ABSTRACT
The most determined of conservative candidates was Nicolas Sarkozy, who had entered French politics at the end of the 1980s as the young mayor of the wealthy Paris suburb of Neuilly. The 2007 presidential elections pitted the intensely ambitious Sarkozy against the Socialist nominee, Sgolne Royal. Neither had graduated from the prestigious Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA), the normal training ground for French leaders. Whatever Sarkozy's original plans may have been, he soon found himself preoccupied with the consequences of the world financial crisis that exploded in the fall of September 2008. In contrast to most French politicians, Sarkozy declared himself an unabashed admirer of the United States, which he saw as a country that encouraged economic initiative, and he set out to improve Franco-American relations, which had already begun to recover from the dispute over the Iraq War. Sarkozy's political difficulties raised the hopes of the Socialist opposition of defeating him in the 2012 election campaign.
