New French President Nicolas Sarkozy has been labeled a free-market fan, a shameless interventionist and a spendthrift opportunist. So which of the labels fit? All of them. Sarkozy's economics are nothing if not eclectic. But in spite of that, or perhaps because of it, the new president has a better chance of galvanizing growth than any leader in decades. With a 65 percent approval rating, Sarkozy neared war hero Gen. Charles de Gaulle's record Inaugural score. Consumer confidence leapt to a five-year high in May. And Sunday's impressive win in lower-house elections gives him plenty of lawmakers to back his program of economic reform.

But what, exactly, is Sarkonomics? His mix of free-enterprise friendliness and state-coddling can seem erratic. But it's a pragmatic way to get results from the globalization-leery French, who need to be reassured as much as they need to get moving. The president has won kudos from economists by promising supply-side reforms like the end of the 35-hour workweek, a curtailing of union power and more-flexible work contracts that would make firing easier. But his first steps have been muddled with some gratuitous spending, and they've tended toward demand-side change, boosting purchasing power via things like a too-generous mortgage-rate cut, instead of fixing French firms' competition problems.

A look back at his history does little to clear up the picture "as Finance minister in 2004, he privatized key state-owned businesses but bailed out others; he strong-armed supermarkets even as he tried to increase competition in the retail sector. Still, Sarkozy's brand of fair-weather laissez faire has the backing of the people (67 percent of voters say they are ready for major reform all at once), a crucial first step. Sarkozy was Finance minister for a mere 235 days, but he made them count. One of his most famous moves was the rescue of the near bankrupt engineering giant Alstom. German arch rival Siemens was circling for the spoils. But Sarkozy took up the torch of "national champions," and cut a rescue deal with Brussels' competition chief. The state took on 21 percent of the firm in a debt-equity swap, and Sarkozy got credit for saving 25,000 French jobs.

Was it only six weeks ago that political suspense reigned in Paris cafes? Could conservative Nicolas Sarkozy really win the nation's highest office? People wondered if he might be thwarted by the Socialists' comely comer, Segolene Royal. Or perhaps even trumped by the engaging centrist François Bayrou? Well, no. And since Sarko's triumph on May 6, this take-charge kind of guy has, yes, taken charge. In the first round of legislative elections yesterday, his UMP party steamrollered much of the opposition and it looks very likely to finish the job in runoffs next Sunday. So here's a prediction for the next five years of French politics: all-Sarko all the time.

Of the 577-member National Assembly, a record 110 candidates were elected outright last night by winning more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round. Of those, 98 are from Sarkozy's UMP party. Only one is a Socialist. Projections for next Sunday are wide-ranging, but all forecast a Sarko landslide. With between 383 and 501 seats for the right (compared to 60 to 185 for the left), this will be the first time since 1978 that power in parliament won't have changed hands from one election to the next.

As Sarkozy racked up incredibly high poll numbers over the past month (a run of proposed tax breaks apparently expunging memories of the polarizing, riot-inspiring figure he'd been portrayed as only weeks before), his parliamentary victory took on the air of fait accompli. Indeed, while last month's presidential elections set a record for voter turnout (nearly 84 percent), many registered voters took yesterday off like any other sunny Sunday in June "setting a record for voter abstention (39.5 percent).

In fairness to those absentees, the Socialists looked like they'd taken a hike, too. Acrimonious squabbling among contenders for party leadership began live on television minutes after Sarkozy's election was announced, and the current Party SecretaryFrançois Hollande soon stopped talking victory and started warning against the dangers if the left faced a "crushing" defeat.

In the event, the Socialists themselves might have done worse yesterday. The party's 24.7 percent of the vote is actually better than it did in the first rounds of the two previous legislative elections. But the minor left-wing parties that used to fall into line behind the Socialists did miserably, so the left as a whole is likely to be insignificant on the floor of the National Assembly.

It's official: France now has the hairiest government in recent memory. While previous government leaders have tended to grayness and baldness, President Nicolas Sarkozy has brought change on the follicular as well as the political front. It's not that Sarkozy, 52, has the thickest coif on the planet. Long gone are the lengthy hippy-era locks of his youth, replaced first by a curly little '70s nest and more recently by a more efficient and candidate-like Brillo wave. That said, by France's thin and pasted-back presidential standards (set during World War II), Sarkozy might as well be Samson himself.

