Sarkozy wants France to be more like Germany

For the record, so did Marshal Philippe Pétain.  Just sayin'.

The real story from The Local.  (Hint:  it's really about strategic fiscal restructuring in the face of the European debt and currency crisis.  But you already knew that.)

Sarkozy occasionally has spats with his German counterpart Angela Merkel. They have had seriously different ideas on how to resolve the European debt crisis, for example, and Sarkozy has most recently irked Merkel by vowing to go it alone in introducing a financial transaction tax.

But the French leader clearly thinks his country has a lot to learn from a neighbour with which it has fought three wars in the past century and a half.

To be fair, you could do worse than to emulate the Germans on fiscal policy and industrial policy. If more European economies behaved like Germany, and fewer behaved like Greece, the Eurozone might have had a fighting chance -- honey-glazed though it was from the beginning by artificially low interest rates across the board irrespective of local/national economic situations.