The economic crisis is bad news for economists, or at least for those in the west whose orthodox recipes offered an uncritical gloss on the deceptive boom years and failed to anticipate the devastating financial meltdown that has followed. No wonder then that in this time of retrenchment and rethinking, there is also a search for fresh perspectives and voices that can propose economic solutions for the world after the crash.

It is a big responsibility to place on anyone's shoulders, let alone that of a diminutive 36-year-old woman easily mistaken for a student. But in the crucial area of finding answers to the enduring problems of poverty and development in the global south, a young left-leaning French economist named Esther Duflo is leading one of the interesting and creative currents of new economic thinking. Patrice de Beer is former London and Washington correspondent for Le Monde

Esther Duflo teaches at MIT and runs a project called the Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL, whose first letter comes from the name of her Saudi sponsor, Abdul Latif Jameel). She has become so famous in France that she was invited to chair a year-long project on "knowledge against poverty" at the - almost exclusively male - cradle of Parisian intellectualism and academia, the Collège de France; her inaugural lecture on 8 January 2009 on the theme of "experiments, science and the fight against poverty" was held in front of an enthusiastic crowd which overflowed from the largest lecture-hall.

A pioneer's project

Esther Duflo could not be further from the traditional image of French (usually Parisian, usually male) intellectuals - beloved abroad but recycled too at home - whose concern with "great ideas" tends to frame their encounter with the actual world of living, working, suffering individuals. She is also no friend of those big international bodies charged with responsibility for dispensing or regulating aid to the less-developed countries, and whose bureaucracy consumes a significant share of dwindling aid funds (see John Lichfield, "Step aside, Sartre: this is the new face of French intellectualism", Independent, 13 January 2009).

She has focused on the importance of economic-development programmes which work best at grassroots level rather than in the gleam of the planner's eye or seminar-room's sheen. She is both academic and populariser, and writes a mind-blowing column in centre-left daily Libération (founded by Jean-Paul Sartre). The persuasiveness of her ideas is reflected in the growing attention she has received, from her peers in selected other projects such as the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development and from respected media outlets (see "International bright young things", Economist, 30 December 2008).

This governing idea of this rigorous protestant woman, since childhood deeply committed to helping the poor, is of "randomised evaluations of social programmes": the most effective (and cost-effective) way, she argues, for the downtrodden to find a route out of poverty. The implication is that external agencies can assist less by doing "more" than by doing "better". Esther Duflo acknowledges the influence here of the Bangladeshi pioneer of microcredit, Muhammed Yunus, whom she describes as "the living evidence that economic innovation is possible" (see Farida Khan, "Muhammad Yunus: an economics for peace", 25 October 2006).

Duflo believes that economists should not wait for perfect conditions to fall from the sky before starting to evaluate projects; they should rather create these conditions themselves via an experimental method which (as she says) "gives you the chance to be surprised". Economists are not pure scientists but rather like plumbers: their job is to fix things. Thus they "have to remain modest, to observe the behaviour of social players and deduct from that the laws of economy". It is a vision that preceded the deep phase of the current global crisis, and is given added point by it (see Esther Duflo, "21 Solutions to Save the World: Fund What Works" [Foreign Policy, May-June 2007]).

It is deceptively simple too. For it requires getting rid of the traditional (ideological or professional) blinkers which have long inhibited development strategies. It also requires a quality that economists are only now, with the discrediting of so many ideas by the great recession, beginning to see the point of: modesty. Her emphasis on experimental trial and error, cross-checking and different approaches echoes a remark by Franklin D Roosevelt which she likes to quote: "The country demands bold, persistent, experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But, above all, try something."

Her work with J-PAL in India and Africa offers many examples of her original methods. Her grassroots testing, for example, enabled her to discover a way to reduce child truancy by 25%: give vermifuge to pupils (at a tiny cost per head and per year) to free children of worms. But school attendance itself does not necessarily mean learning anything from teachers who may lack dedication to and respect for their pupils, using a curriculum designed for the elite. Here, the "Read India" programme, implemented with a local NGO called Pratham, showed that one additional young tutor per school could increased literacy and numeracy much more - and at a much lower cost - than buying computers. (Yet isn't it much more gratifying for a donor to have his picture taken next to a computer than to a jar of worm-powder?)

