.)

Roger Cohen, International Herald Tribune: Cohen reports that Sarkozy has been compared to Napoleon and, disdaining the regal nature of the French presidency, "once compared his predecessor, Jacques Chirac, to an out-of-touch French monarch on the Revolution's eve." Cohen argues that ruptures in the "trans-Atlantic bond" render the world less stable, and with the noxious Bush-Chirac mix now halfway remedied, and a neophyte French president, "more at ease in the world, attuned to globalization," brighter days could lie ahead. That is, unless the US heeds the pattern of its short-lived dynastic legacy, "as if all we had were Tudors and Stuarts."

Elaine Sciolino, New York Times: Sciolino wrote of Sarkozy's fondness for the US, "He is unabashedly pro-American, a man who openly proclaims his love of Ernest Hemingway, Steve McQueen and Sylvester Stallone and his admiration for America's strong work ethic and its belief in upward mobility." A few weeks later she compared the Sakozy family, in the paper's style pages, to the Kennedys. "Gone are the much older and more formal Chiracs, with their discretion, impeccable manners, old-fashioned style and easy slow motion." Reportedly, Sarkozy will make activism the "leitmotif of his presidency," and with colleagues and journalists (ahem!) opts for the more colloquial second-person tu instead of the more formal vous.

George F. Will, Washington Post: Will gets a quote calling Sarkozy a, "Keynesian who doesn't know who Keynes was," but then points out, "Sarkozy does know of Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek," and calls him, "A fountain of suspiciously opaque formulations (he advocates 'regulated liberalism' and 'humane globalization'), he is pleased that the word 'protection' is no longer taboo." Will rails against France's leftism as "perfectly reactionary," and concludes, "American conservatives should seek happy harbingers elsewhere."

Adam Gopnik, New Yorker: Gopnik recalls the simply astonishing story of Sarkozy, then mayor of Neuilly, talking a psychotic suicide bomber out of a nursery school (the piece is entitled, "The Human Bomb"). His heroism, it took place in 1993, was how the country came to learn about the man who, "likes risks, enjoys risks, revels in risks." Gopnik sizes him up: Sarkozy's mother is a family of Greek Jews and his father were Hungarian. Lastly, he gets at economic policy, "Some suspect that Sarkozy's secret strength in resolving the French economic 'crisis' may be that there is no crisis."