"Truth, efficiency, confidence. " Under this guiding trinity, Manuel Valls made his inaugural speech as prime minister on April

"Truth, efficiency, confidence. " Under this guiding trinity, Manuel Vails made his inaugural speech as prime minister on April 8th, promising budget savings and tax cuts that amount to an about-turn in policy. There would be no more tax increases, Mr. Vails declared, and businesses needed to be supported, not caricatured and maligned. But at the same time, he made clear that he was quite prepared to put his country on yet another collision course with Brussels rather than "destroy growth" by sticking too rigidly to France’s fiscal commitments. The prime minister’s speech to a rowdy parliament was strong on passion. "Few countries in the world allow foreign-born citizens to reach the top of government," he said, speaking as somebody born in Spain. It was also heavy on ambition. Mr. Vails promised to halve the number of regions to 11 by 2017 and scrap elected assemblies in departments by 2021. Bureaucratic France has 90 public-sector staff per 1, 000 people compared to 50 in Germany. Most enjoy almost total job security. These radical measures imply a cull that will inevitably be seen as a direct assault on local Socialist officials who form the backbone of Mr. Vails’s own party. Mr. Valls’s fiscal plans were equally bold. In 2013 four-fifths of fiscal consolidation came from tax increases, not spending cuts, according to the Cour des Comptes, the public auditor. Now Mr. Vails promises the reverse. On top of ￠50 billion ($ 68 billion) of budget savings and ￠30 billion of payroll-tax cuts for companies already announced by President Francois Hollande, he announced another ￠5 billion of reduced charges for low-paid employees — worth up to ￠500 a year each — and ￠6 billion in business-tax cuts. And there is to be a steady reduction in the corporate-tax rate from 33% to 28% by 2020. As part of this fresh approach, Jean Pierre Jouyet, a centrist who was a minister under Nicolas Sarkozy, Mr. Hollande’s centre-right predecessor, was appointed as the president’s new chief of staff. (This also confirms the grip of the 1980 graduating class from the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, which included Mr. Jouyet, Mr. Hollande, Segolene Royal, his ex-partner and now environment minister, and Michel Sapin, the new finance minister.) Mr. Valls was less clear on where the ￠50 billion budget savings will come from, referring only to a three-way effort from local authorities, social security and central government. He said nothing about paying for his extra tax cuts, although he promises a mini-budget before the summer. As Guillaume Menuet, an economist at CitiResearch, says, this is a "policy shift that will not be fully financed". Asitis, the 2013 deficit came in at 4. 3% of GDP, above the 4.1% forecast. With growth fragile, it looks impossible for France to keep its promise to reduce the deficit to 3% next year. Indeed, Mr. Valls said as much, declaring that he believed in "budgetary responsibility, not austerity" and that he favoured "a change of rhythm" so as not to cramp growth. The new government is preparing to make a request to the European Commission for more time. Mr. Sapin and Arnaud Montebourg, the anti-austerity economy minister, went separately to Berlin on April 7th to talk to the German government, the first to make the claim of fiscal responsibility, the second to say that deficit targets are of "secondary" importance. So far, Brussels and Berlin have been skeptical. There is no good reason for France to have a delay, said Olli Rehn, the economics commissioner, adding that stronger euro-zone growth makes it less justifiable. France’s serial requests are treated as duplicitous by those who ask why big countries break rules that smaller ones have to obey (a game that first began when France and Germany bust the stability pact in 2002). The Hollande government has already been given one delay.