Some of J-PAL's programmes - on the use of fertilisers in Kenya, or the distribution of sprayed mosquito-nets in Uganda, Madagascar and Kenya - have led Duflo to question the ideas of far more high-profile analysts. Her research on mosquito-nets confirmed that the policy (supported by the World Health Organisation) of offering them for free was most effective against malaria, as opposed to the aid-critic William Easterly's advocacy of selling them at a low price.

J-PAL's project on fertilisers builds on Malawi's policy of handing "starter- kits" to farmers to confound both the positivist views of orthodox economics and to dependency-creating subsidies. Duflo's MIT and J-PAL colleague Abhijit Banerjee believes that experience and good technical knowledge can enrich economists' understanding. The offer of free delivery to farmers in Kenya who placed an early order for fertilisers - and thus allowed knowledge of their effect to be spread quickly around the community - is a classic case-study of innovation based on precise observation and adapting to local circumstance.

Duflo describes this as an example of "a programme which, for a very low cost, can change the everyday life of poor farmers by systematically improving the productivity of their fields". Her ambitions in such projects are conveyed by informed by the point in her Collège de France lecture that ground-level experimentation "compels scientists and field-workers to accept being contradicted and surprised. My feeling is that this is their true strength, and an opportunity to advance science while fighting poverty".

A burning question

These evaluations are a "crucial step" towards prosperity for the many; fighting poverty in the most efficiently possible way is a "necessary" foundation. She warns that John Maynard Keynes's famous comment "in the long run, we are all dead" takes on "a more real and sinister sense in the poorest countries". The explosion of inequalities has had devastating consequences in many parts of the globe; to conjure vast sums in bailouts or in aid is not going to help when the system itself is dying.

There is a need rather to focus on local experiments - cross-tested in different environments - to help understand how to reduce poverty, and to make the reduction permanent. For Duflo, "macroeconomic models will be based on microeconomic principles: the macro model is built from micro blocks like a Meccano". This is a component of an ambitious project to redefine economics as "a real human science - rigorous, impartial and serious, generous, ambitious and committed - but also human in its fragility and modesty". It is a refreshing and bold vision - pursued too in her founding editorship of a new publication, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics - from a young scholar-practitioner unafraid to challenge "the self-proclaimed experts of the anti-poverty fight".

Esther Duflo and her colleagues have begun to provide answers to a burning question that is even more relevant amid the desperate economic conditions of 2009: where will the 21st-century solutions to the world's economic problems come from?

When over a million French people, with the support of a vast majority in public opinion, downed telephones and keyboards on 29 January to march through town centres across the country, they were continuing the tradition of what is seen across the world as little more than a charming national idiosyncrasy. As Americans were sharing hot dogs and high-fives at the Super Bowl and Brits complaining about the weather, France, of course, went on strike.

Hugh Cleary is a freelance writer and translator based in London. He has recently been researching European theories republicanism.The Times in Britain chortled benevolently at a demonstration it described as a "tantrum" and a "ritual", an exercise in "letting off steam and celebrating cherished tradition", arguing, in short, that this was a matter of show rather than substance and that political consequences would be negligible. Patrice de Beer's article on openDemocracy takes the threat to the political establishment more seriously but is similar in tone on the demonstrations, labelling them "carnivals of protest" (Patrice de Beer, "France's politics of regicide", 6 February 2009).

Such analysis fails to do justice to the demonstrators. For this was indeed a protest about substance, a demand that the voices of the people be reintegrated into a debate and economic context in which political and business leaders pledge unimaginable sums in support of a system about which the only thing widely understood is that it has failed. This was no nostalgic left-wing condemnation of capitalism, nor was it a case of farmers and lorry-drivers protecting their own personal interest - it was a defence of the very essence of true republicanism: the engagement of individuals in the collective political process, in pursuit of a common good. As French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut puts it, "The republic is not a collection of individuals, each looking after his own affairs; it is - ideally - an assembly of citizens".

