Analysis: French Leader Is U.S. Friendly

French President elect Nicolas Sarkozy is cheered by supporters as a French flag is waved at the Gaveau concert hall in Paris, Sunday, May 6, 2007 after the closure of the polling stations for the second round of the presidential election. French voters elected reform-minded Nicolas Sarkozy as their new president on Sunday by a comfortable winning margin.(AP Photo/Claude Paris) (Claude Paris - AP)

Sarkozy's election could improve chances of unblocking the paralysis that has gripped the European Union since 2005, when French and Dutch voters blocked greater integration. Those votes were giant setbacks for pro-Europeans like Sarkozy who want the 27-nation bloc to become a veritable player on the world stage, with coherent policies to guarantee its energy supplies, to regulate immigration from Africa, and to protect European workers from the most cut-throat excesses of globalization.

He promises to be a tough customer in global trade talks, saying Europe should only open its markets to those that open theirs. He wants an EU-wide tax on goods from countries _ he has singled out China _ that have not agreed to cap their greenhouse gas emissions.

And at the World Trade Organization, "I want reciprocity and I do not want anyone to tell me that we don't have the right to do what the Americans do," he says. "We created Europe to act, not to submit," he also says.

Sarkozy says German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the British and Spanish prime ministers, Tony Blair and Jose Luis Rodrigues Zapatero, and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso have all given him a thumbs-up to his proposal that the bloc adopt a new treaty to unblock EU decision-making and give it an elected president.

But, ultimately, Sarkozy could make his greatest impact abroad, or at least in its region, by setting France on its feet again. By some measures, France has become the sick man of Europe. Only Poland and Slovakia have worse unemployment rates than France. Its economic growth rate is one of Europe's slowest _ only Italy and Portugal did worse last year than France's 2.1 percent.

Reforming France and solving such problems, notes Heisbourg, "will have a lot more influence than any amount of foreign policy gesturing."

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Chief of Bureau John Leicester has reported on France since 2002.