In his year-end speech French President François Hollande surprised when he openly confessed that he had underestimated the depth of the recession, that the French macroeconomic data were very worrying with growth forecasts of less than 1% of GDP, well below Germany and Great Britain, that the tax burden was too high (45% of GDP, the highest in the EU along with Belgium) and that taxes should therefore be lowered, that there were too many obstacles to competitive business activity, that the public expense needed to be cut to reduce the deficit and debt, that abuses of the social model should be eliminated, and that the French state was ¿too heavy, too slow and too costly." Pierre Laurent, leader of the CP, reacted by accusing Hollande of "betrayal of the socialist cause". Others spoke of "ideological turning point" or "social-liberal realism". Some judged the speech as a toast to the sun that would end in nothing. They were wrong.

That speech has materialized in a set of measures that Hollande presented with great fanfare in a great press lecture . In it he wanted to present himself as a Gerhard Schröder or a French-style Tony Blair, that is, as a modern and reformist socialist, ready to do whatever it takes to lift the sambenito that weighs on France of currently being "the sick man of Europe".

The measures he proposed are spectacular: immediate reduction of the public expense by 15 billion euros and another 50 billion by 2017, reform of social security, a responsibility pact with companies consisting of flexibility in exchange for employment and relaunching the Franco-German axis working on three fronts: harmonization of economic policies, coordination of energy policies and progress in the common defense policy.

The European Commission and Germany consider that this package of measures is on the right track. French employers believe that Hollande is now discovering what German social democracy has been practicing since 1959, when it rejected Marxist ideology in its famous congress of Bad Godesberg, or the "third way" that Tony Blair launched in the 1990s. Businessmen do not trust him and fear that it will all end up as empty words. Why is Hollande going to succeed where his predecessor Sarkozy failed? What are the chances of "social-liberal realism" in France? Hollande has advanced an ambivalent answer: "let no one be fooled, the measures I propose may seem liberal, but the initiative belongs to the State".