Sarko the Inexplicable

The Globe & Mail's Doug Saunders has a percetive and funny article on the bumpy first year of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who, besides being shorter than Napoleon, has supporters worried that "he's not a JFK so much as a Silvio Berlusconi, the vanguard of a continent-wide wave of Eurotrash conservatism, a movement stretching from Sweden through Germany to Italy and including, as its most recent members, the mayors of both London and Rome, an army of mildly intolerant non-reformers seeded heavily with orange-skinned playboys."