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He reduced payroll taxes on overtime pay, and cut the bureaucracy by refusing to replace one of every two retiring state workers. In the history books, Sarkozy's impact may well be more notable for what he accomplished abroad than at home: Under France's presidency of the European Union in 2008, he mediated between Russia and Georgia during their brief war; the following year, he replaced France in NATO's integrated command after a 43-year absence; Politically, he was a mix. Sarkozy favors free markets, but has been unafraid to defend French business. He long took pride in his moniker as "Sarko the American"
-- and has rebuilt ties both with the United States and Israel. He led France into a leadership role in a NATO-backed revolution in Libya that toppled Moammar Gadhafi, and has taken a tough line on nuclear-minded Iran. Along with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, he helped craft a hard-won European fiscal treaty meant to stem the continent's debt crisis. As interior minister, Sarkozy was generally successful as a crime-fighter. But his tough talk on youth in immigrant-heavy housing projects also often infuriated many French citizens whose families hail from former French colonies in north and sub-Saharan Africa. Yet as interior minister, he helped create the country's largest confederation of Muslim groups, the CFCM, and supported a form of French-styled "affirmative action"
-- before he abandoned it under pressure in his conservative political camp which saw preferential treatment as against France's color-blind values. Born on Jan. 28, 1955, Nicolas Paul Stephane Sarkozy de Nagy-Bocsa grew up in a middle-class home in Paris, the second of three sons born of a half-Jewish French mother and an aristocratic Hungarian emigre father who fled Communism after World War II. Sarkozy is the first French president to divorce and remarry while in office. He is the father of three sons and, as of last year, a daughter with former supermodel Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, his third wife. Before this election, Sarkozy said he'd quit politics if he lost. "A new epoch is opening," he said Sunday night, saying he'd become a citizen "like you." He gave no specifics about his plans. Sarkozy got a searing taste of defeat 13 years ago, after he headed a center-right list of candidates for European parliamentary elections, and the loss sent him into retreat from national politics. "I recognize failure. I take full responsibility. I am ready to learn the consequences," he wrote in his 2001 book "Libre" ("Free") of that campaign in 1999, which he assumed leadership only six weeks before the vote. "And in the situation I find myself in this spring evening," he wrote, remembering the loss, "being, remaining, and being considered dignified is my only ambition."
[Associated
Press;
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