Sarkozy sets 100 days to pass economic reforms in France

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 US-style election campaign is anything to go by, Sarkozy will be a different kind of leader from the presidents who have governed France over the past half-century.

The fiery former interior minister, who will take over from Jacques Chirac on May 16 and announce his new government as early as the next day, insists 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 , he wants to give regular news 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 broader pool of advisers.

As one of his close aides, Michel Barnier, former foreign minister, 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 yesterday. "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.

Yesterday, 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 the street can matter almost as much as the Parliament, and unions have 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 yesterday, 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 left Paris yesterday for a three-day break.

Starting Thursday, he will consult with his inner circle to constitute his new government. With 15 ministers, his Cabinet will be leaner than previous governments, and will include some new 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 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.

But his main task will be to push through a first installment of economic reforms. Following the two-round legislative elections on June 10 and 17, Sarkozy will convene an extraordinary parliamentary session. One bill would eliminate payroll and income taxes on overtime in a bid to water down the 35-hour week. Another would grant universities more autonomy. A third draft law would mandate minimum service during strikes in the public transport sector.

Sarkozy has given unions and employers until the end of the summer to avoid the legislation by negotiating an agreement between them. But in the absence of a deal legislators will be asked to vote by the end of August.

"The platform of the president-elect has two faces," Le Monde said in an editorial yesterday. "His speeches have the imprints of a protectionist Bonapartism; his program, much more liberal, talks of a break of Blairist inspiration."

As the writer Jean d'Ormesson wrote in the newspaper Le Figaro yesterday: "Fasten your seat belts. This will be quite a ride."