From Rousseau's "Social Contract", in which he wrote that freedom in civil society is only possible through "obedience to a law one prescribes to oneself", to Iseult Honohan's "Civic Republicanism" - a compelling vision of republicanism for the 21st century - which emphasises "political participation in shaping the collective life", it is clear that the principles of republicanism demand both an active contribution by citizens to public life, and official structures that facilitate and encourage this contribution. 

The best and worst of the French republic

Seen in this tradition, the demonstrations embody the best and draw attention to the worst characteristics of the French incarnation of republican theory. The most problematic element set out by Honohan is the impetus needed ‘from the bottom up', the imperative that citizens must not only make the leap of prioritising the common good over their particular desires, but also devote time to pursuing it - not rejecting republicanism, as Oscar Wilde did to socialism, on the grounds that it would take up too many evenings.

How encouraging, then, that political activism in France is alive and well not just as a means of making demands but as participation in the establishment of the common good. January's strike - like the protests before Christmas of secondary school pupils against cuts which will not affect them but their successors, and the mobilisation of young people in 2006 against the CPE employment reform which might have given them more chance of getting a job - was characterised by an uplifting absence of self-interest. Opposition politicians and trade unions may attempt to distil the expression of dissatisfaction into specific demands (such as financial support for consumers rather than institutions) but the real demonstration was against the departure of public policy from common notions of fairness, from the common good. It is telling that the rallying cry of protestors was not a specific policy demand but a plea to be re-empowered in the political process - "Sarkozy, entends-tu?" ("Sarkozy, are you listening?")

The bottom-up impetus, then, is present. But over the centuries France's republic has lost sight of itself. Citizen participation and collective deliberation on the common good have been replaced at its heart by an alienating obsession with the distinction between public and private - which has entailed the separation of the public realm from its stakeholders.

A president who is constitutionally omnipotent and personally hyper-active, and an unrepresentative political structure, where unelected officials can occupy the highest legislative posts, have removed policy-making from the influence of the electorate. There is a strong argument, as the social scientist Marcel Gauchet claims, that "France's democracy is becoming ever less democratic".

Furthermore, hiding behind the mantra of equality and the flawed principle of laicité, the French state refuses to recognise individual identity in the public sphere, preferring to consign difference to the private realm. Yet a truly republican government must endeavour to engage with its citizens, just as it expects them to become involved in the political process. Honohan's convincing argument on dealing with pre-political identities is that, while it is not necessary to officially sanction cultural practices or values, it is paramount to "recognise the citizen in their identity". Until the state makes this fundamental recognition of its citizens, its problems with the integration of different groups are likely to persist. It is unreasonable to expect anybody to, in Sarkozy's words, "aimez la France" - that is, presumably, identify with collective society - if society's representatives fail to recognise and engage with individuals.

A way forward

It is clear, then, that the stresses Patrice de Beer identifies in the French republic - and the resulting breeding ground for extremism - are down not to a failure of people to assume their responsibilities as citizens, but to a failure of republican structures to adequately incorporate them.

Writing in openDemocracy in 2006, in the wake of the CPE demonstrations, Henri Astier noted the power of French public protest and suggested that it held greater legitimacy than even elected politicians. He adventurously advocated a kind of licensed anarchy as a remedy (Henri Astier, "In praise of French direct democracy", 12 April 2006). Improving democracy, however, does not necessitate its destruction. While some constitutional reform would be desirable to make leaders more accountable, what France really needs is a new spirit of engagement with its citizens and a desire to integrate them into the political process.

Ségolène Royal's efforts in this direction, under the name of "participative democracy", were derided in the run-up to the 2007 presidential election. Nothing could be more absurd, it was suggested, than a person who wished to govern millions giving disproportionate access to small groups. On the contrary, nothing could be more important. This is recognised in America, where the "town hall" debate still plays a key role, where the greatest threat to Obama's victory was posed by an American "everyman" (or plumber) and where McCain was at his most dignified when he challenged the racist ravings of one of his own supporters at a rally.

France could learn from this attitude to citizen engagement, as it could from re-examining its own founding fathers, from Rousseau to Renouvier. Until its government begins to act positively to engage with the views of citizens, social fractures will endure and it will continue to be a republic in nothing but name.

