Sarkozy's Trollcadero

Submission 10,943

About

Trollcadero is a single topic blog featuring various parodies based on a news photograph of French president Nicolas Sarkozy posing awkwardly with his arms wide open shortly before the 2012 French presidential elections.

Origin

On May 1st, 2012, French president Nicolas Sarkozy appeared at a public gathering with his supporters for the presidential elections and the International Workers' Day at Trocadero, a famous square located right in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. As part of his entrance, Sarkozy did an awkward pose, opening his arms to the public with a funny face. One picture of this moment was captured by photographer Philippe Wojazer, from the Agence France Presse:

The next day on May 2nd, the Trollcadero^[1] Tumblr (contraction of Troll and Trocadero), was launched, curating dozens of parodies while providing both the original image and an exploitable version for visitors to use. As of May 5th, the blog accumulated over 100 parodies.

Spread

The phenomenon was immediately picked by various French news websites, including meltybuzz.fr^[2], The French Huffington Post^[3] and Le Nouvel Observateur^[4] or even Yahoo news^[5]. Commenting on this new meme in its daily article about net culture, French website madmoizelle compared it to the Jean Sleeping on People phenomenon^[6].

Trollcadero is part of a series of anti-Sarkozy blogs aimed at poking fun at the president's public image, in a way reminiscent to Sarkozy was There. As a matter of fact, other Tumblrs, such as La France Flotte^[7], parodying the La France Forte (The Strong France) slogan from Sarkozy's campaign, reused the parodies on their own.