While most nations are trying to liberalize their economies, both major candidates in France are competing to promise higher taxes and more spending. Sarkozy is supposed to be the market-oriented candidate, but he has endorsed higher taxes on financial services — and is suggesting sympathy for a higher VAT, according to MSNBC:

Nicolas Sarkozy will push for a European tax on “speculative movements” by financial groups, such as hedge funds, if he wins this year’s French presidential elections. …his plan to tax financial flows is likely to dismay US and UK financial groups, as well as parts of the French business community, which largely prefers him to Ms Royal. …His comments echo the traditional Gaullist suspicion of capitalism and financial investors, for which Mr Chirac has become well known. Mr Sarkozy’s attack on speculative finance mirrors the views of some business leaders. Claude Bébéar, chairman of insurer Axa, France’s biggest institutional investor, yesterday pilloried the “dictatorship of the market” and the “short-term interests” of hedge funds. …[Sarkozy’s] record as finance minister was notably dirigiste. He intervened to save Alstom, the engineering group, from bankruptcy and brokered an all-French merger of Aventis and Sanofi to avert a takeover by Switzerland’s Novartis. …Mr Sarkozy admitted he was watching Germany’s three percentage point increase in VAT with interest.

The story also notes that Sarkozy also was an interventionist finance minister. The net result is that France almost surely will continue to stagnate, regardless of who replaces Jacques Chirac.