Sarkozy has also frequently mistreated and marginalised both his prime minister, François Fillon, and his government. In the French political system, prime ministers are often seen as disposable items, there to be sacrificed as the president requires, but Sarkozy has determinedly concentrated the decision-making process in the Elysée Palace. The justification has been that this is required to ensure that the necessary actions are taken and that reforms are implemented, though the results have been far from uniformly successful. In March, an open letter was published by a group of acting and retired diplomats denouncing the lack of coherence in French foreign policy. The charge was that the professionalism of the Quai d'Orsay was being undermined by the amateurs advising the president. Despite letting his intentions be widely known, Sarkozy was unable to remove Fillon from office at the end of last year. According to opinion polls, the prime minister is consistently more popular with the electorate than the president. 

Another key element of the Sarkozy strategy — and one highlighted by Hewlett — has been to take votes away from the FN. A strong vote for the FN would make securing an electoral victory a near impossibility for Sarkozy. To that end, he has talked tough on law and order, vowed to increase the number of expulsions of illegal immigrants, passed legislation outlawing the wearing of the veil, ordered the deportation of Roma and, most recently, sought to close France's borders to Tunisian refugees. Following Sarkozy's election, a new Ministry of Immigration and National Identity was created: after much criticism, it closed its doors in November 2010.

So how did it go wrong? In part, it is a matter of personal style. If the French are generally cynical about their politicians, they expect their presidents to behave with an element of decorum. Sarkozy's willingness to trade insults with those he meets and to further the interests of his own family have gone down very badly. Progress has been made in liberalising the economy but the official unemployment rate remains at just below 10 per cent and growth for this year is predicted to be only 1.5 per cent. The latest figures show that 43 per cent of young males are unemployed. If the majority of the population support plans to reform the taxation system and believe that taxes are too high, there is equally a sense that the changes introduced by Sarkozy are unfair. Handing back €30 million of tax to France's richest woman, Liliane Bettencourt, did little to correct this impression. Nor has the aspiration to increase take-home pay reaped dividends. Thanks to the recession and increases in food and energy prices most households are worse off than when Sarkozy was elected.

General incompetence and routine corruption have also played their part in diminishing Sarkozy's credibility. If a succession of scandals has dogged his presidency from the outset, none has been more damaging than that associated with the recently departed Michèle Alliot-Marie. A foreign minister taking her Christmas holidays in Tunisia while a corrupt regime totters, and then lying about it, has done little to enhance Sarkozy's claims to restore integrity to politics. Subsequent developments in Libya, Egypt and Syria only served to expose long-standing French support for the repressive regimes of the region.

More alarming still for Sarkozy is the fact that he has not seen off the electoral challenge of the extreme Right. Indeed, under the new leadership of Marine Le Pen the threat posed by the FN appears to have grown; recent opinion polls indicate that she might secure most votes in the first round of the next presidential ballot and that the FN is now taking votes from Sarkozy's own party. In a country where about half the population sees Islam as a threat, comparing Muslims praying in the streets to the German occupation has done nothing to diminish Marine Le Pen's popularity.