Sarkozy hangover remedy anyone?

Okay, we're all happy and, for some, relieved that the Socialist Party candidate has lost the French presidential election. We agree on that.

Does that mean Sarkozy is - or has become (remember Sarkozy is not new to politics. What has he done so far? I've mentionned some of his positions before here, here, here or here) - a saint? Our saviour? (I'm thinking about Jeane Manson - also see here - singing O Happy Day, replacing the words "When Jesus washed ours sins away" by "When Nicolas Sarkozy was born", among other signs of idolatry and hysteria)

This is ridiculous.

This is why I want to say a big "thank you" to this.

Then, I would like to quote an article by Véronique de Rugy. A must read if you sincerely think of Thatcher when the name Sarkozy is pronounced (I've read too many articles comparing Sarkozy to Margaret Thatcher, way too many).

However, Mr. Sarkozy is less than consistent when it comes to his other proposals, such as increasing the education budget by more than 50%, spending more money on families, introducing a draft for six months of civil service, and using the euro as a tool to trigger "job creation and economic growth."

More importantly, Mr. Sarkozy, or anyone else for that matter, won't be able to implement his program without first reforming France's powerful labor unions. The unions represent only 8% of French workers but have an influence disproportionate to their size. They routinely paralyze the country — on average there are 17 days a year of strike in public transportation in Paris — without consequences.

Mr. Sarkozy needs to make this reform his priority, but he has said little about ending public subsidies to unions. He has talked about requesting public transportation employees to give a minimum service guarantee, but that is not likely to be enough.

A close look at Mr. Sarkozy's many years in power leaves little indication that he can avoid the temptations of politics. Mr. Sarkozy has been involved as a politician for more than 30 years. For 20 of those years, he was Jacques Chirac's double. Some argue that the young Sarkozy only split with Mr. Chirac in 1995 to get his day in the sun.

Since then, he has worked not for government reform, but to lay ground for his successful campaign for the presidency. And he is not afraid to use the public purse to affect his ends. As the minister of the interior, he supplied large public subsidies to Islamic mosques, ostensibly to cut French Muslims from foreign influence, and during his short term as minister of the economy, he used public subsidies to temporarily prevent the moribund Alstom Company from going bankrupt.

He has also often ignored the basic laws of economics, launching a campaign to cut retail food prices by 2% and doing nothing to restrain government spending even in the face of a huge deficit. In order to comply with the 3% public debt cap imposed by the Maastricht Treaty, he discreetly added a civil servant specific pension scheme into the regular pension system, artificially lowering the deficit/GDP ratio.

When he left office, the public debt was going at an ever faster pace than before, and he left all of the 52 million civil servant jobs in the country intact. That Mr. Sarkozy is possibly the most free-market oriented politician in France today says more about the poor state of French politics than about Mr. Sarkozy himself.

The gap between his words and his actions reinforces the idea that he is likely to do little reform in a country whose people have little interest in giving up their entitlements.