The efforts of France's hyperactive president Nicolas Sarkozy to become an indispensable and omnipresent global actor continue to be aided by the disarray of his domestic political opposition.  The internecine war for the control of the principal leftist movement, the Parti Socialiste (Socialist Party / PS), is emblematic of "Sarko's" luck. While the world's economic and social situation enters into ever-deeper crisis, denting incomes and threatening millions of jobs, the socialist leaders' dispute has offered a bathetic contrast. Indeed, coincidence of the G20 summit in Washington and the PS's gathering in Rheims gave the French media ample opportunity to contrast the grand scale of global challenges with the petty partisan warfare into which the congress descended.Patrice de Beer is former London and Washington correspondent for Le Monde

Among Patrice de Beer's articles in openDemocracy:

"Calle Santa Fé: between Chile and freedom" (16 January 2008)

"Sarkozy and God" (6 February 2008)

"May ‘68: France's politics of memory" (28 April 2008)

"Nicolas Sarkozy, the frenetic leader" (25 July 2008)

"Nicolas Sarkozy: world leader, local problem" (12 November 2008)

The internal agony of France's main leftwing party is severely disillusioning to many observers. The credibility of politics in France is at its lowest when it is most needed. The French used to say they had the "most stupid rightwing in the world". Now, when the PS is split between leaders who loathe each other much more than they do Sarkozy, and the extreme left is fragmented into multiple rival groups (while engaged in a hopeless search to coalesce into a single force that could overtake the PS itself), can it also be said that they have the "dumbest left in the world"?

A dubious affair

Maybe, but also maybe not. Yes, the PS has a new first secretary, Martine Aubry, who defeated her rival, Ségolène Royal by a few dubious votes after an election that some compared to what happened in Florida in 2000 when George W Bush was sent to the White House instead of Al Gore. The margin - a majority of forty-two of the 137,116 votes (out of 232,912 paid-up PS members) - was narrow enough to reinforce rather than quell the tensions that had preceded the result.

"Ségo", the socialist presidential candidate defeated by Sarkozy in the election of May 2007, took a few days to overcome suspicions of what she called a "stolen victory" before reluctantly acknowledging her rival's close win - without, however, shedding her ambitions to reform the party and lead it towards the presidential elections of 2012.

Martine Aubry, the mayor of Lille from a strong political lineage (as the daughter of Jacques Delors, and labour minister in the Lionel Jospin government of the late 1990s who introduced the now almost defunct thirty-five-hour week), has offered to cooperate with a rival she detests while promising those who supported her leftist platform the lion's share of the party's leadership. It is hard at this point to say whether a harmonious "wedding of the carp and the rabbit" (as the French saying goes) is possible, or whether the devastated image of a party that has lost touch with the real world as well as with voters can recover.

All this looks like a recipe for political disaster. But this is only half the story of a PS drama marked by dubious tactics and irregularities. How, after all, to describe a process where full election results are not published more than a week after polling-day? Where widespread suspicions of fraud in regional constituencies have not been seriously investigated? Where results can only be challenged before a national body where the majority will obviously vote for their candidate rather than for the truth?

Both the definitive results of the 21 November members' poll and those of the PS national council on 25 November, remain in doubt (the council, controlled by Aubry's friends, increased her majority to 102 after days of consultation). No wonder there have been references to Tammany Hall, French-style - although it is worth mentioning too that the PS is the only major French party to hold real elections, even if they are messy; Nicolas Sarkozy's Union pour une Mouvement Populaire (Union for a Presidential Majority / UMP) is all but run by the president himself.

Patrice de Beer is former London and Washington correspondent for Le Monde

Among Patrice de Beer's articles in openDemocracy:

"Calle Santa Fé: between Chile and freedom" (16 January 2008)

"Sarkozy and God" (6 February 2008)

"May ‘68: France's politics of memory" (28 April 2008)

"Nicolas Sarkozy, the frenetic leader" (25 July 2008)

"Nicolas Sarkozy: world leader, local problem" (12 November 2008) 

All Against Ségolène

If the melancholy current condition of France's main leftwing party is worth a longer look, it is in part because the media-circulated image of political mud-wrestling between two ambitious prima-donnas - whose social-democratic platforms are, in truth, not that far apart - conceals a more interesting reality.

