Quotes of the Day

Having laid low while President Jacques Chirac took the heat for losing France's referendum on the European constitution, Nicolas Sarkozy is back, in the guise of a self-styled crimebuster.

After an 11-year-old boy was killed by a stray bullet while washing the family car in La Courneuve, a desolate banlieue outside Paris, France's newly reappointed Interior Minister vowed that "the thugs will disappear" and that he'd "cleanse" the quarter. Two days later, Sarkozy decried that a man who had been granted early release from life imprisonment is now implicated in the June murder of a 37-year-old jogger. "The judge must pay for his mistake," Sarkozy fumed before an assembly of gendarmes at the Interior Ministry.

The combative tone suggested to many that Sarkozy, who as head of the governing Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) is already eyeing the 2007 presidential elections, is gunning for the hard-right voters of Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front. If so, he'll have to contend with his own government first. Justice Minister Pascal Clément noted that "the law, all of the law, was respected" in the prisoner's early release, and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin lectured that "nothing should put in question the independence of the judiciary." For his part, the judge in question accused Sarkozy of "demagoguery," and the Superior Council of Magistrates filed a formal complaint with Chirac.

UMP parliamentary deputy Jean-Michel Fourgous said the intense reaction shows that for Sarkozy, "the threat comes from Chirac's people, not the National Front." But it's with Chirac's people that Sarkozy governs. "He knows that his brand of economic liberalism isn't popular in France, so he's compensating with a dose of moral conservativism," says Stéphane Rozès, director of the French polling firm CSA Opinion. "But he can't go much further in that direction without having to choose between the government and his own ambitions."

• JAMES GRAFF
• With an eye on 2007's presidential race, Nicholas Sarkozy takes a hard-line on crime