President On the Precipice

But as Sarkozy grows accustomed to having just about everything his way, he appears to be growing more prickly, not less, about pointed criticism. In a bizarre lawsuit, he went after the makers of a toy "voodoo doll," an effigy of Sarkozy that parodied some of his past rhetoric and provided, along with a sarcastic how-to manual, a dozen needles with which to skewer the doll. In October a judge defended the maker's right to make a joke, but Sarkozy just couldn't take it, and kept on in the courts. Last month another judge ruled in his favor, but allowed the dolls to stay on the market. More disturbing still is the way Sarkozy tries to manipulate France's mainstream media, the last embattled bastion of his critics. As a government minister, his personal calls to reporters who had dared to disrespect him were legendary. His close friendships with media bosses are also well known. How much self-censorship Sarkozy's influence has elicited is unknowable, but, to take one silly example, the weekly picture magazine Paris Match airbrushed away Sarkozy's love handles when he was photographed in a swimsuit on his first summer vacation as president.

Now, rather more seriously, Sarkozy is rewriting the laws governing broadcast media in France: the head of the government networks known as France Télévisions will now be named by the president. And, despite France's massive and worsening public deficit, Sarkozy is seeing through a promise he made earlier this year to phase out advertising from public television. Questions have been raised about how much ad revenue he's going to be putting in the hands of private networks owned by his political allies, but Sarkozy's own explanation is perhaps more revealing. The left, the Socialists, never dared to do the same. "They always talked about it with no results," he said. This move shows what a government can do when it is committed to action, he boasted. If Parliament doesn't pass the controversial bill by early next year, he's signaled he may simply make it a decree.

Whether, in the end, Sarkozy will go down as a man of destiny, or merely of obstinacy and arrogance, only history—and perhaps his fellow European leaders—can decide. The French, for their part, have given him free rein to—well, to reign.

© 2008