Nicolas Sarkozy: ‘Sarkozyism’, a New Presidential Leadership

Abstract

When I analysed the nature of Nicolas Sarkozy’s election victory of May 2007, I identified the crucial capacity of Sarkozy as a candidate to root himself in a tradition of the national and republican right that brought together the areas once supporting Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (the greater Paris basin, the East and the extension of these areas to the south east), and later to combine this with republican nationalism, with a Barrésian and Gaullist flavour (Perrineau 2008). This Bonapartist stamp, nationalist and Gaullist, evident in the electorate, was equally perceptible after the election victory and over the subsequent years, when I looked at the exercise of presidential power by Nicolas Sarkozy (Hefez 2008; Deldique 2008; Reza 2007; Lembeye 2008). What, then, are the principal characteristics of the exercise of this particular President’s power? How can the exercise of this form of power be classified when seen in the long-term perspective of French political regimes?