Sarkozy pledges quick action on French economy

PARIS: Nicolas Sarkozy, France's president-elect, has given himself 100 days to pass a first wave of economic reforms after voters endorsed his call to break with the stagnation that marked the 12-year administration of his predecessor.

Before the summer is over, Sarkozy wants to loosen the 35-hour workweek, cut taxes and curb the power of France's labor unions.

"I will not act fast, I will act very fast," he vowed last week.

If his carefully choreographed, rigorously efficient U.S.-style election campaign is anything to go by, Sarkozy will be a very different kind of leader from the presidents who have governed France over the past half-century.

The fiery former interior minister, who will officially take over from Jacques Chirac on May 16 and announce his new government as early as the next day, insists that he will be personally involved in the details of economic reform.

Instead of addressing the French twice-yearly on Bastille Day and New Year's Eve from Élysée Palace, he wants to give regular press conferences.

At the same time, Sarkozy, 52, is considering creating an enlarged strategic unit dealing with foreign and defense policy in the presidential office modeled on the National Security Council in the White House, opening the decision-making process to a much broader pool of advisers.

As one of his close aides, former Foreign Minister Michel Barnier, put it: "Nicolas Sarkozy will be a presidential entrepreneur."

"This president will be more involved in domestic issues than any of his predecessors and more open to advice on strategic issues," Barnier said in a telephone interview Monday. "The days of our republican monarchy are counted."

He is widely expected to name his friend and campaign adviser François Fillon as prime minister. This would mark a departure from past practice where presidents used their prime ministers as shields who could be sacrificed in times of political crisis. Being more personally involved in domestic policy means that Sarkozy would be more vulnerable to the hostility his reforms could ignite.

After campaigning on a reform platform and beating his Socialist rival, Ségolène Royal, with 53.06 percent of the vote, Sarkozy immediately claimed a mandate for change.

The reality may be more complicated.

Sarkozy's first battle will be the legislative elections in June, where his party, the Union for a Popular Movement, needs to win a majority to enact the laws his advisers have been preparing. On Monday, Sarkozy's team was plotting to field centrist allies and even candidates with leftist credentials in some constituencies to fend off efforts by the Socialist Party and a new centrist movement to deprive the right of a majority.

"We will see how we can give him the biggest parliamentary majority possible so he can put his proposals into effect," said Michèle Alliot-Marie, the minister of defense, who is likely to be a member of Sarkozy's cabinet. "He wants to carry out all the commitments he made during the campaign."

According to the first opinion polls released since Sunday's vote, Sarkozy's party is well placed to win a comfortable majority of the seats in the National Assembly. One survey gave the Union for a Popular Movement 34 percent, compared with 29 percent for the Socialist Party.

But in France, the street can matter almost as much as the Parliament, and unions have already pledged to defend their privileges. "The street is important in France," Barnier said.

Sarkozy's team has pledged not to be cowed by protests.

"We need a strong hand with the CGT in order to send a clear signal to our electorate," Fillon, the former social affairs minister and architect of a pension reform in 2003, told the weekly magazine l'Express on Monday, referring to one of France's two biggest labor unions. The CGT was one of the main organizers of two months of street demonstrations against a youth employment law that was eventually abandoned by Chirac.

"We have to show that we don't act like previous governments," Fillon said.

Sarkozy disappeared Monday to an undisclosed location for a three-day break. Starting Thursday, he will consult with his inner circle to constitute his new government. With only 15 ministers, his cabinet will be leaner than previous governments, and will include some new - and controversial - posts like that of minister for immigration and national identity. Half of his cabinet members are expected to be women, and at least one of them, Rachida Dati, is a French woman of North African descent.

Sarkozy's first foreign visits will be to Berlin and Brussels, where he will present a blueprint for institutional reform of the European Union before a crucial EU summit meeting in June that seeks to break the deadlock over the European constitution following the French no vote in 2005.