Nicolas Paul Stéphane Sárközy de Nagy-Bocsa was born on Jan. 28, 1955, in Paris, the son of a minor Hungarian aristocrat who fled Communism after World War II. His mother was a law student, herself the daughter of an immigrant, a doctor who had arrived a generation earlier from Greece.

Mr. Sarkozy was the middle of three sons, but his father left the family when Mr. Sarkozy was 5, marrying twice more and fathering two more children. (The mother of those children, Christine de Ganay, went on to marry Frank G. Wisner II, the son of a celebrated spy and now the United States special envoy to Kosovo. Her son, Mr. Sarkozy’s half-brother, Oliver Sarkozy, is the joint global head of UBS Investment Bank’s financial institutions group in New York.)

The abandonment marked the Sarkozy family, leaving them largely dependent on Mr. Sarkozy’s maternal grandfather, with whom the family lived in the 17th Arrondissement of Paris. “I was fashioned by the humiliations of childhood,” Mr. Sarkozy told a magazine in 1994.

His mother finished her law degree, took a job with the mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine, an upscale suburb, and sent her sons to a private Catholic high school.

Mr. Sarkozy eventually earned a law degree and became a member of the Neuilly town council at the age of 22.

But he got his real start in politics as a long-haired, bell-bottomed youth leader of the Union of Democrats for the Republic, a Gaullist party led by Jacques Chirac, who was serving his first term as prime minister.

Mr. Sarkozy’s brash manner and strong oratory style caught Mr. Chirac’s eye and won him the patronage of other party leaders. Yet, Mr. Sarkozy was not afraid to outmaneuver his elders when the opportunity arose.

He unexpectedly challenged the senior Gaullist Charles Pasqua for the job of Neuilly mayor in 1983, becoming the youngest mayor in France at 28.

The mayor’s job gave him his first national attention in 1993 when he negotiated to free schoolchildren taken hostage by a deranged man who called himself the Human Bomb. The man was eventually killed by the police, and the children were freed.

Mr. Sarkozy served as budget minister under Prime Minister Édouard Balladur, and betrayed his mentor Mr. Chirac by backing Mr. Balladur’s rival bid for president in 1995. When Mr. Chirac won, Mr. Sarkozy was shut out of the new administration.

He has had a strained relationship with Mr. Chirac since then, but his political skills were too powerful to ignore: Mr. Chirac brought him back into the government as interior minister in 2002.

Mr. Sarkozy has been unstoppable since, dominating the news media and often stealing the spotlight from the president with his projects, including a high-profile law-and-order campaign.

After a cabinet reshuffle in 2004, he served as finance minister, overseeing the government bailout of the bankrupt engineering giant Alstom — a move which marked him as a “dirigiste,” or interventionist in the Gaullist tradition, in many people’s eyes.

With his focus clearly on this year’s presidential elections, Mr. Sarkozy ran for and won the top job at the UMP, Mr. Chirac’s party, later that year. But in an unusual move, Mr. Chirac — who may still have harbored ambitions for a third term as president — forced Mr. Sarkozy to resign from the government in order to take the post.

Mr. Sarkozy was called back within months, though, as Mr. Chirac struggled to restore confidence in his administration after the humiliating defeat of a referendum on a European constitution in May 2005.

In his second term as interior minister, Mr. Sarkozy was more aggressive than ever, threatening to “clean out” troubled neighborhoods plagued with petty crime and vowing to repatriate illegal immigrants.

Many people regarded the anticrime campaign as a calculated effort to win support from France’s far right in anticipation of his presidential bid.

The strategy appeared to backfire when second-generation immigrant youths rebelled, touching off weeks of arson and sporadic rioting across the country. But again Mr. Sarkozy turned the emergency to his advantage, taking the lead in quelling the unrest while other government officials dithered. He emerged from the crisis more powerful than ever.

Mr. Sarkozy’s personal life has been less successful than his public one: in 1996, he divorced his first wife, with whom he has two sons, and married Cécilia Ciganer-Albeniz, with whom he had another son.

For years, Ms. Sarkozy acted as Mr. Sarkozy’s closest aide but she left him to have a very public affair with another man in 2005. The couple have since reconciled, but Ms. Sarkozy has been notably absent from her husband’s presidential campaign, fueling rumors that he will inhabit Élysée Palace alone.

Having promised change, Mr. Sarkozy will now bring his considerable energy to bear on forcing change in a country that is chronically dissatisfied with the status quo yet famously abhors change. Both the country’s unions and minority youth have promised to give him trouble.

Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s newly-elected president, speaks to supporters in Paris after the election results announcement, May 6, 2007. Sarkozy defeated Socialist Party candidate Segolene Royal on Sunday. REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer (FRANCE)

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