President Bling and the scandals that won't go away

While Nicolas Sarkozy's recent arrest is unlikely to derail his political comeback, how many controversies can the man the French left loves to hate really afford?

Controversial: To his many enemies, Sarkozy is the epitome of all that is wrong with French politics. Photo: Philippe Wojazer.

Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

Nicolas Sarkozy's enemies, and he has many, had hoped for a perp walk, a Dominique Strauss-Kahn moment: their bête noire in handcuffs between two flics, with no tie or shoelaces, being snapped at the instant of defeat by a hundred press photographers, before being ignominiously arraigned.

That, at least, was (and still is) the plan: to ring the death-knell of a political career, started at 18, which brought this brash son of a Hungarian émigré to the leadership of the party founded by General de Gaulle, then to the Presidency of the French Republic in 2007, at the age of 52.