IT IS not often that you can accuse Dominique de Villepin, France’s Prime Minister, of playing to the public.

But this most haughty politician, who has rarely shown anything like the popular touch, has clearly struck a chord in his unapologetic campaign for “economic nationalism”.

Yesterday new polls showed overwhelming support for all the principles of his campaign: for a merger to create national champions; for blocking foreign takeovers; for state ownership of utilities; and for “economic patriotism” overall.

France, battling to bring down unemployment, will lose by it. So will the project of the single market. De Villepin appears to have no truck with the view of Charlie McCreevy, Commissioner for the Internal Market, that “there is a direct correlation between openness and prosperity”. France’s best hope is that its companies do what their German counterparts have done, and haul themselves through the modernisation that politicians find beyond them.

Some of the inspiration for de Villepin’s campaign clearly comes from France’s rejection of the European Constitution in May. In Britain, that tortured document may have been seen as the imposition of a European super-state; in France, many resented it as an attempt to force Anglo-American free-market principles onto the French social model.

De Villepin has attacked what he calls “declinologists”: those who claim to have spotted in France a pattern of inexorable decline, and blame it on its lack of Anglo-Saxon spirit.

His rhetoric would have remained just that: part of the long build-up to next year’s presidential election, by a self-nominated contender.

But then he blocked a bid by Enel, the Italian electricity giant, for Suez, the mainly-private French utility, by arranging an instant merger with the state-controlled Gaz de France.

The Government’s stake will fall to 36 per cent in the new giant - but it will keep a blocking vote protecting the company against hostile bids.

This manoeuvre was hardly going to go unnoticed across Europe. De Villepin appears deaf to charges of hypocrisy, even though French utilities have been aggressive bidders for "assets" of other countries.

France is not alone in this new taste for protectionism. The Spanish Government is trying to block Eon, a German company, from buying Endesa, a utility. Poland wants to block an Italian takeover of a German bank with Polish subsidiaries. France and Luxembourg want to stop Mittal, the steel giant, bidding for Arcelor, their joint steel company.

Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s Prime Minister, has promised to block all future French takeovers if he wins this summer’s elections. His Opposition has also called for a block on BNP Paribas’s bid for BNL. But France has tried to protect its companies in a much more systematic way, and now de Villepin has announced that this “patriotism” is the cornerstone of policy. He has designated 11 sectors of the economy which he thinks should not be foreign-owned — including casinos, for some unfathomable reason, and Danone, the yoghurt-maker.

Despite McCreevy’s best efforts, this may spell the end of the attempt to force a true single market into being. These blocks on deals are not clearly illegal under European law. But they are, very obviously, against its spirit.

For 14 years, the EU has been debating a directive on cross-border takeovers, designed to make them much easier. At last, a directive has been written, and the EU’s 25 members must implement it by May 20. But it has been watered down so much already it may have little effect on making cross-border takeovers easier.

The biggest losers will be Europe’s consumers - and eventually, the employees of companies shielded for so long against competition that they wither and die. With an election to fight next year, and with unemployment rising, that may be beyond de Villepin’s horizon.

But the kind of stunts he is pulling will not keep that competition at bay. The best answer, as Germany’s companies are suddenly showing, may be to forge ahead with change, leaving politicians behind.