The Times of London describes what Sarkozy has in mind for France:

    Top of the agenda will be immediate tax cuts, which total €15 billion (£10.5 billion). These include a 4 per cent reduction in income tax and social charges, tax relief on mortgage interest and the abolition of death duties for all but the richest.

    Mr Sarkozy wants to encourage people to work more than the statutory 35-hour week, which was imposed by the Socialists in 1999 and which he calls a disaster. He wants to strengthen purchasing power and to prime an economy that has suffered relative stagnation and high unemployment for two decades. As well as the carrot, he intends to apply a British-style stick: the benefits received by jobseekers will be reduced if they refuse two offers of work in fields for which they are qualified.

    Among money-saving measures, Mr Sarkozy says that one in every two civil servants who retire from France’s bloated state administration will not be replaced. One of the potentially most explosive measures is to scrap the so-called special regimes. These are generous pensions and retirement conditions that are enjoyed by public-sector workers in the railways, Paris transport system, energy utilities and post office.

    However, he will not follow the laissez-faire doctrines that were pursued in Britain and the US in the 1980s. The state will keep a firm hand on industrial policy, intervening to support French firms in key economic sectors and maintaining a large public sector. Mr Sarkozy is also heading for conflict with Europe over his schemes for imposing tariffs on imports from outside the Union.

The Times’ editorial addresses the obstacles Sarkozy faces:

Mr Sarkozy has still not quashed self-serving claims by Socialist opponents that his policies are divisive – claims that were given superficial credence by his courting of Le Pen voters, his insistence on a new French patriotism and proposals for tough new immigration controls. His first test may come within hours: if the suburbs react to his election with another eruption of violence, he will have to demonstrate a determination to enforce law and order right from the start.

He knows, however, as do most of his supporters, that the real problem in the febrile suburbs is not racism or discrimination but unemployment. The shamefully high level of joblessness among all the young, and especially those of immigrant origin, is a main factor in the alienation of many young people and the emigration of the brightest. It is here that Ms Royal fatally failed to convince the country that her policies – which amounted to yet more state intervention and protection – would ever create the jobs and flexibility France desperately needs. A priority for the new President is to push through urgent measures to get France back to work: this includes tax cuts, a law on strike reforms and other proposals that he hopes to put to an emergency session of parliament in July. France turned out in huge numbers to vote for change. President Sarkozy now has to move fast to deliver it.

In his commentary, Charles Bremner, The Times’ Paris correspondent, avers that Sarkozy’s victory “marks the opening of a new era in France, yet at the same time, it is an unusual act of continuity” and compares his election to Margaret Thatcher’s:

The French have thrown out their sitting governments or presidents in every election since 1978. For the first time since 1969, they have voted in a new President from the outgoing President’s party. Sarkozy of course sees himself as une rupture with the Gaullist administration of Jacques Chirac which he has served for most of the past five years as Interior Minister. In the same way, in 1979 Margaret Thatcher had served as a minister in the previously ruling Conservative party yet she broke with the consensus of her party. This is in many ways France’s Thatcher moment [emphasis added].

The Times’ Bronwen Maddox thinks that “it is easier to see Sarkozy having a rapid effect abroad than at home”:

It does not take much more to mend relations with Washington – particularly with an Administration in such a chastened state – than to declare a desire to do so, and to get on the plane. Ask Angela Merkel; the German Chancellor managed to insert criticism of wide flanks of US policy into her first encounter with President Bush, so grateful was he that she was not Gerhard Schröder.

In the European Union, the mere fact of having a new French President will release the paralysis over a new constitution (or whatever uncontroversial diminutive it is called). Sarkozy favours, in broad outline, the notion of a pared-down version of the ill-fated original. Given that this is all that Britain and several other countries will accept, it is likely to emerge as the compromise, despite Germany’s desire for something more ambitious. It is possible, then, that with one step, Sarkozy puts himself back in the mainstream of the next big decision in European policy.

Tim Hames of The Times believes that nothing less than the survival of the Fifth Republic is at stake:

. . . if [Sarkozy] does not succeed, more then his reputation will be damaged. “Blame the system” will once again become the watchword. The Fifth Republic will be seen as no more effective than its many discarded predecessors. It is Mr Sarkozy’s agenda or, in effect, it is a Sixth Republic. The stakes are that high and, ultimately, that simple.

