THE French are enjoying a good laugh at the expense of Nicolas Sarkozy, their energetic leader, who is being mocked for claiming to have helped knock down the Berlin Wall 20 years ago.

Lampooning of the “hyper-president” has gone to new extremes after a picture on his Facebook site of him chipping at the Wall turned out to have been taken after the hated symbol of the cold war had fallen.

A diminutive stature and boastful streak have long made “Sarko” a figure of fun. He was ridiculed previously for claiming to have single-handedly rescued Europe from global financial crisis.

His desire to be at the centre of events was parodied last week in a series of spoof photographs showing him leading the French to victory in the 1998 football World Cup and storming the Bastille in 1789.

He has been shown seated next to Winston Churchill at the Yalta summit in 1945 and walking on the moon. In one of the pictures he is recast as a member of the Beatles. He also “discovers” America, invents penicillin and wins an Olympic medal.

Not all of the reaction to the Berlin Wall photograph was quite so good-humoured. Visitors to Sarkozy’s Facebook site accused the Elysée Palace of censorship, complaining that negative comments about the president’s behaviour had been erased from the internet. A presidential spokesman said only “hateful and vulgar” messages had been removed.

With his platform heels and pugnacious demeanour, Sarkozy, a hate figure for the left, is used to being mocked but has made it clear that it upsets him. He has often threatened lawsuits when faced with the worst excesses, such as a “voodoo doll” in his image that did a brisk trade in Parisian shops last year.

A taste for luxury watches, designer sunglasses and jewellery led to caricatures of him in the early days of his rule as “le président bling-bling”, but more recently comics have focused on his allegedly dictatorial bent: he is often parodied as Napoleon or Louis XIV.

The cartoonists had a field day with his marriage to Carla Bruni last year and much of the fun has revolved around the difference in height between the statuesque former model and the pint-sized president.

Photographs of him in platform heels or standing on his toes next to President Barack Obama have fuelled the comedy and there was hilarity when Sarkozy, in a desperate attempt to look taller than his 5ft 5in during a factory visit, surrounded himself with workers who had been picked because they were shorter.

Ever since a television interviewer accused Sarkozy of behaving like a “little boy” — the journalist was sacked for this lèse majesté — Les Guignols de l’Info, a satirical television programme that features politicians as puppets, has been lampooning the leader as a tantrum-prone toddler.

In a sketch about his threat to walk out of a G20 summit earlier this year (if the rest of the world did not endorse his ideas for regulating financial markets), leaders’ seats were depicted around a conference table and next to a baby’s high-chair for Sarko.

He has promised “rupture” with the bad old ways of the past and has embraced new ways of communication, attracting thousands of “friends” to his Facebook site. A caption alongside the photograph of him at the Wall claimed he had rushed to Berlin on November 9, 1989 — the day the Wall fell — “to take part in the event that was taking shape”.

It emerged, however, that the photograph was taken at least one day later. Sarko’s account of witnessing the fall of the Wall was a “total fantasy”, according to Alain Auffray, a journalist who covered events in Berlin at the time. Various officials roped in to bolster Sarko’s version of events offered conflicting versions.

To some it was reminiscent of the fuss that erupted last year when Hillary Clinton, now the American secretary of state, recalled landing “under fire” at an airport in Bosnia, only to be contradicted by footage of an entirely peaceful arrival.

For Sarkozy, who has had to brazen out allegations of nepotism and turning a blind eye to a minister’s past as a sex tourist in Thailand, it was one more embarrassment.

He took yet another knock last week when Bernard Laporte, the former French rugby coach and sports minister, challenged the government’s reputation as a beacon of “openness”.

The cabinet might include women, members of ethnic minorities and homosexuals, but Laporte claimed it had snubbed him because of his regional accent — an almost incomprehensible Toulouse twang.

His government colleagues, he maintained, had seen him simply as “the bloke who gives out the tickets” for football and rugby matches.

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