Transit strike, Sarkozy divorce news hit France

PARIS - For President Nicolas Sarkozy, a day does not get much darker than this.

Yesterday, Sarkozy, 52, was reeling from blows on two domestic fronts: a wave of strikes that swept through France and an official announcement that his 11-year marriage had come to an end.

Shortly after a presidential spokesman, David Martinon, told a news conference that he had no comment about his boss's marriage, the Elysee Palace dropped the bombshell that Sarkozy and his wife, Cecilia, "announce their separation by mutual consent." The palace later clarified that the couple "had divorced."

Other French leaders have led unconventional love lives. One president, Felix Faure, died in the bed of his mistress in 1899; another, François Mitterrand, fathered a daughter with his mistress.

But the president, who was previously married and divorced long before he was elected president, is the first to divorce while in office.

Immediately after the news was broadcast on radio and television, striking protesters in the port city of Le Havre shouted: "Cecilia, we are like you! We are fed up with Nicolas!"

The Elysee Palace statement, which ended weeks of speculation, said that neither the president nor Cecilia Sarkozy would comment on the news.

The announcement coincided with a national strike in the public sector - the first in Sarkozy's five-month presidency - to protest the conservative government's plan to eliminate special retirement privileges that employees in private businesses do not have. Labeled "Black Thursday" by the news media, the 24-hour strike halted most trains, subways, and buses throughout France and canceled classes in many schools and universities.

State unemployment offices and many museums were closed. Mail delivery was uneven. Some Paris theatrical performances were called off.

Workers at the state-owned electricity and gas utility giants joined the walkout, leading to a reduction of 16 percent in electricity output by the country's nuclear reactors. The ultimate indignity for the president was that power was cut off to La Lanterne, which he is using as a secondary residence, in Versailles.

Some unions threatened to continue their protests beyond yesterday, but the news gripping France was not the strike - the French are used to those - but the announcement that the Sarkozys had ended their marriage.

Cecilia Sarkozy has been out of the public eye recently, but last week, she posed - at her request - on the balcony of a Paris hotel for the cover of Paris Match, whose latest edition appeared on the newsstands yesterday.

She was said by the popular weekly magazine to have been unhappy with unflattering pictures of her that had appeared recently in the news media. She chose the same photographer who had taken her husband's official presidential portrait.

The three-page Paris Match spread showed her staring vacantly into the camera next to the caption "Cecilia Sarkozy, a Serene Woman," but it revealed nothing about the state of the Sarkozy marriage. Her whereabouts yesterday were unknown, although friends said she was preparing for an engagement party for her 20-year-old daughter, Jeanne-Marie, this weekend. The Sarkozys have a 10-year-old son, Louis, and they each have two adult children from previous marriages.

Asked in a telephone interview about Cecilia Sarkozy's plans, Carina Alfonso-Martin, her spokeswoman, said: "I don't know them. This is her private life. It's up to her to say."

Nicolas Sarkozy kept to his daily schedule and traveled to Lisbon yesterday afternoon for a two-day meeting of the leaders of the European Union.

He will be accompanied on a state visit to Morocco next week by Rachida Dati, his minister of justice.

The opposition Socialist Party suggested that the president timed the announcement of the divorce to coincide with the strike, perhaps in an attempt to mute its news impact.

"The Elysee has chosen this Thursday, a day of strong social mobilization, to make the information official," said Annick Lepetit, the Socialist Party's national secretary, in a communique. "We will leave it to the French people to judge if it's only a simple coincidence."

The separation of Ségolène Royal, Nicolas Sarkozy's Socialist rival for the presidency, and François Hollande, her longtime partner, the father of her four children, and the head of the Socialist Party, was announced on the night of France's legislative elections in June.

Portraying herself as a woman scorned, Royal was quoted in a book leaked to the news media that night as saying, "I asked François Hollande to leave our home, to pursue his love interest, which is now laid bare in books and newspapers, on his own."

Since then, the tabloid magazine Closer has published a photo of a French journalist with her arm around Hollande on a Moroccan beach.

Hollande has sued the magazine for invasion of privacy.

With the Sarkozy divorce finally out in the open, the finger-pointing began.

Patrick Balkany, a close friend of the couple and the mayor of the Paris suburb of Levallois-Perret, called the separation "inescapable" because "Cecilia was in this state of mind."

"She no longer wanted to participate in the life of the president, in public life," Balkany told RTL radio, saying that Nicolas Sarkozy was "very serene" and "had turned the page." He added, "She left; she came back. When she came back, they perhaps thought that it could go back like before. It did not."

Some of their friends confessed that they were heartbroken.

"I love Nicolas, I love Cecilia," said Andre Santini, a secretary of state in Sarkozy's government. "This gives me so much pain."