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PARIS - Beset by a huge transport strike at home, scorned in his attempts to carve himself a role on the world stage and weakened by the breakup with his wife, Nicolas Sarkozy is at the controls of a presidency in a tailspin.
France's leader looks a diminished
figure, lonely and careworn, little more than five months after he charged into the Elysee Palace as the champion of dynamism and fiery advocate of change.
Sarkozy's political capital has shrunk faster than any newly elected President in modern French history.
His bid to restore France's lustre as a world power has been strewn with errors. His campaigns to forge a friendship with US President George W. Bush and President Vladimir Putin of Russia have looked simpering.
His forays into Europe have raised suspicions among the neighbours that he is an old-style Gaullist, out to put France's interests first.
At home, his endeavour to overhaul the cossetted public-sector pensions system - the first big reform of his election manifesto - has run into huge resistance, with a strike by transport unions last week that slowed the nation to a crawl. Between 150,000 and 300,000 people took part in marches in Paris and other cities.
Angry electricity workers even cut off supplies to La Lanterne, an official residence in the grounds of the Palace of Versailles that Sarkozy uses as a second presidential residence.
To cap it all, Sarkozy's big love and political mentor, his wife Cecilia, is out the door. On the same day as the big strike, the Elysee Palace confirmed speculation that had reached fever pitch: the presidential marriage, far from being the John-and-Jackie-Kennedy model so admired by Sarkozy, is on the rocks.
The couple are divorcing "by mutual consent", the Elysee said.
The two went through a spectacular bust-up in 2005 when Cecilia fled to New York, where she was seen with an advertising executive who had helped orchestrate her husband's political rallies. They then reconciled, but had rarely been seen together since the May election victory, when they appeared together looking stiff and awkward.
The divorce deprives Sarkozy both of an adored spouse and an invaluable adviser who charted his rise to the presidency from mayor of the rich Paris suburb of Neuilly.
"Cecilia is my wife. She is part of me," Sarkozy wrote last year in a pre-election autobiography, Temoignage (Testimony).
"C. I write C. because even today, nearly 20 years after we first met, it still moves me to pronounce her first name." He admitted their separation in 2005 left him "profoundly shaken".
Christophe Barbier, editor of the weekly news magazine l'Express, says Sarkozy could be crippled politically as well as emotionally.
"Everything points to a dependence on his wife," said Barbier. "The President's psychological state depends on her. If the head of state becomes heartsick, the whole country sneezes."
Jean-Christophe Cambadelis, a Paris MP with the opposition Socialist Party, said: "We are in the middle of 10 days that shook the power of Nicolas Sarkozy. The Government is fighting on many fronts."
Analysts say Sarkozy has to perform a political conjuring trick, turning his negatives into positives and his weaknesses into strengths.
One way of doing it is to emulate Margaret Thatcher and to tough it out with the unions. At the moment, at least, Sarkozy has huge support for overhauling pension schemes that allow train drivers and other public-sector workers to retire as early as 50, a dozen years earlier than in the private sector.
Sixty-seven per cent of people want Sarkozy to stand firm on this issue, and only 30 per cent support union efforts to keep these privileges, according to an opinion poll published on Friday by Le Figaro newspaper and LCI television.
Sarkozy has a chance to show that "he will not be bullied by the French street in the way of so many of his predecessors," the weekly Economist magazine said.
"In the past, he has preferred to cut deals rather than face down an adversary."
Other options are to launch a big initiative abroad or at home. Green issues may be a useful tool for Sarkozy, who is to give a big speech on Thursday at a nationwide forum on long-term environmental policy.
According to the weekly newspaper Le Canard Enchaine, Sarkozy is planning a Cabinet reshuffle in the New Year.
Philippe Braud, a professor at the Sciences Po institute, said Sarkozy's divorce will be accepted by the public, as so many marriages break up these days, and may even provide him with a boost.
"I see two possible scenarios," said Braud. "One is a latent form of depression, a sort of destabilisation of the President. The likelier one is that a failure in private life can be a spur to expend greater energy in public life. It's a compensatory mechanism, to avoid the anguish of solitude."