Jacques Julliard, a respected political analyst from the left-leaning weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, writes that the Aubry-Royal contest was less a left-right spat, or a war of the new vs the old (as in Britain's "old" and "new" Labour) and more an "anthropological" fight. Julliard, citing French philosopher René Girard's "theory of sacrifice", added that the PS's old guard - known as the "elephants" - chose to assemble behind Aubry and the "TSS" banner (Tous Sauf Ségolène [All Against Ségolène]) because they had been "looking for an expiatory victim to slaughter in order to ensure tribal cohesion and [the] regeneration of [the groups'] members".

But this still begs the question: why, if indeed the two "queens of the rose" are ideologically so close to each other? The answer is that the real issue at stake was not control of the party or clash of personality (even if civil wars are often bloodier than "normal" wars) - but Ségolène Royal's ambition to change the PS from top to bottom. This involved a great internal shift:

▪ transforming a party where one-third of members are party officials and elected officials into a mass movement where membership-fees would be slashed to attract new and younger voters less ideologically minded and more interested in societal issues than in class warfare

▪ opening it towards the centre in a country where all the "lefts" put together only represent 40% of voters, and where moderate votes are needed to win a majority in a presidential election.

This ambition, to the "elephants" that control the party machinery and are weary of members' unpredictability, represented a betrayal, a mortal sin and even more, a mortal danger. So they united to thrash the female troublemaker.

It was a fearsome sight to see such unlikely comrades cohere around the TSS cause: pro- and anti-Europe figures, pro- and anti-globalisation - from leftist ex-prime minister Laurent Fabius (who helped ensure a "no" vote in the 2005 referendum on the European constitution) to centrist former finance minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn (now International Monetary Fund director-general, and a European integrationist); from outgoing PS first secretary (also Royal's ex-partner and father of her four children) François Hollande to the failed candidate in the presidential election of 2002, Lionel Jospin.

The insults flowed freely; the mildest being that "Ségo" was stupid, mad or unqualified. "Who is going to take care of the children", said Fabius. Jospin went even further, comparing her with "neo"-socialists who collaborated with the Nazis during the second world war.

After the elephants

The elephants' confident rampage convinced them that Ségolène Royal would lose decisively. In the event, she actually won the first round of voting with 29% of the votes. This provoked a quick rearrangement of tactics in which the old guard tried to unite the three other factions - represented 71% of the votes - against her. Indeed, these managed to go as far as adopting a common platform, but failed to agree on a common candidate before finally rallying behind Martine Aubry. This did not stop "Ségo" winning again in the initial direct contest with her main rival, before they were virtually tied with 50% each (which meant that Aubry's vote had declined from 71% to just over 50% between the two rounds). The more Royal was attacked, the more she gained support - and she remains the favourite to be the left's presidential candidate in 2012.

Indeed, the results even at their provisional stage showed that she carried a majority of rank-and-file voters against a worn-out party machine which had failed for more than a decade to undertake any imaginative ideological and practical work to adjust the party's platform to the realities of the 21st century.

True, PS members do not always agree with her not-so-original political rhetoric; nor with a very personal, almost messianic style that has some resemblances with the style of campaigning familiar in the United States. But what unites them - another echo of the Barack Obama phenomenon - is their hope for a long-delayed modernisation of the PS, weariness with a generation of feet-dragging old men who always seem to be looking in the rear-mirror, and desire to move beyond the tired slogans and deal-making politics among different political courants (streams).

But, at this stage at least, Ségolène Royal has lost her political battle. Will Martine Aubry be able to open up the PS and break free of the shackles held by her "elephant" supporters. or will Royal build on her near success and carry the day in the battle to come; will the PS become an efficient national opposition party ready to retake power or remain a coalition of local "barons" just needing a common brand-name to support their local ambitions?

Even at the end, the questions outnumber the answers. But if the credibility of politics in France is to revive, at some point the new way of doing and thinking about politics that Ségolène Royal reaches towards must find expression - of a kind that can find a way to challenge both the PS's elephants and Nicolas Sarkozy.

