Nicolas Sarkozy may be running the country. But his father and his wife reign supreme these days in the French media.
Pal Sarkozy, a retired advertising executive who has been divorced from the French President's mother for more than 50 years, has just published a racy autobiography that details his amorous adventures as he transformed himself from a penniless Hungarian immigrant into a playboy in postwar Paris.
Suddenly Mr. Sarkozy's debonair 81-year-old father seems to be everywhere: on magazine covers, in the newspapers, on the radio and the television news. The coverage is reverential, the photos are flattering and recollections of his lady-killing days inspired.
As he recounts in his book, Tant de Vie (So Much Life), he saw each woman as "a gift in a package" who inspired in him a desire to "undo the knot and remove the wrapping."
While Mr. Sarkozy's père is promoting his 266-page book, the President's pop star wife has launched a separate media barrage.
Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, a former fashion model, is accustomed to adoring press coverage in France and internationally. But this weekend she goes a step further. She is on the cover, in the fashion shots and in most of the articles in Sunday's glossy Madame Figaro magazine, circulation 438,000. She is also its guest editor-in-chief.
She suggested it was all a bit of a strain. "Despite appearances to the contrary," Ms. Bruni-Sarkozy told the magazine, "I'm really a hermit, a solitary person."
A recurring criticism of Mr. Sarkozy has been that he draws too much attention to his private life. But if his latest poll numbers are any indication, his family is the more adept at public relations.
The President's approval ratings sank to new lows this week, to between 28 per cent and 32 per cent, according to three different opinion surveys.
Fresh from a state visit to Washington and struggling to avert a mutiny in his party over his tax policy, Mr. Sarkozy has not commented on his family's latest leap into the limelight.
In their multiple interviews, though, his wife and father have been talking about him. Both spoke of how hard he works. Both also said they worry that he will be signing up for more exhaustion and toil if he runs for re-election in 2012.
The President has not said that he will run. But cynics smelled a plot.
"Carla and Pal are clearly under orders," columnist Bénédicte Charles wrote in the weekly magazine Marianne. "Did you get the message? Sarkozy's job is really hard, he's had it, but still he does it - for France, for us, the ingrates who are always criticizing him."
The elder Mr. Sarkozy said he decided to write his autobiography to correct public misperceptions about his life and his relationship with his powerful son. He insists he was not an absent father, for example, although the President has often suggested as much.
"I'm sorry if he felt that," the father said, adding that his own childhood was tough, too. "I saw a lot less of my own father," he said, "than my children saw of me."
In his book he recounts his first sexual encounter - at the age of 11 with his nanny - as well as his first broken heart and his wedding night with the first of four wives, the President's mother.
According to his account, Mr. Sarkozy arrived in Paris from Budapest at the age of 20 in 1948 and spent his first night sleeping in a subway entrance, his feet wrapped in rags. It gets more colourful from there. The publisher's blurb for the book describes him as a man "who carved out a unique destiny through the vicissitudes of history."
The senior Mr. Sarkozy cheerfully describes himself as a man who loved women too much to be faithful in his youth.
"I was like a sailor navigating at full sail, in no rush to reach the shore," he wrote in one of the many passages about his infidelities and affairs. "So many seas to explore!"
Being the father of the President, he said, now gets him the best tables in restaurants and an effusive welcome from gallery owners for the surrealistic paintings he has taken to creating since retiring five years ago. No doubt it will also help him sell his book.
Asked by one interviewer to describe his son, Mr. Sarkozy said the President is sometimes short-tempered, not always punctual and has a weakness for chocolate. "In private," he added, "he is warm and kind, even if he basically talks about himself. But then again, I talk about myself a lot."
Special to The Globe and Mail