Speaking in French, English and German, he said: “We need to give Europe confidence. Throughout his election campaign, President Hollande made an issue of the importance of growth.”

France's Hollande and Germany's Merkel at the Nato summit in Chicago earlier this week

Ahead of today’s informal EU summit in Brussels, senior officials have been repeatedly warning that no decisions will be taken. Indeed, no communiqué has even been circulated among national delegations, so the dinner is likely to wrap with only a press statement from Herman Van Rompuy, the evening’s host.

Even though Van Rompuy in his letter to leaders has emphasised the informal nature of the session, Europe’s two largest party groupings – the centre-right European People’s Party and the centre-left Party of European Socialists – will both hold pre-summit caucuses starting in the late afternoon.

In the past, the EPP gathering was the more significant affair, with almost every major EU leader (Van Rompuy, European Commission president José Manuel Barroso, Eurogroup chair Jean-Claude Juncker) and leaders from the largest eurozone countries (France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, Germany’s Angela Merkel, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi) all regular attendees.

At one point, the PES became something of a caucus of the damned, with only Greece’s George Papandreou, Portugal’s José Socrates and Spain’s José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero as centre-left leaders in attendance. Like so much in Europe these days, the French presidential elections have changed all that.

People pass Bank of Greece in Athens last week

Jitters over whether Greece will be forced out of the euro have turned the focus of policymakers in recent days on whether Greece is on the precipice of a bank run.

It’s no mere academic exercise; a full-scale bank run would force the European Central Bank and eurozone lenders to either pump in more money – without a new government in place, and no assurances Athens would live up to the rescue terms – or pull the plug on Greece’s financial sector.

Since a banking sector without a central bank would essentially force Greece back to the barter system, there would be few options left then for Athens to begin printing its own currency again. Essentially, the drachma would return through the back door.

As we reported in today’s dead-tree edition, senior eurozone officials responsible for monitoring the currency area’s banking system said the rate of withdrawals thus far falls short of a panic. But the International Monetary Fund’s recent report on Greece makes it clear that a slow-motion bank run has been under way for more than two years, with close to 30 per cent of deposits being pulled out since the end of 2009.

EU commissioner Michel Barnier

For Barnier, the election back home not only brought him a new French president to deal with, but also a mixed legacy for his political home, the centre-right UMP. The party’s standard-bearer Nicolas Sarkozy used the waning days of the campaign to openly court voters who had supported the far-right National Front through anti-EU rhetoric.

In addition to threatening to pull France out of the EU’s passport-free Schengen travel zone, Sarkozy regularly belittled the European Commission and urged “buy French” policies that violated the EU’s common market.

In our hour-long interview, Barnier insisted that such Europe-bashing was only the result of overheated politics ahead of a contentious vote. “I think you have to put to one side the electoral campaign,” he said, citing UMP party luminaries like François Fillon and Alain Juppé who have strong pro-European pedigrees.

Still, Barnier said he intends to actively insert himself in the post-Sarkozy debate about the UMP’s future – though he assiduously declined to say what role him himself might play in that new party.

How ironic then that Hollande’s first major piece of EU financial regulation will see him largely siding with European banks (and yes, that includes the British ones) against calls from the UK and ECB for tougher rules.

Diplomacy in Brussels can be a funny business. Hard as it is to believe, in this negotiation the big beasts of City banking have been privately cheering on the French. Next week, when finance ministers meet to negotiate a deal, we’ll all be able to see if Hollande changes Paris’ tune.

Welcome to our rolling coverage of the reaction to elections in France and Greece on a big day for Europe.

By Tom Burgis, John Aglionby and Esther Bintliff in London with contributions from FT correspondents around the world. All times are London time.

This post should update automatically every few minutes, although it might take longer on mobile devices.

12.44 Borzou Daragahi, the FT’s north Africa correspondent, reports on the response to the French election results in the Arab world:

Across a region undergoing tumultous change, many greeted the fall of Nicolas Sarkozy with glee, hopeful it would spell the end of French foreign policies considered too Atlantacist, pro-Israel and anti-immigrant.

Though many Libyans hailed Mr Sarkozy for his role in spearheading Nato’s help in toppling Col Muammer Gaddafi, others remember his administration’s cozy ties with deposed Tunisian leader Zein el Abidine ben Ali and Egypt’s former President Hosni Mubarak.

Ties between Tunisia’s new government, dominated by a coalition of Islamists and leftists, and France have grown particularly strained. In an interview with the FT in January, Islamist party leader Rachid Ghannouchi accused France of arrogantly giving Tunisia ‘lessons’ on economic and social policy despite its own problems.

 

Mustapha Ben Jaafar on April 27, 2012. AFP PHOTO/ FETHI BELAIDFETHI BELAID/AFP/GettyImages

After Mr Sarkozy’s defeat, Mustapha ben Jaafar, speaker of the Tunisian parliament and leader of the left-leaning Ettakatol party, hailed François Hollande’s arrival as way to update bilateral relations.

“We are hopeful that the arrival of the Socialists will give impetus to the historically strong relationships between our two countries,” he said in a statement. “With France, the new democratic Tunisia wants to build a true partnership that respects the values of freedom and human rights, based on a strategy of co-development and shared prosperity.”

12.22 The election results in Greece testify to widespread dissatisfaction with the country’s mainstream conservative and socialist parties. Voters have punished the political groups they see as jointly responsible for the economic crisis, with once marginal groups rapidly gaining ground.

Spain's Mariano Rajoy, after a meeting at the Spanish parliament in Madrid earlier this month

The recent turn in market sentiment against Spain has led to a somewhat unanswerable debate in European policy circles about what, exactly, the markets are worried about: Is it that the new Rajoy government tried to break from tough EU-mandated deficit limits last month…or the fact they eventually agreed to stick to next year’s stringent target?

If Standard & Poor’s downgrade of Spanish debt last night is any indication, it appears the markets are more concerned about the latter than the former.

Most senior EU officials have a different view, arguing that by unilaterally declaring he was going to ignore the EU-mandated 4.4 per cent debt-to-gross domestic target for 2012, prime minister Mariano Rajoy spooked the bond market by signalling Spain had lost its sense of discipline.

But S&P makes a different argument.

France's Nicolas Sarkozy has made EU borders an issue in his re-election campaign

The issue of the European Union’s passport-free travel zone has become a political hot potato again, thanks in part to Nicolas Sarkozy, who has warned during his presidential re-election campaign that France would withdraw from the border agreement unless more safeguards are adopted.

With just days before voting in the first round of the French election, Sarkozy’s government is pushing the issue back onto the EU agenda, this time with German assistance.

In a joint letter sent to the Danish presidency, Claude Gueant, the French interior minister, and Hans-Peter Friedrich, his German counterpart, are calling for countries to be granted the right to re-impose border controls unilaterally for 30 days if national authorities believe other countries – particularly on the EU’s southern and eastern frontiers – aren’t securing their borders.

A leaked copy of the letter Brussels Blog got its hands on (in French) can be read here. A look at the proposal (in English) after the jump…