His Prime Minister, Francois Fillon, 53, also has an acceptable little broom of hair. (No, he can't compare with the heroic salt-and-pepper-mane-in-the-breeze of his predecessor Dominique de Villepin, but who can?) Unfortunately, Fillon decided to trim down his traditionally side-parted flop into a schoolboy snip, circa 1954, upon being named to his new gig. But they are just the starting point in a government of 15 mostly next-generation ministers, many of whom came of age in the late 1960s.

Nicolas Sarkozy has long been tight with the media. He's often called editors, or their bosses, on deadline to urge them to downplay unfavorable stories. He's joked with journalists that they'd better treat him well because their bosses are his pals. His industrialist friends do indeed hold major stakes in much of the French media, especially the press, but the problem isn't so muchthe potential conflicts of interest when his new government begins making decisions affecting megacorporations owned by Sarkozy's buddies; it is some of the Fourth Estate's coverage of Sarkozy.

France's new president has been on the cover of so many magazines in recent years that his mug has sometimes felt like a part of magazine cover logos. In mid-April, the conservative weekend magazine Le Figaro--owned by an industrialist friend of Sarkozy, Serge Dassault--ran Sarkozy on the cover for three out of four weeks. Their first headline: "Nicolas Sarkozy: What I still have to say to you."

France's new foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, first came to fame in the 1970s and '80s as an idealistic physician out to heal the world. The French public and international press saw the founder of Médecins Sans Frontières (the original Doctors without borders) as a dashing young man defying tyrants while calling on the international community to have a conscience. The political and diplomatic establishment thought him dangerous. In fact he was both, albeit with the best of intentions.

Now 67, Kouchner is a veteran of previous cabinet posts under French Socialist governments and a stint administering Kosovo in the wake of the 1999 war fought to stop a Balkan genocide. He's learned the uses of statecraft and diplomacy; he has an unparalleled record of on-the-ground experience, and he's shown a penchant for warm relations with the United States. In all respects, he presents an enormous contrast with his predecessors in the foreign ministry, and one many Americans will welcome.

But as rumors of Kouchner's appointment circulated earlier this week, I started rifling through the notes I've made of our various conversations since I first met him in El Salvador in the early 1980s, and they make pretty disturbing reading. His good intentions were so worthy and so moral that I found them convincing back then, and in my gut I still do. But Kouchner's idealistic activism helped open the way for "humanitarian" military interventions that ended in mires of moral ambiguity or outright disaster, and not only for France. Kouchner helped to force the ill-fated intervention in Somalia in the early 1990s. In a real sense, Kouchner also helped create the conditions for the current war in Iraq, and, indeed, he was one of the few public figures in France who defended the American-led invasion in 2003. So the record of his approach is worth thinking hard about now, especially given his recent calls for international military action to protect aid convoys in Darfur.

"Humanitarianism is not pacifism," Kouchner likes to say, nor is moral outrage sufficient to meet the world's needs. That epiphany came to him, by his own reckoning, in 1979 on a god-forsaken island called Poulo Bidong. Thousands of Vietnamese refugees fleeing their country in open boats had drifted onto the beaches there like so much human flotsam, and Kouchner was puzzled, then appalled, by the passivity of the victims. The refugees' boats were often attacked by Malay pirates. A handful of lightly armed cutthroats would rob, rape and kill anyone they wanted, and no one on the boat would raise a hand. The victims "did not have enough sense of solidarity to defend the families next to them," Kouchner recalled.

These are the 24 hours François Fillon has waited for. The man from Le Mans today becomes President Nicolas Sarkozy's copilot, the prime minister who will help accelerate his new boss's reform agenda. Fillon, Sarkozy's top political adviser during the hard-fought presidential campaign, becomes his No. 2 and the head of a government to be named tomorrow. The pair are poised to drive through the most comprehensive reforms in modern French history. But they sure make an odd couple.

Sarkozy, 52, and Fillon, 53, are the youngest ticket to lead France since 1980. Yet both have political experience beyond their years. In 1981, Fillon, at 27, became the youngest parliamentarian in France. Sarkozy became the country's youngest mayor two years later, at 28. They've both headed a range of ministries; Fillon, a five-time minister, has headed Education, Social Affairs, Information Technology and the Postal Service. Today, the pair, now the most powerful in France, jog together, often photographed side by side during the campaign, sweat-drenched, in shorts. Fillon races cars and climbs mountains in his spare time. Both have young children; Sarkozy's son Louis is 10; Arnaud, the youngest of Fillon's five children, is 5.

