KEY POINTS:
Genuine excitement attends the election of the new President of France. Nicolas Sarkozy is not cut from the same patrician cloth that has characterised all previous French Presidents, right or left, in living memory. Mr Sarkozy, son of a Hungarian immigrant, is not a product of the public service academy that has put its stamp on most of France's leading figures. He sounds like a man of change rather than of tradition, and France sorely needs that.
The 12-year presidency of Jacques Chirac has left the economy flat and overdue for drastic repairs. Mr Chirac was a classic conservative, content to accept the long-established line that market liberalism is somehow Anglo-Saxon and foreign to the social and moral foundations of the French republic. Mr Sarkozy is not nearly so sniffy.
Mr Chirac has presided over slow growth, high taxes and chronic unemployment. The 35-hour week introduced by a Socialist Government remains in force five years after that Administration was defeated. For a time, while the euro was as weak as the German economy, France was able to disguise its decline but now that the euro is strong and Germany is recovering, France is floundering. It is today's "sick man of Europe", the tag Britain carried until the reforms of Margaret Thatcher began to work. Will Mr Sarkozy deliver a similar remedy to France?
France needs less rigid employment law, lower taxes and much deregulation to make its industries more competitive in modern markets. Neither of the candidates in the run-off for the presidency on Sunday was running a realistic campaign. The Socialist's Segolene Royal promised yet more public spending and fines for firms that moved jobs abroad. On the right, Mr Sarkozy concentrated on popular attacks on hedge funds and called for a European tax on speculative currency movements.
In France's largest voter turnout for two decades Mr Sarkozy won 53.1 per cent of the ballot against 46.9 per cent for Ms Royal. Opinion polls suggested voters preferred Ms Royal, who would have been France's first woman head of state, but saw Mr Sarkozy as a more competent leader with a more convincing economic programme. The turnout may owe as much to opposition to his abrasive style as support for the stern economic medicine he is expected to deliver, but it gives him a decisive mandate.
He has plans to undermine the 35-hour work week by cutting taxes on overtime, curbing union powers and trimming the public sector. He could face the same crippling strikes and resistance that Mr Chirac met when he took office in 1995 and tried to impose change. Let's hope Mr Sarkozy is more resilient. A robust competitive French economy would be a contributor to global prosperity; a weak, protective France inhibits progress in trade talks and much else.
The new President hopes to change more than the French economy. Foreign policy and defence come under his direct authority and Mr Sarkozy is much more pro-American than Mr Chirac. He readily acknowledges the need for American leadership in world affairs, and wants a concerted push against global warming. He also intends to put France back in the forefront of the European Union, a role relinquished somewhat since a 2005 referendum rejected the latest EU constitution.
But above all he has campaigned as "the candidate of work". He proposes to encourage the French to work harder for greater rewards, cut unemployment and stimulate growth. His first task is to help his party retain control of the legislature at elections on June 10 and 17. If his party can win a double mandate and he is as determined as his record suggests, France should not look back.
