Sobre o novo livro de Nicolas Sarkozy

The French need to work harder and display less arrogance, if they are to recapture former glories, Nicolas Sarkozy, the Interior Minister, tells his countrymen in a highly personal 281-page book published yesterday.

Témoignage (Testimony) has an initial print run of 130,000 copies and M Sarkozy’s publisher, XO Editions, hopes that the work will become a summer blockbuster.

M Sarkozy hopes that it will be a launch pad to the presidency next year.

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If Americans opt for presidents who enshrine success and opportunity, French voters prefer heads of state with experience of pain and failure. M Sarkozy, who is 51 — relatively young for a French presidential candidate — says that he now has just that.

His argument represents an electoral gamble in a country that has repeatedly voted in favour of generous welfare payments and extensive leisure time — and which will be invited by the Socialist Party to do the same again in the presidential election next spring.

“I believe that deep in French society there is a strong demand for the restoration of certain values of the Republican right: work, respect for authority, the family, individual responsibility,” he says. Although he denies personal animosity for his rival, President Chirac, he makes no attempt to hide their fundamental political differences.

He criticises almost every significant decision that M Chirac has taken, including the threat to veto a UN resolution on the war in Iraq and approval of Turkey’s entry into the EU.

And in a comment that will infuriate traditionalists, he says that the French should no longer insist on speaking their own language in international negotiations and instead should use English.