At last, the front-runner won, after months in which polls had suggested that, at the last moment, he just might not. Now that Nicolas Sarkozy is President of France, will it make much difference?

It could, but more likely abroad than at home, and only if voters demonstrate a sustained appetite for change, which so far they have not.

Yet the sense of drama surrounding the French election was justified; it is just possible that Sarkozy can trigger the changes that France needs in order to restore its sense of economic potential and release it from its bewildered surliness in a Europe of 27 countries.

The condition on which any change hangs is next month’s parliamentary elections. If voters return a centre-right government, then Sarkozy has a chance of putting into practice some of the policies on which he campaigned. If they express their ambivalence by picking a centre-left government, then his month-old presidency will lead to years of paralysis.

The reason the election remained so hard to predict, despite Sarkozy’s steady lead in the polls from the start, was voters’ ambivalence about the programme he laid out – and about him. His message that France urgently needed to change resonated with those dismayed to see the faltering of one of Europe’s most powerful economies and the loss of France’s central place in making European policy.

President Chirac’s use of the Iraq war to illustrate, and magnify, France’s differences with the US failed to establish his country as the hub of a rival set of values and diplomatic allegiances. In the turmoil of the Middle East, France, for all its historic links, is playing a peripheral part.

Sarkozy’s offer to bring France back from the margins had great allure – in theory. But voters were unconvinced about the details. Many feared that his labour reforms, designed to bring down the stubbornly high rate of unemployment, would rip up the “safety net” of protections enjoyed by those in work. More broadly, many appeared to fear that he would destroy the qualities that make France distinctly French; Ségolène Royal’s gibe that he was an American with a French passport proved to be one of her most successful lines.

That is why it is easier to see Sarkozy having a rapid effect abroad than at home. It does not take much more to mend relations with Washington – particularly with an Administration in such a chastened state – than to declare a desire to do so, and to get on the plane. Ask Angela Merkel; the German Chancellor managed to insert criticism of wide flanks of US policy into her first encounter with President Bush, so grateful was he that she was not Gerhard Schröder.

In the European Union, the mere fact of having a new French President will release the paralysis over a new constitution (or whatever uncontroversial diminutive it is called). Sarkozy favours, in broad outline, the notion of a pared-down version of the ill-fated original. Given that this is all that Britain and several other countries will accept, it is likely to emerge as the compromise, despite Germany’s desire for something more ambitious. It is possible, then, that with one step, Sarkozy puts himself back in the mainstream of the next big decision in European policy.

But an attempt to retrieve the influence that France enjoyed in a much smaller European club will be credible only if it regains its economic confidence and manages to find a formula, “French” or otherwise, to bring down unemployment. There, inevitably, Sarkozy’s chances are slimmer.

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