Nicolas Sarkozy

Nicolas Sarkozy is a French politician who served as the 23rd President of France from May 2007 to May 2012 and as one of the most-publicly-visible French political figures of the 2000s and 2010s. He was born Nicolas Paul Stéphane Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa on January 28, 1955, in Paris, the son of a Hungarian-French father (Pál Sárközy de Nagy-Bócsa, a Hungarian aristocrat who emigrated to France in 1944) and a French-Greek-Jewish mother. He earned a law degree at the University of Paris X Nanterre and qualified as a lawyer in 1981.

His political career began in the early 1980s when he became deputy mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine — a wealthy western Paris suburb — at age 28. He was elected mayor of Neuilly in 1983 at age 28 (the youngest mayor of any French town with over 50,000 residents at the time) and served in that role until 2002. He served in the French National Assembly from 1988 onward and held multiple ministerial portfolios under Presidents Jacques Chirac, including Budget Minister, Interior Minister, and Finance Minister.

He won the May 2007 French presidential election against Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal. His five-year presidency was characterized by aggressive economic-policy reforms, EU-level activism (including playing a major role in shaping the EU response to the 2008 global financial crisis and the 2009 Greek debt crisis), and substantial controversy over his personal style — particularly his three-month 2008 marriage to Italian-French model and singer Carla Bruni shortly after his divorce from his second wife Cécilia Attias. He lost the May 2012 election to Socialist François Hollande.

His post-presidency has been defined by ongoing legal proceedings. In 2021 he was convicted of corruption and influence-peddling related to an attempted bribery of a French judge — making him only the second French president since Charles de Gaulle to be convicted of a crime (the other being Jacques Chirac). He has been sentenced to a one-year suspended prison sentence and an additional one-year electronic-monitoring sentence; appeals have been ongoing. He has continued to publish memoirs and political commentary.

His name Nicolas is the French form of Nicholas, from the Greek Nikolaos meaning "victory of the people." Nicolas has been continuously among the most-popular French-American boys' names for decades.