T he European Union is discovering what France has been experiencing for the past year: Nicolas Sarkozy is a politician in perpetual motion who combines radical promise with rash impulse. Declaring himself to be a convinced European, Mr Sarkozy has spent the first hours of France's presidency of the EU berating its institutions. The European Commission, he says, should protect people from globalisation, not expose them to it. The EU's excessively liberal trade policy must be reworked. The European Central Bank's masochistic mandate should be rethought.

The French president is embracing the new-found object of his affection so tightly that he seems in danger of squeezing the breath out of it. Yet there remains the possibility that this one-man political oxymoron may yet unscramble France and help the EU unscramble itself too.