From nyt:

“He is a lieutenant so loyal that President Nicolas Sarkozy personally rewarded him with the party’s nomination for mayor of the affluent Paris suburb that Mr. Sarkozy himself long governed.

But now, David Martinon, the president’s spokesman, has abruptly withdrawn from the race. And it was the president’s own son Jean who forced him out.

“The conditions are no longer in place for me to lead the municipal campaign in Neuilly,” Mr. Martinon told reporters on Monday. “I am pulling out.”

Adding to the intrigue, Mr. Martinon said that he submitted his resignation as spokesman — but that Mr. Sarkozy refused to accept it.

With Mr. Sarkozy’s poll ratings in free fall, the fiasco in the suburb, Neuilly-sur-Seine, is the freshest sign of turmoil in his presidency.

His hyperactive style, long regarded as a welcome change from the torpor of the last days of the presidency of Jacques Chirac, is increasingly seen as movement without a goal. “It’s the law of the boomerang — the harder and farther you throw it, the faster and more violently it comes back,” Le Monde wrote in its editorial on Monday afternoon.

On Monday, Mr. Sarkozy’s popularity plunged to a new low of…”

continue reading