Europe's Odd Couple

zeketurner:

That is when she had to face Sarkozy. “She’s a scientist, almost like a German cliché, planning everything, going step by step, unemotional, not a show horse,” Stefan Kornelius, a senior editor of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, told me. “But Sarkozy’s the kind of macho man that she doesn’t like at all. And she and the chancellery are irritated by his jumping from issue to issue, his lack of attention, his inability to do German systematic work. She’s a technocrat with a hidden husband, and he’s flamboyant, with a beautiful woman” — the singer and former model Carla Bruni — “at his side.”

Sarkozy has been much criticized for his love of money and gaudiness. A wealthy lawyer with wealthy friends, he lives a gilded French presidential life, surrounded by staff members always ready with a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. Merkel still lives in the central Berlin apartment she occupied before her election and can sometimes be seen out shopping, or stopping into a favorite French-style restaurant, Borchardt, for a quick meal with her husband. — FRESHLY SQUEEZED OJ