France's president is a man who relishes crises. As he hops from one to another, from the Russian invasion of Georgia to the financial hurricane, Nicolas Sarkozy thrives in the self-image of "crisis-manager-in-chief" - and strives to make others perceive the halo. It helps that he can - at least until the last day of 2008 - include the "presidency" of the European Union in his portfolio.

Patrice de Beer is former London and Washington correspondent for Le Monde

Among Patrice de Beer's articles in openDemocracy:

"Calle Santa Fé: between Chile and freedom" (16 January 2008)

"Sarkozy and God" (6 February 2008)

"May ‘68: France's politics of memory" (28 April 2008)

"Nicolas Sarkozy, the frenetic leader" (25 July 2008)

The characteristic image of "Sarko" is of a figure popping up, rushing onto or off his plane, seizing an initiative or propelling himself to the frontline and frontpage. There is hardly a European or global issue where the president does not want to interpolate himself (and if it is just too intractable or time-consuming - as in the Democratic Republic of Congo - he can deploy his foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner). And indeed, the bigger the issue the larger the claim. It is no wonder that Sarko now presents himself as a great friend of president-elect Barack Obama, drawing on the capital he gained when he hosted the United States's next leader at the Elysée palace during the election campaign (while disdaining to find time to welcome Obama's Republican rival, John McCain).

To achieve this pre-eminence and sustain the profile that accompanies it, he is shameless in borrowing ideas from other leaders (such as Britain's prime minister Gordon Brown on financial reforms), overshadowing once-friendly rivals (such as Germany and its chancellor Angela Merkel), or pushing himself into the limelight (such as claiming credit for convincing Moscow to sign a ceasefire with Georgia, and Washington over the convening of the G20 summit on 15 November 2008).

Sarkozy's G20-summit strategy extends to seeking recognition for coaxing Asian leaders (including China's president, Hu Jintao) to attend. But this pattern of frenetic activity is almost designed to provoke irritation, even among France's closest allies. The apparent tension with Angela Merkel over an invitation to the armistice commemoration on 11 November is but a minor example. More serious has been the discontent Sarkozy's grandstanding has occasioned across the European Union.

For the other side of Sarkozy's aspiration to be the "president of Europe" - a title he loves - is the accusation that he is plotting a kind of coup d'etat against European institutions, by trying to extend his "presidency" beyond the end-date of 31 December 2008 (when the mantle passes to the Czech Republic). The nerves are rattling in Prague, in Stockholm (which succeeds to the presidency in July 2009), in Berlin, and beyond; not least as Sarkozy's invention of a new quasi-political grouping based on eurozone membership (which conveniently excludes the Czechs and Swedes) appears also to sidestep the established Eurogroup chaired by respected Luxembourg premier and finance minister Jean-Claude Juncker).

It is all a striking turnaround for a man who, when elected in May 2007, did not seem very well versed (nor especially interested) in foreign affairs, and who had even mused over the idea of abolishing the Quai d'Orsay (site of the French foreign ministry). Sarko, a former interior minister, made his political name in the domestic arena - campaigning on law-and-order and repelling immigrants. But he has caught up quickly; indeed, history shows (for Sarkozy as with George W Bush) that even if elections are seldom won on international issues, the latter tend to bite at some point in a presidential term.

A domestic test

But if Nicolas Sarkozy knocks repeatedly at the world's door, his restlessness extends too to an impatient desire to find urgent solutions (and often merely populist non-solutions) to the many domestic concerns that have come under his voracious inspection. Among the near-limitless reform agenda, the very institutional map of France itself has been redrawn several times even since May 2007. The national structures of the judiciary, military, universities and health services have been shaken to the core - in part to revamp overlapping and often obsolete networks, but also in part to save money in a country Sarkozy himself has called "broke".

A further renovation has now been added to the list with the setting up of a new commission, headed by Sarkozy's mentor and former prime minister, Édouard Balladur. The task is to simplify France's multilayered administrative machinery ("I don't want a new report, I want solutions" - and within three months, was the president's characteristic demand).

This official aims of this reform are to save costs and improve management. An unofficial political aim is to curtail the influence of the Parti Socialiste (Socialist Party / PS) - which, if it looks incapable of taking back power on the national level, still wields control of many regions, départements and major cities.

