At the height of summer, when the electoral ashes and confetti have settled and have been collected, the country will find itself in an extremely dangerous situation.
1. In France, the prospects for unemployment, budget deficit and balance of payments will be worse than the outgoing majority would have us believe.
2. The elections in Greece will have probably brought a government hostile to the stability agreement and its exit from the euro will be imminent.
3. In Portugal, the public support to the austerity policies will be frayed.
4. In Italy, the government of Mario Monti will have lost most of its reform momentum.
5. In Germany, the sacred alliance around austerity policies will have disappeared.
6. Spain will have shifted its private debt onto its public debt, which will reach the German and French level, against a background of high levels of unemployment.
7. European banks will appear as incapable on the long-term, for want of capital basis, of financing the economy.
8. The European Union, torn by bureaucratic wrangling and without serious leadership, will have shown its impotence.
If this scenario comes true, the end of the euro and the collapse of living standards of each European will be within sight. And yet, this is not inevitable:
1. In France, considerable savings are possible by confronting the innumerable wastes by the State, local governments and social administrations, without calling into question social justice.
2. In France, considerable resources are available to improve its competitiveness by opening closed professions, by taxing inheritance and capital more than created wealth, by organizing a fiscal devaluation.
3. France and Germany can come to an agreement and draw up a common path towards a Europe of growth.
4. The European Commission has a pot of money of 50 billion euros, that it cannot use, and which, transferred as capital to the European Investment Bank, may allow this public bank, efficient and powerful, to finance new investments worth more than 500 billion in energy and telecommunications infrastructure, and support for SMEs.
5. The European Financial Stability Fund can be transformed into a bank and fund the urgent capital increases of banks throughout the EU.
6. All eurozone countries could jointly define an agenda of reforms for competitiveness, applicable regardless of the majorities in power in various countries. Not an unworkable document, as the Lisbon agenda, but a true joint program.
7. The eurozone can build a self-sufficient tax revenue, to fund Eurobonds, which will mutualize risks between countries of the Eurozone.
8. To vote this tax, the Eurozone can build a federal parliament, which could be in Strasbourg when that of the Union would remain in Brussels.
All this cannot be carried out in case of cohabitation: the President needs a majority to govern. But this cannot be achieved either just by the left. First, because they should not deprive themselves of great ideas of modernization coming from the right and which Nicolas Sarkozy was wrong in not applying. Then because it will take a real national unity to build successfully social justice on the removal of countless private incomes that paralyze the country. Finally because it will be necessary to attract, in order to keep them, all the creators, and unite all the forces of France.