The first round of the French presidential election next Sunday carries implications that go far beyond the extreme importance that France has in Europe and in the world.

Beyond who wins and who loses, how the French people vote and decide could prove to be vitally decisive, as at so many other times, for the better or the worse, for the rest of Europe, ourselves included.

The scene is well-known: as The Economist put it: “France is the euro zone’s second-biggest member and home to 10 of Europe’s 50 biggest companies. But it is deeply troubled. It has the slowest-growing large economy in Europe, a State that soaks up half of GDP, the fastest-rising public debt in Western Europe over the past 10 years and, above all, entrenched high unemployment. Over the past 25 years French GDP per person has declined from seventh-highest in the world to 17th.”

Being Europe’s sick member led, almost two years ago, to the French “Non” in its referendum on Europe’s constitutional treaty, which sent shockwaves through Paris’s political elite and brought five decades of European integration to a halt. Since then, the rest of Europe has been eagerly awaiting the end of the Chirac years and for France to come out of its funk of introspection, regain its confidence and re-engage the international stage.

Now it seems that this is not what is going to happen.

If there is anything clear this side of Sunday, it is the growing disenchantment of French voters after 25 years of alternating left- and right-wing governments and politics and politicians in particular.

Soon after the European referendum defeat in 2005, the country’s poor suburban ghettos erupted into three weeks of rioting, exposing France’s failure to integrate the latest wave of mainly African immigrants. Six months later, millions of students and workers took to the streets to protest against a youth labour law, clashing with police and forcing a weak government into a humiliating U-turn.

In short, at play next Sunday is whether France can heal itself and bring itself into the world that is fast passing it by. There was a time when François Mitterand’s adroit handling of the political parties won the day, and then Jacques Chirac came in, clad as a moderniser. But that was just for the election’s sake: he was always a nationalist at heart who found it (still finds it) difficult to comprehend modern economic theory. France ably defended the CAP, the most incomprehensible and pernicious plank of EU policy, protectionism at its worst, so that French farmers continue to get all the benefits at the expense of the rest of Europe.

One must remember that many other European countries, and not so many years ago, were in the same dire straits: consider Britain, the “sick man of Europe” in the 1980s. But then, through the radical liberalisation of labour and product markets, more competition and less protection, lower taxes and cuts in public spending, plus a shake-up of the coddled public services, these previous laggards caught up and now are in far better waters than France.

The French electorate is now faced with two main candidates who seem to be competing with each other in being ultra nationalistic, xenophobic and drunk on the heroic image of La France, disregarding the lessons that any other country could teach them.

Ségolène Royal came to the fore as the great new hope of the Left, capitalising on a weakened and split Socialist Party whose candidate, Lionel Jospin, was swept out of the race by Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002. But, apart from innumerable gaffes, and wishy-washy ideas, she has failed to grasp that the Left in France must stop thinking its main task is to relieve society of neoliberalism in the least neoliberal country in Europe. For all her posturing, she is no Tony Blair.

Her main opponent, and the man who till now is seen as the front-runner both next Sunday and in the second phase of the election, Nicolas Sarkozy, can say that France needs radical change and openly admires America but at heart he was a minister, was he not, in the outgoing French administration that made such a mess of economic policy. And his preferred solution during last year’s riots was to call the unemployed ‘canaille’ and push for more police force rather than understand the reasons for the disenchantment.

And, on a more European level, he has taken to blaming the euro and the European Central Bank for ills that are of France’s sole creation. He could easily fall into the same ideological trap that people like Jacques Chirac and other would-be modernisers fell into: that they come in a blaze of modernising rhetoric but since this is pure façade and without basis, it soon withers while the leaders in Paris carry on dreaming that France is the centre of the world.

The only losers would be the people of France itself, but, given France preponderant importance in Europe, we too, to a certain degree, could be the losers as well.