It will be a hard task to unthread such an intricate system - harder, arguably, than many of Sarkozy's international endeavours. In 1969, Charles de Gaulle was obliged to resign from the presidency after his own regional reform - opposed by almost the entire political establishment - was rejected in a referendum. François Mitterrand was able to make some changes to the system in the early 1980, but since then no government has had the courage to propose radical reform of a clotted system.

There is popular as well as political resistance to any such effort. The French are deeply attached to their (real or imaginary) rural roots, and nostalgia for their ancestral départements or identification with the location of a weekend home is never far from the surface, and easily tapped. Politicians of left and right look with disfavour on any changes which could harm their local influence. The massive parliamentary opposition to the suppression of the départements' number on cars' number-plates (a decision now subject to a qualified reversal) is a clear signal of this very modern malaise.

A difficult reform

Yet if France is so hard to govern, it is not because of her 365 (allegedly) types of cheese, as Charles de Gaulle (allegedly) once said. It is rather because of the inextricable administrative behemoth created during the last four decades by the piling up of seven layers of institutions under the national one: 36,782 communes (from tiny villages to big cities); 2,580 intercommunal groupings; 100 départements (including four overseas, divided into 4,039 cantons, 325 arrondissements and 334 pays, or informal districts); and twenty-six regions.

Most of these have specific administrative and fiscal powers, backed by a huge budget that involves 30% of all civil servants (689,000) managing 75% of public investments. France also has powerful elected bodies at communal, intercommunal, departmental (where each canton is represented by a counsellor) and regional levels; while the membership of the senate is heavily tilted in favour of underpopulated rural areas. At least some fiscal decisions need to be dealt with at all six levels before a decision can be reached.

Some in the leftwing opposition, led by the socialists, may agree in principle on the need to simplify this indigestible, multi-layered cake. But as a whole the left is opposed to any reform which would reduce its local powers and slash its financial resources - at the very time it is looking ahead to the next regional elections in 2010.

But there are also vocal and powerful opponents within Sarkozy's own conservative camp. The chief whip of his Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP) in the national assembly, former minister Jean-François Copé, and the newly elected president of the senate, Gérard Larcher, have set up their own commission to do as much as they can to control the debate and block any proposed change.

What makes this reform even more difficult to design - let alone to implement - is the intricacy of France's local-government structures. An entangled system with overlapping responsibilities will be complicated and costly to unravel. The question of who is going to pay the price of reform (in in loss of power as well as monetary terms) is a key one. Will local villages with a few dozen voters be forcibly regrouped with other neighbouring boroughs; will départements be merged with regions, or small regions be amalgamated (Normandy is divided into two regions, for example); will the sacrosanct republican principle of uniformity - which specifies that any structure has to be identical with others in the same category, thus denying the option of local variation - be broken, allowing a la carte regroupings between regions and départements (or cities and départements in the case of Paris, which is both at the same time)?

The last quality 

The French president may in the course of this campaign discover the truth of the renowned phrase of Tip O'Neill: "all politics is local". It is one thing to ride a white horse around the world looking for diplomatic victories, or even to impose economic and social burdens on voters at home. But it is quite another to undermine - or even just to threaten - the political fiefdoms and ambitions of France's politicians. After all, this is a country where the "local" is also the regional and the national: members of the national assembly or senate are also often local councillors, mayors or chairs of regional assemblies. In this sense they have the best of both worlds: a local power-base, and a vote at national level which (especially in troubled times) may be badly needed by president and government to pass legislation.

Nicolas Sarkozy has a very personal and persuasive blend of qualities: ideological conviction and pragmatism, charm and ruthlessness, boundless determination to trample any opposition to his goals and pervasive influence on the media. Yet even for him, it will be a tough and possibly painful challenge to achieve reform in this area.

Sarko has another precious quality (shared perhaps with the United States president-elect he reveres): luck. The burst of renewed popularity (as reflected in current opinion-polls) he has acquired - in part as a by-product of the enduring internecine conflict within the Parti Socialiste - is a case in point. To overcome so much opposition on this issue, active as well as passive, he will need plenty of this too. A failure would certainly dent his image. But Sarkozy is no Charles de Gaulle: if he were to fail he certainly would not resign.