The Rise And Fall Of France's Golden Couple

He was the president, she was a pop star. They seemed like the dream team. But then he lost power and now he’s facing years in jail. Is this the end for Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni?

- Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

France isn’t a betting country, but when Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni decided to get married in 2008, after a two-month courtship, many people were already starting to guess the likely divorce date.

These two, the siren supermodel and the twice-married “President BlingBling” – a nickname given to him by the press due to his fondness for Rolex watches, gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses and hobnobbing with moguls – were publicity hounds, the perceived wisdom went. She loved power, he loved young women. It would never last.

“She’ll drop him if he loses in 2012,” a politician friend told me knowingly (Republican Sarkozy ending up losing the presidential election to his Socialist opponent François Hollande denying him a second term in office).

“His roving eye will find someone else the minute she’s off to have Botox,” a Republican party grandee smugly predicted at a dinner party.

Thirteen years, one presidency and two election defeats (in 2012, and in the 2017 Republican primaries) later, and Bruni and Sarkozy are still married and, by all accounts, closer than ever. This is despite them facing the ultimate relationship test: a string of legal challenges brought about, Sarkozy claims, by “activist judges”, all of which he has strongly denied.

None of the investigations, of which there have been half a dozen, have ever come to anything – that is, until earlier this year when the former president’s luck ran out and he was finally convicted of trying to bribe a judge in 2014, two years after he left power.