Nicolas Sarkozy lost the French presidential election yesterday to Socialist Francois Hollande, MSNBC is reporting. The loss makes Sarkozy the first French one-term president since 1981, when Valery Giscard d’Estaing lost his reelection campaign.
Scoring 48.4 percent of the vote, Sarkozy said “I take full responsibility for this defeat. My engagement in the public life of my country will be different from now on. I am preparing to become just one French citizen among many.”
Sarkozy was elected in 2007, beating out Hollande’s former partner, and the mother of his children, Segolene Royal. His campaign was built on the promise of rupture from the policies of is fellow conservative and former mentor, Jacques Chirac.
Sarkozy’s loss is being attributed to his inability to follow through on his campaign promises that he would shrink unemployment, as well as revive the lackluster economy. He also repeatedly pointed to Europe’s financial crisis, saying that the economies in such countries as Italy and Greece endangered the euro zone.
While backed by a strong majority of his conservative UMP party in the National Assembly, Sarkozy reportedly once said that he’d foreseen himself more as a prime minister, whose job is the day-to-day running of the government. He didn’t see himself as the head of state, whose traditional role is about statecraft.
Written by: Karen Benardello