But the similarities end there. Indeed the tensions between them were well enough known that as recently as 2003, Sarkozy reportedly quipped, "They say he's the anti-Sarkozy. It's true. He's neither effective nor popular!" They were rivals for the leadership of the right-wing RPR party in 1999 and in the past disagreed on fundamentals. Sarkozy, apart from a few recent campaign digs at the European Central Bank and the strong euro, has been a fairly faithful European; Fillon, a eurosceptic early on, voted "No" in the 1992 referendum on the Maastricht Treaty that led to the creation of the EU.

In the hours before Nicolas Sarkozy was inaugurated as France's new president, you could practically hear a page turn in the book on Franco-American relations. It was when, over a breakfast of croissants and orange juice, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte, on a visit to Paris, highlighted the victory of Sarkozy--who by French politicians' standards seems rabidlypro-American as a generation-changing presidential victory with a broad mandate.

Yes, Washington is ready to begin a new chapter in bilateral relations, strained since the start of the war in Iraq. In that context, Negroponte offered a survey of the great challenges of our time, like a tutorial for a new government whose leader is not known for his foreign-affairs prowess. There is, of course, no shortage of crises for Sarkozy's France to show its mettle, Negroponte made clear during the breakfast that was organized by the French-American Foundation and the U.S. Embassy. France is already fighting alongside Washington in Afghanistan, or with Washington's approval or collaboration in Lebanon and Haiti, Negroponte noted, as well as helping to search for solutions to intractable crises from Iran to the Middle East to Darfur, all of which might benefit from further French involvement. The former U.S. National Intelligence director placed particular emphasis on the danger from failed or failing states amid the international war on terror. "These states need partners," Negroponte said, or else they will destabilize others. "Now is the time to work ever more closely."

Sarkozy has yet to offer a clear international vision, as extra-European affairs were largely absent from the presidential campaign. But prior to being elected, he did note that the "long-term presence" of French troops in Afghanistan isn't "decisive," spurring concerns that France might withdraw its 1,000 troops who are stationed near Kabul. "I don't think there's any doubt that there are challenges in Afghanistan," Negroponte acknowledged, noting the strong commitment of NATO partners like France--"and we would hope that commitment would continue to hold." North Africa, traditionally a French zone of influence, is another growing area of "concern" in the war on terror, Negroponte noted, in response to a series of recent bombings attributed to radical Islamists there. Summing up the big picture, Negroponte concluded, "It is only by working together that we're going to be able to deal with this [international terror] threat."
Whether it all amounted to wishful thinking about burden-sharing while the US is heavily invested in Iraq, or simply an overture to make a positive difference where France can, the deputy secretary of State wrapped his views and comments in history. France, a nation that has helped the United States in the past and that has been helped by America in return, has a proven willingness to fight "and sacrifice" for its ideals, he said, adding that France works to protect "freedom everywhere."

Plenty of Americans are also hungry for warmer bilateral relations. Eighty percent of Americans today believe that it is "somewhat" or "very important" for the United States to have good relations with France in the coming years, according to a survey commissioned by the French-American Foundation. Will Sarkozy make the difference? Sixty-two percent said that they don't know what impact he will have. Washington is clearly hopeful that he will back up the nascent change in the tone of bilateral relations with plenty of substance. If he does, the next State Department breakfast might just be over French toast.

Nicolas Sarkozy, long known as the "man in a hurry" of French politics, has finally calmed down. Yes, the former interior minister has long known how to play calm by slowing his speech and lowering his voice, but the frenetic, impatient and temperamental Sarkozy never seemed far beneath the surface. Today, though, he finally seemed to have achieved serenity as he reached his destination: his inauguration as the sixth president of the republic.

His "arrival" was trumpeted in multiple ceremonies, wreathed in tradition and dusted with the gravitas of France's war-scarred history of occupation, liberation and survival. If the dozens of metal-helmeted guards on horseback, a 21-cannon fire salute and a convertible limousine ride up the Champs-Élysées didn't tell him that he'd finally made it, perhaps it was his private meeting with outgoing President Jacques Chirac, when the new president was given France's nuclear "football" codes. As he escorted his predecessor down the red-carpeted steps of the Élysée Palace and to the waiting car that drove Chirac off toward a post-presidential life. Sarkozy waved warmly, and for once appeared genuinely and preternaturally calm.

