The battle to pass legislation reforming France's state-owned broadcasting agencies extended late into the past few nights. The left-wing opposition launched what it described as a “parliamentary Vietnam war”, filing more than 200 amendments against the article banning advertising on public TV from 8pm to 6am.

Since Sarkozy told a bewildered press conference last January that he had decided to get rid of advertising on state channels, a far-reaching working group concluded that public broadcaster France Télévisions would need to be compensated to the tune of €450 million per year. The government opted to raise the corresponding funds through new taxes on mobile phone companies and on the advertising revenues of private television channels, which are expected to benefit from the reduced competition and relaxed limits on the quantity of ads they can air.

However, MPs for the ruling UMP party decided to slash the advertising tax from 3% to 1.5% and the mobile phone levy from 0.9% to 0.5%, attracting the ire of their opposition counterparts and prompting division within their own ranks. Green parliamentarian and former public TV journalist Noël Mamère dubbed the bill an “assassination” and Socialist parliamentary leader Jean-Marc Ayrault said: “This text is meant to shore up the accounts of Martin Bouygues.” The head of the Bouygues construction company, a personal friend of Sarkozy's, controls the TF1 broadcasting group and a mobile phone network.

Critics had a field day on Thursday, when a 2007 lobbying paper from TF1 suggesting the scrapping on advertising on public channels and relaxed rules for private broadcasters was leaked to the press. The paper's key proposals appear in the bill currently under discussion.

In an interview with the financial newspaper, Les Echos, Bouygues said he “did not see a gift” for TF1 in the proposed legislation and argued the advertising market was heading for a “recession”.

After a meeting with Sarkozy on Wednesday, members of the UMP parliamentary party quoted the president as saying: “This is an excellent reform and I was not elected to maintain the status quo.”

Although €450 million are already earmarked in the 2009 budget, nobody knows how France Télévisions will be funded after that if the new levies prove insufficient. Employees went on strike over the issue on November 25 and France Télévisions chairman Patrick de Carolis has threatened to resign if funding issues are not resolved.

In another widely criticised move, the legislation states that the heads of state broadcasting companies will now be directly appointed by the French president. Up until now, they were chosen by the independent broadcasting regulatory body CSA.

Journalists from state-owned channels and from the private sector alike have criticised what they see as a return to the pre-1968 era, when the government tightly controlled public broadcasting. Jean-François Kahn, a prominent journalist, described the new appointments process as “a French version of the Putin system”.

The opposition has obtained one success: the legislation will not be ready for January 5, as it still has to go through the Senate. Yet the government is prepared to decree the advertising ban anyway. As culture and communication minister Chrstine Albanel put it in parliament: “The president of the Republic has made the decision.”