Nicolas Sarkozy joins President Bush for lunch in Maine tomorrow after performing a round-trip dash from New England to Paris that further burnished his aura as the ultimate action man.

Few were surprised that Super-Sarko decided to break off a two-week holiday in New Hampshire to lead mourners at today’s funeral of Jean-Marie Lustiger, a former long-serving Archbishop of Paris.

The presidential jet was summoned to zip him home and back to America before he is driven the 50 miles across the state border to Kennebunkport, the Bush family retreat. No-one questioned the cost and hefty carbon footprint of four Transatlantic Airbus flights to fetch and return Monsieur le Président.

Such exploits have become routine for the hyper-dynamic leader who has both dazzled and irritated with the jogging-jetting style that he brought to the Elysée Palace when he succeeded Jacques Chirac in May. “He is almost becoming a caricature,” La Nouvelle République newspaper said. “Our president is president 24 hours a day seven days a week.” In 12 weeks, Mr Sarkozy, 52, has kicked over tradition, turning the monarchical presidency into a power-house that has disarmed opponents, lifted the national mood, and put France back on the world stage. According to Tony Snow, Mr Bush’s spokesman, tomorrow’s Kennebunkport lunch seals a “new era” in the recently frosty Franco-American relationship. Sarkomania reached New York this week when Vanity Fair magazine named Mr Sarkozy the world’s best-dressed politician, gushing that “he is dashing, manly, romantic..he should change nothing.” The Napoleonic president seems to be everywhere. He brokers a European treaty in Berlin; he brainstorms with trade union leaders in Paris; he visits crime victims, defuses student protests and stages a Bastille Day rock concert; he pops up in the Alps for the Tour de France; he stages a conference to tackle the Darfur crisis; Cécilia Sarkozy extracts Bulgarian medical workers from Libyan prison and her husband drops in to promise Muammar Gaddafi French arms and nuclear plants.

Mr Sarkozy’s detractors - at home and increasingly in Europe - accuse him of grabbing the limelight and performing empty stunts. François Hollande, leader of the Socialist party, calls him “the omni-president”. He told Parliament: “Omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient, the head of state decides everything. He speaks about everything, intervenes in everything but evokes nothing.” Mr Sarkozy’s fondness for glitz, America and millionaires are loathed by his critics. This week they contrasted Chancellor Angela Merkel’s humble holiday visit to a supermarket with Mr Sarkozy’s sojourn on a millionaires’ estate. But a solid majority of French tell pollsters that they like the punchy, hands-on radical who promised to “Do what I say and say what I do”.

Mr Sarkozy, 52, makes no apologies for his lifestyle and often says: “I was not elected to watch trains go by.” He is convinced that France has had enough of political impotence. “France wants a President who governs,” he says. He boasts boyishly to visitors of his achievements since he defeated Ségolène Royal, his Socialist opponent. He first neutered the opposition by appointing some of its stars and non-white personalities to senior government posts. With a special parliamentary session, he then pushed through about half of his promised reforms to working hours, taxes and strike laws.

He is privately casting himself as the new strongman of Europe - a view that is beginning to irk the Germans and other EU partners who are displeased by what they see as old-fashioned French strong-arm behaviour.

The opposition is waiting for the one-man Sarko band to stumble in the autumn when public sector unions are expected to start resisting. Then, according to some experts, Mr Sarkozy will become vulnerable because he has done away with the traditional shield of a government.

François Fillon, the Prime Minister, who is mocked by opponents as an invisible man, says that the critics are behind the times when they talk about the President hijacking the government. Mr Sarkozy has scrapped pretence and is simply exercising the executive power that has been more discreetly wielded by the presidency since the modern Fifth Republic was created in 1958, says Mr Fillon. The next step, says Mr Sarkozy, must be to give more power to the toothless French parliament to act as a balance to presidential power.

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