The Summer Of Sarkozy

Also helping Sarkozy is the fact that there is little credible opposition. Early in his term, he poached some of the most talented Socialist politicians. He sent modernizer Dominique Strauss-Kahn to Washington, D.C., by helping to install him as head of the International Monetary Fund. Then he folded into his government the perennially popular Bernard Kouchner as Foreign minister. Last month Ségolène Royal, his Socialist opponent in last year's election, clashed with Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë over whether a socialist could also be a liberal. Such navel-gazing will continue, at least until Royal, Delanoë or someone else takes over the party leadership in November.

Still, there are hazards in Sarkozy's idiosyncratic methods. Fomenting union infighting makes Sarkozy look clever now, but humiliating the more liberal members might come back to haunt him, or at least slow reform. He is also prone to launching trial balloons he can't rein in. In January, he suddenly announced public television would no longer sell advertising space—at a cost of €1.2 billion. Such moves set back a country that has promised Brussels it will balance its budget by 2012. And though he talks of economic reform, he is far from an economic liberal, demonstrating time and again a willingness to intervene on behalf of companies he deems vital to French interests. This month, for instance, France took a direct stake in Aker Yards France, a shipyard, to protect French jobs.

This lack of ideology can pass for pragmatism, but it can also blur his message. "It was supposed to be la rupture and, to some extent, in some areas it is," says David Spector, an economist at the Paris School of Economics. "In others, it's Chirac-like demagoguery of the worse kind." But ultimately Sarkozy is discovering what economists have known for years: the recipe for starting to reform the French economy isn't as difficult as one might think—but finishing it might be.

© 2008