Everything has been mixed up with him for a long time. Politics, business, money. Everything is linked, intertwined. All the time. Sometimes in the name of friendship, as he has so many friends in the world of business as in that of politics. Sometimes in the name of the interests of France. Sometimes in the name of his own people. But it still proves difficult to disentangle the roles of the man who was at the same time the sixth president of the Fifth Republic, the leader of the French right, the lawyer and the wise businessman. In this game of shadows which marks his life, Nicolas Sarkozy however keeps one fixed point: PSG.
He himself remembers his “first match at the Park”, “a France-USSR hopefuls” when he was seventeen. Probably this France-USSR (amateur) of May 25, 1972 commented by the young Michel Drucker on the ORTF, the inauguration match of the current renovated Parc des Princes, above the Paris ring road. (…) Nicolas Sarkozy swears that from the Hechter years (1973-1978), as a passionate supporter, he never left the stadium, “paying for the tickets out of his own pocket”, taking his two eldest children, Pierre and John, “from the time they were four years old”. (…)
In 1983, Sarkozy gave Susić and his teammates a standing ovation after their final victory against the Canaries of Nantes. That year, he won the town hall of Neuilly, at the age of twenty-eight, under the nose of his mentor, Charles Pasqua. Having entered politics, he can now, every morning while shaving, dream of presidential election.
Another date marks the future head of state: May 13, 1993. In a kindergarten in Neuilly, a man who calls himself Human Bomb threatens to blow up a class and holds twenty-one children hostage.
Among them, Fleur, four years old, one of the daughters of Sébastien Bazin, then director of the Hotel Real Estate Company. The mayor of Neuilly leads operations on the ground, in conjunction with the Raid and the families. These hours are never forgotten. With Bazin, a friendship was born.
The years gallop away. 2007. His friend, Sébastien Bazin, head of the Europe branch of Colony Capital, becomes a shareholder of PSG. Nicolas Sarkozy is elected to the Élysée. The dream of a lifetime. He can tackle major affairs, those of the world, head on.
