Sarkozy's promises for (or threats to) Europe

-    discard Europe’s free-market ideology and its depoliticized take on economic policy (just following predefined rules is boring, spectacular populist action is much more fun)

-    run an interventionist industrial policy (by the way, other governments first carped at France's car subsidies but when they understood how fantastic the idea was they quickly fell in line and set up their own programs)

-    fight for the Common Agricultural Policy because we still want to have farmers in Europe tomorrow, and because we need food independence, and because it is our moral obligation towards the global poor to lavish billions of Euro on much richer EU farmers, and because if we cede to total-hyper-deregulation we will see the same catastrophe in agriculture that we have seen in finance (by the way, thanks to Gordon Brown for suscribing to the FRENCH solution to the financial crisis)

-    build a Europe that protects, reestablish the community preference, not be naïve about competition (good competition is when France gains market shares, unfair competition is what the others do to us), introduce a carbon tax at EU borders

-    reconsider the way the EU engages in trade negotiations (since the Commission is unable to grasp the real European interest, l’Elysée will take over).

Luckily, the next French presidency is a while to go.

PS : All this is not really new though nicely condensed in this speech. What we can learn from it is that we (the liberals, the think tanks, the academics) should participate much more actively in the French domestic policy debate. We write primarily in English and for liberal Anglo-Saxon newspapers. But this way we have little impact on the more protectionist member states.