Napoleon Bonaparte, whom Mr Sarkozy cites as his hero (short men stick together), noted of his leadership that: “I am sometimes a fox and sometimes a lion. The whole secret of government is knowing when to be one or the other.” The new President will have to be as cunning. He needs to reconcile this fantastically creative but intensely stubborn nation with the realities of an international economy that does not allow for 35-hour weeks or one in four of the population claiming to be a farmer and looking for a subsidy. He will have to deal with opponents for whom the riot is a strategic weapon. He has to frame a foreign policy that is more sophisticated than the “Yanks, no thanks” message of the Chirac era. I do not know whether the French have an equivalent phrase to “last chance saloon” but right now, like it or not, they are drinking (decent plonk, doubtless) in it.

In the Financial Times, Martin Arnold talks about the disarray in the Socialist Party:

Commentators predict the party could now be torn in two, along the lines of the split in the 2005 European referendum, when a large minority rebelled against the official party line and campaigned for a No vote.

”Her defeat will be extremely damaging for the left. Huge divisions will start to emerge at 8pm on Sunday,” says Eric Dupin, author of A Droite Toute, a book on the rightward shift of French voters.

Jean-Marie Colombani, director of Le Monde newspaper, says: “Globalisation is still considered a threat and diabolised as the root of all evil. The left must get out of the ideological impasse in which it has been trapped for too long.”

In its editorial, The Guardian does little to hide its disappointment. Depicting Sarkozy’s victory as a “sharp swing to the right,” it says that the French “have not voted in a man they particularly like” but have “voted in a president it feels it needs.” Royal’s defeat was, in part self-inflicted:

For most of her campaign she was gloriously alone, sniped at by an unreformed and truculent party whose jealous stars were all too eager to play the role of Brutus. It was not a question of who would be the first to put the knife in, but who would be the last . . . Hidebound by a manifesto that was not hers, Ms Royal said as little as she could. Had the centrist-leaning Socialist candidate spoken her mind, she would have split her party.

As did Royal on the eve of the election, the Guardian’s editorial warns of social unrest:

Having acquired a reputation as the man who gets things done, the president-elect will storm into action. For this 6,000 riot police around Paris are braced. All police leave in the Seine-Saint-Denis region of north-east Paris, the scene of the worst riots in 2005, has been cancelled. The only brake on the president-elect’s actions is the immediate prospect of parliamentary elections on June 10 and 17. These are likely to go the same way as the presidential election, and if they do the last hurdle will be cleared. If rioting does break out in the suburbs, the social unrest will not do anyone, least of all the immigrant communities, any good. It will only play into the hands of a president eager to earn his spurs as a tough, no-nonsense leader.

The Telegraph’s editorial begins by asserting that Sarkozy “now has an unarguable mandate for radical change.” Implementing this mandate won’t be easy:

Many Frenchmen will oppose by any means, legal or illegal, the dismantling of their precious droits acquis: the various social and employment perks they have wrung out of past governments. And France is a country where the verdict of the ballot box is often trumped by the will of the street. We can be sure that, as soon as Mr Sarkozy moves to keep his promises, there will be a spate of strikes, blockades and lock-ins.

For Mr Sarkozy, however, the risks of backing down outweigh those of bulldozing through. There is, about the French electorate, something of the spoilt child. They whine and protest and drum their heels; but, deep down, the last thing they want is to be taken at their word. They know that reforms are necessary, and that some of these will be painful. But they would lose all respect for a government that, having won at the polls, caved in to manifestations.

Mr Sarkozy is likely to be an especially awkward negotiating partner over Europe where, despite the EU constitution being defeated by a larger majority of Frenchmen than elected him, he plans to bring it back under a new name. He hinted as much in his victory speech. His uncritical support for closer integration sits oddly with his free-market domestic agenda.

An article by John Lichfield in The Independent deals with changes in the French electorate:

One of the lessons of the first round of the 2007 presidential election is that the combined left – from Socialists to Trotskyists via Communists and Greens – has shrunk to only just over one third of the electorate.

The whole spectrum of French politics has shifted to the right. Within that spectrum, Mme Royal’s score in the first round – 25.8 per cent – was historically a high figure for a Socialist. The problem was that the “rest of the left” totalled only about 10 per cent . .