Perhaps it was simply the satisfaction of achieving a lifelong ambition. Or perhaps it was the gravity of ceremonies--often steeped in clichés of pomp and circumstance à la française, but that conveyed the weight of history nonetheless. Regardless of the reason, Sarkozy's striking serenity as he stood before the eternal flame at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier that flickers beneath Paris' Arc de Triomphe, suggested that he might finally sense, as he says, that he is a part of something bigger than himself. Earlier in the day, he spoke to 500 guests, allies and supporters in the Élysée Palace's salle des fêtes and to millions of French people watching televisions around the nation--in an effort to link the heroic France that survived the epic struggles of the 20th century with the France of 2007, whose more existential challenges spring from the changes that the fast-mutating world economy requires of a nation steeped in tradition. " On May 6 there was only one victory, that of the France that doesn't want to die. - There was one single victor, the French people who don't want to give up." He continued: "I think with solemnity of the mandate that the French people have confided to me - and that I don't have the right to disappoint." Of the mandate he claims, Sarkozy added, "I will scrupulously fulfill it."

At the end of 12 roller-coaster years as president, the 74-year-old Jacques Chirac offered a warm and vibrant farewell to the nation in his final televised national address this evening. France's grandfatherly president was visibly touched as he spoke the words: "I want to tell you about the strength of the link that, at the bottom of my heart, unites me with each and every one of you. This link is one of respect . . . of admiration. It is one of affection for you, for the people of France. And I want to tell you to what extent I have confidence in you."

It was vintage late-era Chirac. And in a country whose leadership has been cold and distant, it marked a strikingly human contrast to other presidential departures, which have often been tinged with tragedy. President Georges Pompidou, who suffered from a mysterious "flu," suddenly died in office in 1974 from what turned out to be a rare cancer. The ailing François Mitterrand--who also suffered from cancer and who died within a year of departing the Élysée Palace in 1995--gave no farewell speech at all, simply issuing a farewell declaration. And then there was the icy departure of the youngest and most physically active president, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in 1981. In a televised appearance that satirists continue to mock with striking regularity a quarter of a century later, d'Estaing ended a monotone televised adieu to the nation with an awkward pause and then the word, "Goodbye," before standing up and quietly leaving the room as the camera continued to film his empty chair.

Poor Nicolas Sarkozy! When he promised to be president of a France that "wakes up early," he didn't realize that he might have to give up sleeping late. And when he declared on the campaign trail that he'd cut off the golden parachutes of failed CEOs, it wasn't readily apparent that people might examine the gilded gifts that CEOs offer him. Nor, it seems, did a candidate who promised to make the French work more and harder--and with a thinner social services net--conclude that he might need to forego the extravagant tastes long granted to French presidents in favor of a more sober presidency. After learning on May 6 that he would become France's next president, Sarkozy and his family retired to the palatial Hotel Fouquet's Barrière on the Champs Élysées, with its sleek and elegant suites at rates from 1,500-2,000 euros ($2,000-$2,700). The next day, they were transported to an airstrip at Bourget, outside of Paris, where a luxurious Falcon 900 EX jet zipped them off to Malta. Sarkozy may have campaigned on increasing the purchasing power of the French, but such a round-trip journey--including an elaborate in-flight meal--is hardly a bargain at more than 80,000 euros (about $108,000). Fortunately, the jet is owned by a company run by his longtime industrialist friend Vincent Bolloré.

Ever the glad-hander, Sarkozy ignored the VIP arrival's section at the Maltese airport and joined with the common travelers, according to a detailed report in Le Parisien, the USA Today-like French publication. But he and his family returned to the lap of billionaire luxury soon after when they boarded the Paloma, a 2.5-million-euro 60-square-meter über-luxury yacht. The multilevel cruiser, with its 12 cabins, Jacuzzi, four plasma-screen televisions and stunning array of additional accessories, was upgraded in a 5-million-euro renovation a few years back, according to the Parisien, which took relish in the details. But Sarkozy's increase-the-purchasing-power discourse took another hit when word hit the French press and television that the yacht rents for 173,693 euros (more than $235,000) per week--in low season anyway. (If he'd waited until high season, the week would have cost another 20,000 euros.) Fortunately, the boat trip was a gift from Bolloré, as both the industrialist and Sarkozy later made clear. The high style of the sejour spurred no less of a luxury authority than Italian billionaire (and former conservative prime minister) Silvio Berlusconi to comment that "Sarkozy has taken me as a model." Yes, the Parisien picked up that quote, too. And yes, President-elect Sarkozy has finally made the big leagues.

