Here's the Headline for the NY Times's Europe Section

Hello students,

After reading on my favorite all-time gossip site news from President Sarkozy, I realized the buzz around it in foreign politics and I decided to check out the Europe section of the NY Times, and here it is... The very moderate newspaper talks about the "dangerous liaison"... Check it out below...
Just so you know, I wanted to include the "break down" video by Sen. Clinton that French press (and worldwide press) is talking about, just so you see it's not a break down.....

Best

CJ

A Politically Dangerous Liaison for France’s President

By ELAINE SCIOLINO
January 8, 2008

PARIS — It is called the “Carla effect,” and it helps explain President Nicolas Sarkozy’s sudden decline in popularity.

Far from endearing Mr. Sarkozy to his people, his paparazzi romance with the model-turned-singer Carla Bruni has fueled criticism that he is ignoring the country and spending too much time having fun.

On top of that, Le Journal du Dimanche, a weekly owned by one of Mr. Sarkozy’s best friends, reported on its front page on Sunday that the couple would wed early next month.

According to a nationwide survey by the polling group CSA published Sunday, only 48 percent of the French surveyed said they trusted the president to run the country — a fall of seven points in a month. Since last July, his approval rating has plunged by 17 percentage points.

“President Sarkozy is exposing his flamboyant personal life at the moment the French want him to deliver on his promises to improve the economy,” said Stéphane Rozès, CSA’s director, in a telephone interview on Monday. “He has eliminated the line between public and private life, between his success in his personal life and his promises for the French people to succeed.”

The decline in Mr. Sarkozy’s approval rating was particularly significant among older people; in the past month, it fell nine points among those surveyed from ages 50 to 64 and 15 percentage points among those over 65.

Indeed, while the French faced the New Year with higher retail prices and a decline in their buying power, Mr. Sarkozy, 52, was photographed with Ms. Bruni, 40, touring the pyramids of Egypt and archaeological sites in Jordan. There, in the Middle East, was Ms. Bruni, a beatific look on her face, as she leaned her head on his shoulder; there he was holding her waist, his fingers touching her exposed midriff.

Dubbed by some commentators President Bling-Bling, the twice-divorced Mr. Sarkozy, is said to have given her a heart-shaped diamond engagement ring designed by Victoire de Castellane at Dior; she is said to have given him a Swiss-made Patek Philippe watch.

Mr. Sarkozy’s spokesman, David Martinon, has refused to confirm or deny the marriage reports, and the Élysée Palace has ordered a news blackout on the subject. Mr. Sarkozy is expected to address his love life at a two-hour news conference on Tuesday, the first of his presidency.

The exceptionally tolerant French did not seem at all perturbed that Mr. Sarkozy’s 11-year marriage ended in divorce in October, after his wife, Cécilia, left him for the second time. But for some commentators, opposition politicians and ordinary Frenchmen, the tabloid photos of Mr. Sarkozy and Ms. Bruni in love lack taste — and are disrespectful of the citizenry.

“The exhibition of the private life of the head of state is without doubt linked to the fall in his approval ratings,” said an editorial on Monday in the newspaper L'Alsace. “The glitter makes many French people dream, but it also irritates many others — especially those who have a hard time making ends meet.”

An editorial in Monday’s L'Est Républicain said, “The French people did not elect him to be a rock star,” adding, “He forgot that he should have a romance with France and not with himself and his paramour.”

The centrist daily newspaper Le Monde ran a front-page cartoon in its Monday afternoon issue of a grimacing Mr. Sarkozy pushing a guitar-strumming Ms. Bruni in a supermarket shopping cart; the headline on its editorial read, “The king is naked.”

Interviews on the street in Le Parisien on Sunday posed the question, “How do you explain the decline?” referring to Mr. Sarkozy’s popularity, and one respondent, Anne-Marie Camez, 65, a retiree, replied, “Carla Bruni — the French are shocked that he displays himself with this girl who doesn’t at all have the image of a first lady of France.”

Mr. Sarkozy and Ms. Bruni, an Italian-born heiress to a tire-manufacturing fortune, met at a dinner party in November. While such a swift wedding might strike some as reckless, it would be politically expedient.

France historically tolerates extramarital sex by its public officials, but other cultures can be less forgiving. Mr. Sarkozy came under fire in Egypt, for example, for sharing a bedroom with Ms. Bruni. “Even if Bruni were Sarkozy’s fiancée, not mistress, church traditions do not allow her to live in his bedroom,” Gamal Zahran, an independent legislator, said in the Egyptian Parliament.

With Mr. Sarkozy set to visit India in two and a half weeks, some of the news media there are predicting a protocol crisis if Ms. Bruni goes along. “The top model cannot receive the same consideration as the president because a girlfriend is not treated like a wife,” the daily newspaper Indian Express quoted an anonymous Foreign Affairs Ministry official as saying.

But The Telegraph, of Calcutta, called for calm, saying in an editorial on Sunday, “There should have been a perfect fit between the French, the best-known lovers of the world, and the Indians, who gave the world that locus classicus of erotic literature, the Kama Sutra.”

The French press, meanwhile, continues to poke fun at Ms. Bruni, who has a son from her relationship with the philosopher Raphaël Enthoven. For two weeks running, the satirical weekly Le Canard Enchainé has run a fictional “Carla B. journal.” “Already four weeks of monogamy!” she exclaims in one entry.

The comment apparently referred to an interview that Ms. Bruni gave to the magazine Figaro Madame last February in which she declared: “I am faithful — to myself! I am bored to death by monogamy.”