In l’affaire Bruni, France feels left out

PARIS, JANUARY 8 : If this story turned up on daytime TV, audiences would never believe it: The reformist President of France, on the rebound from a divorce, is about take a new wife — an Italian tire heiress and former supermodel who looks a lot like the ex- and who dated Eric Clapton, whom she dumped for Mick Jagger when he was still married to Jerry Hall, but who later went on to marry a long-haired French intellectual nearly 10 years her junior after living with his father nearly 20 years her senior.

There was a dalliance with Donald Trump and a former French Prime Minister, but those were episodes ago. Got it? Let’s start again.

The very public romance between French President Nicolas Sarkozy, 52, and chanteuse Carla Bruni, 40, among the ruins of Egypt, the banks of the Nile, and on camel backs in Jordan, reportedly is leading to marriage.

Le Journal du Dimanche, owned by a wealthy friend of the President, ran a front-page story over the weekend saying Sarkozy and Bruni would marry on February 8 or 9. One would suspect the newspaper fact-checked this carefully, given that the last time a magazine owned by this same friend ran a story about the President’s personal life that Sarkozy didn’t like, the editor was fired.

The President’s own mother, Andrea, isn’t so sure. “In his job he will be spoiled with choices,” she told a magazine. “But I hope that no one will get married again. I have had enough of brides.”

The person the President actually pays to speak for him, David Martinon, apparently is the only one not commenting on the prospect of a wedding.

The President’s critics, many of whom don’t like his Centre-Right politics, are already fed up with his giddy new love and the way they say he’s used it to distract from a further slide in the economy, which has left voters feeling they have less buying power than at any time since the early 1990s.

It’s not the first time, they charge, he’s used his personal life to divert attention from more pressing issues of state. He ended his 11-year marriage on October 15, just as he was about to take on powerful unions that were threatening a prolonged strike over his effort to reform the state pension system. The unions ended up backing down temporarily; his wife, also a former model, went off to London; and the President’s approval rating remained high.

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