It's a big week in French politics. Yesterday Mr Nicolas Sarkozy took over as president of the ruling party, the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), vacating his job as finance minister in preparation for a presidential bid in 2007.
Tomorrow, members of the opposition Socialist Party vote on the European Union constitutional treaty. And on the same day a court in Versailles will rule on whether Mr Alain Juppé, the former prime minister and UMP president, is guilty of corruption. If he is found innocent he could be a strong candidate against Mr Sarkozy - assuming President Jacques Chirac does not covet a third term as President himself.
Mr Sarkozy is a brash, ambitious, talented and hugely energetic politician. He has caught the imagination of French voters with his promise of change and an optimism that France can be transformed constructively rather than passively accepting decline. He deliberately breaks the mould of established politics and elites, calling for a review of the working week, cuts in taxation, a more liberalised economy, civic integration programmes for Muslim immigrant communities, and a more broadly -based foreign policy.
But he is careful to combine this radicalism with a strong dose of pragmatism and state dirigisme, which was on ample display when he was successively minister for justice and then finance. As a result his policies can look contradictory, as when he blames immigrant communities for crime yet acknowledges they are badly disadvantaged - an insight arising partly from his own immigrant background.
For all Mr Sarkozy's popularity, his party still lags behind the Socialists in opinion polls and lost out to the left in last summer's regional and European elections. It remains to be seen how that lead will be affected by the party's vote tomorrow on the constitutional treaty. Its deputy leader, Mr Laurent Fabius, has presidential ambitions of his own and calculated that opposing the treaty would promote them. His campaign struck a chord with party members anxious about France's declining influence in the EU and opposed to the liberalising ideology supposedly engraved in the heart of the treaty.
A vote against would herald a major change in the Socialists' hitherto Europhile approach, which has been in place for more than 20 years under the influence of Francois Mitterrand, Jacques Delors and most of its current leadership. All this makes for a more interesting period in French politics. Mr Chirac is determined not to be a lame duck, but the man he most distrusts has now taken over the party he founded.