It's official: Sarko and Cecilia call it quits

Agencies / Oct 19, 2007, 02:20 IST

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French president Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife, Cecilia, have divorced after 11 years of marriage and months of questions about their relationship.

It's official: Sarko and Cecilia call it quits

PARIS: French president Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife, Cecilia, have divorced after 11 years of marriage and months of questions about their relationship, their lawyer said on Thursday.
"They were heard by a judge and the judge granted their divorce," lawyer Michele Cahen said on Europe-1 radio. "It went very well. There was not the slightest difficulty." Sarkozy is the first French president to divorce while in power.
In a terse, 15-word statement, Sarkozy's office said on Thursday the two were separating by mutual consent and would not comment further on the decision.Sarkozy's spokesman said separation meant divorce. The split comes as Sarkozy faced his first major political challenge: strikes on Thursday that hobbled transport nationwide.
Sarkozy has remained unfazed by the strikes. He has not given any hint that his marital troubles will dent his determination to push ahead with his ambitious programme of economic, political and social reforms for France.

In the past week, as speculation about his marriage reached fever-pitch, he continued to present an image of business as normal. He was to be in Portugal on Thursday for an EU summit. Nicolas and Cecilia Sarkozy split for a few months in 2005, and she had seemed ill at ease as first lady since her husband's election in May. She did not cast a ballot in the runoff, and has rarely appeared with her husband in public in recent months.

Her one political venture came back to sting her: She raised her profile dramatically during a July mission to seek the release of five Bulgarian medics and a Palestinian doctor jailed in Libya. The stunned French media questioned her diplomatic credentials, and parliament is investigating arms deals signed soon after the release.
"She was shaken, murdered, wounded by the controversy," Isabelle Balkany, a friend of the couple, said on France Inter radio on Thursday. "Cecilia is a woman of conviction who needs to do things, feel useful. She knew that she would have trouble tolerating theconventional side" of being a president's wife, she said.
Balkany predicted the split would have no effect on Nicolas Sarkozy's job. Even if he is "affected to his depths" by the "painful" decision, she said, "I sincerely think that it will have absolutely no impact on his mission as chief of state."
Cecilia Sarkozy accompanied Sarkozy through the recent years of his political career, acting as an aide, confidante and an ever-present figure at political events.
Dynamic and ambitious, the two set out to buck conventions in French politics, her in designer denim and him jogging and speaking in straight, inelegant sound bites. Their separation, too, sets a precedent, and sets Nicolas Sarkozy apart from France's past leaders.
Their idyll was shattered in 2005, when photos of Cecilia hand-in-hand with another man on a Manhattan sidewalk were splashed across a magazine cover.

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