Let’s take seriously the second-round campaign. Let’s once again increase our first beliefs and truly seek in two weeks, who can best help France avoid the fate of Greece, which awaits, it is almost certain, Portugal and perhaps Spain.

This is the top priority. We cannot make any plans on anything else, any promise of maintaining the benefits gained, of gain of any social conquest, of protection of any personal situation, if we do not avoid first the most likely: the downgrade of France.

For if France continues on her current trajectory, the wave which will carry the elected president on May 6 will be quickly transformed into a tsunami to drown his hopes, and those of the country.

It is thus time, finally, less than two weeks away from the election of the man who will lead France for five years, to get from the last two competitors some clear answers, transparently, on the four key issues on which depends the future of the country.

Questions to Nicolas Sarkozy:

  1. Why did you not, when there was still time, reduce significantly the State’s deficits?
  2. Why did you let all the actors of the economy, households and businesses, borrow more than any other G7 country, as per the undisputed OECD’s data?
  3. How can we believe that in your second term you will make the reforms that you did not dare to do in the first? And do not answer that you can do so because the crisis is behind us, because it is not true.
  4. What do you intend to do very specifically, euro-for-euro, to escape the supervision of markets, ie the lenders, in the mini budget of July 2012 (which you will not escape because your budget figures are wrong), and in the 2013 budget, not counting on growth that obviously will not be at the rendezvous, considering what is happening elsewhere in Europe, in the USA and in China.

Questions to Francois Hollande:

  1. Do you consider that it remains lawful to hope, in France, to make a fortune by one’s work or should this be prohibited in order to finance deficits and eliminate poverty?
  2. If making a fortune is no longer lawful, if business leaders no longer have this motivation, how do you think the country can regain growth? Through public investment.? Through nationalization? Through virtue?
  3. If making a fortune is no longer lawful, in your opinion, should we be content with maintaining the existing fortunes, which would just have for justification but the fact that they were made before May 6, 2012, or should they be challenged, by massive taxes on inheritance and capital?
  4. What do you intend to do very specifically, euro-for- euro, to escape the supervision of markets, ie the lenders, in the mini budget of July 2012 , that you announced, and in the 2013 budget, not counting on growth that obviously will not be at the rendezvous, considering what is happening elsewhere in Europe, in the USA and in China.

In 1771, Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote in his fascinating and too easily forgotten Considerations on the Government of Poland and its Reformation: « Every free state in which no provision has been made for great crises is in danger of perishing with every storm ».

I wish that phrase could serve to highlight this final leg of the campaign.

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