A photo of Nicolas Sarkozy's wide grin fills televisions in apartments throughout the graffiti-stained slab-architecture housing projects of La Forestiere. He has just been declared the next president of the French Republic, one that suddenly feels further away than ever for many residents here. In an apartment living room 14 floors up -- where a wooden board fills in for a broken window- democracy doesn't feel very fair in this moment. "I'm disgusted that 53 percent of French people could vote for Sarkozy," says a heretofore hopeful college student, Yousra Chergui, as she fights back tears. "I live in the suburbs," says the prim 21-year-old. "It will get worse and worse now."

Chergui lives here in Clichy-sous-Bois, amid the open sore that has resulted from decades of France's failed economic and ethnic integration (Islam, Integration and Assimilation ). But more immediately relevant to Chergui, this neighborhood is the incarnation of the domestic challenge that Sarkozy may be least able to deal with. The incoming president has promised to "solve the case" of Clichy, words that sound especially callous in housing projects where time and change are marked by decay.

Downstairs, I speak with Byron, a comic book artist who finds creative inspiration from the lives of young people around him. He sits astride his cruiser bicycle inside of a building entrance, but the breeze still tussles his American-style sweatshirt because the glass façade and the glass doors were destroyed years ago and never replaced by building management. This is Byron's de facto office, his window onto the future. "'Solving' Clichy will be Sarkozy's last concern," he says with scorn. "He is a provocateur. Everyone knows that. Only [French ethnic] 'purists' like Sarkozy. To them, we're all just 'immigrants' here."

Name: marlow
Hometown: Los Angeles
Comments:
Oh [expletive deleted]...My heart goes out to the French people who tried to stop this... I'm with you. Vive la France.

Name: Leonard Muller
Hometown: Chattanooga, TN
Comments:
I think Hillary should now be looking for work outside of the public sector. If France (yes France) will elect a conservative, pro-American, with a NON FRENCH name, the liberals in America most know that there reign here will be brief.

Does France's new president speak American? Sure looks that way. Conservative Nicolas Sarkozy has defeated his Socialist Party rival, Ségolène Royal, by a margin of 53 percent to 47 percent. Royal, the first woman ever to come this close to the French presidency, conceded within minutes. So now the man set to govern the oldest (and arguably the most temperamental) ally of the United States for the next five years is someone whose message will be easy to translate: lower taxes, harder work for more money, greater consumption as the key to more employment and ever tougher measures against criminals and terrorists.

Braving derision by political rivals branding him the new "poodle" of President George W. Bush, who has long been as unpopular in France as he is these days in the United States, Sarkozy made a high-profile visit to Washington last September. Just weeks ago, the French candidate published an American edition of his campaign manifesto, "Testimony: France in the Twenty-First Century" (Pantheon), with a new introduction that makes him sound like the best friend the Yanks have had in Paris since the Marquis de Lafayette.

How Sarkozy's ideas will play with the notoriously protest-prone population he now has to lead is an open question. Testifying to the confrontational mood he brings to the office, police contingents were reinforced today in the same outer-city ghettos that erupted with inchoate, incendiary anger in 2005, while Sarkozy was in charge of public order as the minister of interior. Large contingents of cops were also on hand in Place de la Concorde, the heart of central Paris, in case victory celebrations by the right wing degenerated into outright confrontation between Sarkozy's supporters and those who hate and fear the man "or just want to use the occasion to raise hell.

The French rarely give warm welcomes, but once they get to know you their farewells are gracious and full of politesse.

Take the case of Jacques Chirac, the wily president of the last 12 years. The French have complained about him. They've affectionately or ruthlessly caricatured the man. They've marched against him and battered him like a political punching bag. More than anything, though, they've disapproved of President Chirac. At one point, after the public overwhelmingly rejected the EU Constitution in 2005, Chirac's approval ratings sat near historic lows for months, cascading down into the 20-percent range. When Chirac mused about potentially running for a third presidential term; how many French people wanted him to? A mere one percent.

But just two years on from the failed referendum, as Chirac moves toward the edge of the political stage, the old man is being reassessed. If extra-European affairs were almost completely absent from the presidential campaign, it is because the candidates (as well as most of the French) find little to disagree with in Chirac's main international stances, especially on Iraq. And here at home, the president's every action is no longer widely seen as some Machiavellian maneuver to retain power, even if long-time enemies do accuse him of plotting to avoid post-presidency justice for corruption scandals dating back to his time as mayor of Paris.