French president hopes that radical reform of the global financial system will win over a disillusioned French public before 2012 elections
Nicolas Sarkozy takes over the presidency of the G8 group of global powers this weekend, hoping his grand plan to reform the world economy will boost his flagging fortunes at home.
The French president has returned from a holiday in Morocco to prepare his annual New Year's address to the nation tonighttomorrow night and convince France he can bounce back from the worst year of his presidency.
With record low approval ratings, Sarkozy is the least popular French president since the second world war and faces a difficult re-election battle in 2012.
He has turned to the international stage to re-establish himself, increasingly accompanied by his wife, the singer Carla Bruni-Sarkozy. After the couple were pictured cooing over newborns at a maternity hospital, the French celebrity press this week speculated that Bruni-Sarkozy hoped for a baby in 2011 to boost her husband's re-election hopes. "A baby would lend the couple some credibility," Colombe Pringle, the Point de Vue editor who knows Bruni-Sarkozy well, told French radio.
Sarkozy's leadership of the G8's six western powers and Russia and China, as well as his rotating presidency of the G20 forum of the largest economies, will focus on his ambitious plans to overhaul the financial system. He wants a new monetary system that does not depend on the dollar, to eradicate tax havens, stabilise commodities markets and tax international transactions. French commentators have warned it could be too ambitious but Sarkozy has tried to style himself as the great "protector" of citizens' rights and has argued that international public opinion wants him to deliver a "more moral" banking world and the current "financial chaos" cannot continue.
Sarkozy will fly to Washington in the new year to discuss his plans with Barack Obama. But it will be harder to convince voters at home, as France struggles to bounce back from the economic downturn. More than two thirds of French people think "the worst of the crisis is still to come" and 61% think the G20 can not improve the global economy.
Sarkozy's televised New Year's speech will likely touch on plans to roll back his new tax laws, which are accused of squeezing the poor to hand rebates to the rich, as well as his promise for new dignified care for the elderly.
However, France's persistently high unemployment, low salaries and general mood of depression remains a problem. Even Patrick S�bastien, a mainstream TV host and a kind of French Bruce Forsyth, this week attacked Sarkozy as "the worst thing that could have happened to this country" and likened France to a dictatorship.
The president will criss-cross France personally delivering his new year wishes to difficult voter groups including farmers and fishermen in the coming weeks. MPs from the president's ruling UMP party are desperate to move on from a disastrous 2010 which saw them slaughtered in regional elections and left in control of only one of mainland France's 22 regions: Alsace.
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