Nicolas Sarkozy

Sarkozy was born in Paris, and is the son of Pál István Ernő Sárközy de Nagy-Bócsa (nagybócsai Sárközy Pál; —in some sources Nagy-Bócsay Sárközy Pál István Ernő), (5 May 1928 – 4 March 2023), a Protestant Hungarian aristocrat, and Andrée Jeanne "Dadu" Mallah (12 October 1925 – 12 December 2017), whose Ottoman Greek Jewish grandfather converted to Catholicism to marry Sarkozy's French Catholic maternal grandmother.

They were married in the Saint-François-de-Sales church, 17th arrondissement of Paris, on 8 February 1950, and divorced in 1959.

During Sarkozy's childhood, his father founded his own advertising agency and became wealthy.

Nicolas Paul Stéphane Sarközy de Nagy-Bocsa (born 28 January 1955) is a French politician who served as the president of France and co-prince of Andorra from 2007 to 2012.

Born in Paris, he is of Hungarian, Greek Jewish, and French origin.

His family then sent him to the Cours Saint-Louis de Monceau, a private Catholic school in the 17th arrondissement, where he was reportedly a mediocre student, but where he nonetheless obtained his baccalauréat in 1973.

Sarkozy enrolled at the Université Paris X Nanterre, where he graduated with an M.A. in private law and, later, with a D.E.A. degree in business law.

Paris X Nanterre had been the starting place for the May '68 student movement and was still a stronghold of leftist students.

Described as a quiet student, Sarkozy soon joined the right-wing student organization, in which he was very active.

He completed his military service as a part-time Air Force cleaner.

After graduating from university, Sarkozy entered Sciences Po, where he studied between 1979 and 1981, but failed to graduate due to an insufficient command of the English language.

After passing the bar, Sarkozy became a lawyer specializing in business and family law and was one of Silvio Berlusconi's French lawyers.

Sarkozy married his first wife, Marie-Dominique Culioli, on 23 September 1982; her father was a pharmacist from Vico (a village north of Ajaccio, Corsica), her uncle was Achille Peretti, the mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine from 1947 to 1983 and Sarkozy's political mentor.

Mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine from 1983 to 2002, he was Minister of the Budget under Prime Minister Édouard Balladur (1993–1995) during François Mitterrand's second term.

During Jacques Chirac's second presidential term he served as Minister of the Interior and as Minister of Finances.

They had two sons, Pierre (born in 1985), now a hip-hop producer, and Jean (born in 1986) now a local politician in the city of Neuilly-sur-Seine where Sarkozy started his own political career.

Sarkozy's best man was the prominent right-wing politician Charles Pasqua, later to become a political opponent.

Sarkozy divorced Culioli in 1996, after they had been separated for several years.

As mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine, Sarkozy met former fashion model and public relations executive Cécilia Ciganer-Albéniz (great-granddaughter of composer Isaac Albéniz and daughter of a Moldovan father), when he officiated at her wedding to television host Jacques Martin.

He was the leader of the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party from 2004 to 2007.

He won the 2007 French presidential election by a 53.1% to 46.9% margin against Ségolène Royal, the Socialist Party (PS) candidate.

During his term, he faced the financial crisis of 2007–2008, the late-2000s recession, and the European sovereign debt crisis, the Russo-Georgian War (for which he negotiated a ceasefire), and the Arab Spring (especially in Tunisia, Libya, and Syria).

He initiated the reform of French universities (2007) and the pension reform (2010).

He was charged with corruption by French prosecutors in two cases, notably concerning the alleged Libyan interference in the 2007 French elections.

In 2021, Sarkozy was convicted of corruption in two separate trials.

His first conviction resulted in him receiving a sentence of three years, two of them suspended and one in prison; he has appealed against the ruling.

For his second conviction, he received a one-year sentence, which he is allowed to serve under home confinement.

In May 2023, Sarkozy lost an appeal to his corruption conviction.

He married Italian-French singer-songwriter Carla Bruni in 2008 at the Élysée Palace in Paris.

In the 2012 French presidential election, Sarkozy was defeated by the PS candidate François Hollande, by a 3.2% margin.

After leaving the presidential office, Sarkozy vowed to retire from public life before coming back in 2014, being subsequently reelected as UMP leader (renamed The Republicans in 2015).

Being defeated at the Republican presidential primary in 2016, he retired from public life.

The family lived in a mansion owned by Sarkozy's maternal grandfather, Benedict Mallah, in the 17th arrondissement of Paris.

The family later moved to Neuilly-sur-Seine, one of the wealthiest communes of the Île-de-France région immediately west of Paris.

According to Sarkozy, his staunchly Gaullist grandfather was more of an influence on him than his father, whom he rarely saw.

Sarkozy was raised Catholic.

Sarkozy said that being kept at a distance by his father shaped much of who he is today.

He also has said that, in his early years, he felt inferior in relation to his wealthier and taller classmates.

"What made me who I am now is the sum of all the humiliations suffered during childhood", he said later.

Sarkozy was enrolled in the Lycée Chaptal, a well regarded public middle and high school in Paris' 8th arrondissement, where he failed his sixième.