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Sarkozy not thrilled with Obama |
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Friday, 05 February 2010 |
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 French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who sought during the 2008 presidential campaign to associate himself with Barack Obama, has become sharply critical of the American president, often comparing Obama unfavorably to himself, according to an article published this week in the authoritative French daily Le Monde.
The article quotes Sarkozy twice recently criticizing Obama in public, and says he's twice gone on the record criticizing Obama in recent weeks. Asked last Monday in a television interview of his sweeping attempt to reform several sectors of French government simultaneously, Sarkozy pointed to Obama's made health care reform his sole focus.
"I didn't see that that made things simpler," he said.
In an earlier conversation with reporters, Sarkozy compared his electoral record to Obama, says the piece, whose byline is of the Parisian correspondent for a Swiss newspaper, Le Temps, owned by Le Monde.
"Obama has been in power for a year, and he has already lost three special elections. Me, I have won two legislative elections and the EU election. What can one say I've lost?" Sarkozy is quoted as asking.
The article quotes a "source well familiar with French diplomacy" suggesting the criticism has become a reflex for Sarkozy, and attributes the "unhealthy" attitude to Sarkozy's personal qualities, a matter of much fascination in France. Sarkozy, the piece speculates, got off to a bad start with Obama during last June's visit to Paris, where the French president was displeased by both the "unflattering comparison between the physique" of the two men (Obama is much taller) and by the "adulation of the Bobo left" -- not Sarkozy's base -- for the American.
The piece also quotes a Sarkozy advisor, Alain Minc, expressing what it claims is Sarkozy's true view of Obama in Le Parisien: "He's a charmer, a conciliator, but I am not sure that he's a strong leader in a crisis writing."
The new piece picks up on a theme in the French press that began when, during the June trip, the Obamas did not find time to dine with Sarkozy and his wife in Paris, and took flight last fall. One expressed worry: That Obama considers Sarkozy merely one foreign leader among many.
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