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Italian multimillionaire singer Carla Bruni and remarrying, all in a few hasty months.
His popularity plummeted and dragged national morale down with it.
Economic Woes
Sarkozy pledged to reduce unemployment and income tax (between 5.5% and
40%), create jobs and boost growth in a economy that nonetheless ranks as the
world's eighth largest. Unemployment frog-leaped from 8.7% in 2007 to 7.6% dur-
ing the global banking crisis in 2008 (when the government injected €10.5 billion in-
to France's six major banks) to 9.1% in 2010 - all to the horror of the French, who
traditionally have great expectations of their economy.
Hard-line attempts to reform a pension system, unchanged since 1982, which en-
titles 1.6 million workers in the rail, metro, energy-supply and fishing industries to
draw a full state pension after 37.5 working years (and everyone else after 40), only
provoked widespread dismay and a series of national strikes and protests. So too
have suggestions that the retirement age, currently 60, should be extended to at
least 62 (it is much higher in almost every other European country).
Helter-Skelter Downhill
If the results of the 2010 regional elections are anything to go by, Sarkozy could be
out of a job after the next presidential elections in 2012.
By spring 2010 unemployment was hovering at 10% and government popularity
was at an all-time low.
What was seen as a measurement of just how volatile the country had become
came the same month - riots ripped through the Alpine town of Grenoble after a
27-year-old man was shot dead by police while allegedly trying to rob a casino. The
burning cars and street clashes with riot police echoed the violence that had blood-
ied a Parisian suburb in 2005 - and spread like wildfire countrywide creating a state
of emergency - following the death of two teenage boys of North African origin,
electrocuted after hiding in an electrical substation while on the run from the police.
Banning the Burqa
The wearing of crucifixes, the Islamic headscarf and other overtly religious symbols
in state schools has been banned in France since 2004, and in September 2010 a
controversial law banning face-covering veils in public was approved by the Senate
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