Bewildered supporters of Nicolas Sarkozy, the centre-right French president, are wondering what to do. Should they blame the global financial crisis or the influence of Carla Bruni, his glamorous wife, for what sounds like a lurch to the political left?

Rarely does a day pass without “Sarko” displaying signs of an ideological rethink. He has attacked “fat cats” and the “dictatorship of the market”. He declared that “laissez-faire capitalism is over” and has called for a cap on executive pay and an end to “golden parachutes”.

The transformation is striking given that Sarkozy, famed for his “zero tolerance” policing as interior minister, was once derided on the left as a dangerous right-winger.

These days he is caricatured on one internet website as a French Che Guevara. Martin Schulz, German leader of the socialists in the European parliament, congratulated him (mockingly) for “speaking like a real European socialist”.

Sarkozy’s aides call it pragmatism, but to some it sounds like socialist dogma: he has pledged to create 100,000 state-subsidised jobs — the sort of gesture for which he ridiculed the former socialist government last year. Sarkozy does not seem to rule out the idea that he has changed his political stripes. “Have I become a socialist?” he asked recently. “Perhaps.”

Bruni, who has often described herself as a woman of the left, may welcome it as a positive evolution in the man who has been making big efforts to win the hearts and minds of her left-leaning art world friends, a campaign that has already exacted a toll on Franco-Italian relations.

Italy reacted with fury when Bruni persuaded Sarkozy to override a court’s decision to extradite Marina Petrella, a former member of the Red Brigades, to Rome, where she had been found guilty of armed robbery, kidnap and murder.

There was more Italian anger when Bruni criticised Silvio Berlusconi, the centre-right prime minister, last week over his jibe that Barack Obama, the American president-elect, was “tanned”, saying that she was embarrassed and “very glad to have become French”.

Francesco Cossiga, the former Italian president, pronounced himself happy that Bruni, who once enjoyed a “man-eater” reputation, was no longer Italian: “Who knows if one day the stormy life of Carla Bruni will oblige her to ask again for the passport of which she says she is ashamed?”

Her recent antics underlined the originality she has brought to the role of “première dame”, as a folk singer juggling official appearances with efforts to promote her new album. Her predecessor, Bernadette Chirac, wife of the former president, looked after her rose garden and was the figurehead of a campaign to save small change for children’s charities.

Bruni, 40, last week highlighted her new activism by joining a campaign to stamp out racism and shake up the white political elite. “Power in France has often had the same face, that of men who are white and ageing. We must help the elites to change, or force them a bit . . . without political measures we will wait too long,” she said.

She was widely applauded: notwithstanding the revolutionary motto of liberté, égalité, fraternité, France — one of the world’s most racially mixed countries — is confronting a growing rebellion by ethnic minorities in immigrant suburbs. Sarkozy, who came to power with a promise of “rupture” with the past, has tried to set an example in a country in which only one of the 555 MPs is black. Even before he met Bruni he had included members of ethnic minorities in his cabinet and last week he appointed the country’s first black regional police chief.

Nevertheless, he has stopped short of promises made during the election campaign, when he argued that since France applied “positive discrimination” to women and disabled people, it should also apply it to “compatriots of colour”.

Although Bruni is influencing him these days — it is widely agreed that she has exerted a “calming” effect on the hyperactive leader — some see in Sarkozy’s recent enthusiasm for state intervention a return to the French dirigiste tradition, said to be out of fashion. Others see yet another example of his political genius: his anti-capitalist rhetoric may be aimed at neutralising Olivier Besancenot, the “red postman” from Neuilly, whose new “anti-capitalist party” has attracted impressive support and made him a star on the left.

Joëlle Garriaud-Maylam, a senator in Sarkozy’s party, believes that the president is more pragmatic than ideological and said: “I certainly don’t think he’s turned into a socialist.” And as for Bruni: “She’s been having an amazingly good influence on him; I don’t think she should keep her mouth shut just because she’s the wife of the head of state.”

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