The European Union is waiting increasingly impatiently for the departure of French President Jacques Chirac and hoping his government's "economic patriotism" will not have done too much damage in the meantime.
In the European Commission, the European Parliament and among the 25 member governments, officials acknowledge openly that many key decisions on the EU's future direction are on hold until the May 2007 French presidential election.
Mr Chirac has not officially stated he will not run. But attention has focused on Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy or Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin as the candidate of the centre-right. An obvious Socialist contender has not emerged.
Among the frozen issues:
¤ The EU Constitution, meant to reform the bloc's creaking institutions to cope with enlargement, is moribund after French and Dutch voters rejected it in referendums last year;
¤ Mr Chirac's dogged support for subsidies to French farmers has curtailed the EU's room for manoeuvre in world trade talks;
¤ Any fundamental reform of the EU budget has been postponed until 2008-9 because of French insistence on leaving farm subsidies intact;
¤ Further enlargement of the bloc after Romania and Bulgaria join in 2007 or 2008 is effectively on ice pending a decision on what to do about institutional reform.
"We won't be able to discuss the Constitution (at the EU summit) in June because the French elections won't have happened," laments Eneko Landaburu, director-general of the EU executive's external relations department.
"For 10 years, neither Mr Chirac nor (former German Chancellor Gerhard) Schroeder have made serious proposals for deepening EU integration," he told a group of officials and journalists.
Fellow leaders are more diplomatic in making clear they are waiting until Mr Chirac, 73, is gone to revive the debate on what is known in Brussels as "the future of Europe".
New German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has been more distant towards France than Mr Schroeder was, says she hopes to take forward the EU Constitution when Germany has the rotating presidency in the first half of 2007 - implicitly after Mr Chirac.
Pressed by Paris recently to start cherry-picking those provisions that could be implemented without treaty change, she politely declined, saying Germany does not want to give up on the Constitution, which it has ratified.
France has long been the dominant influence in Brussels but has seen its power decline as the bloc has enlarged to take in first Nordic, then east European countries.
In the Commission, the EU's executive arm, and the European Parliament, alarm at France's increasingly strident economic nationalism since the referendum defeat is mounting.
"I can clearly see an increase in protectionism," said Siim Kallas, the EU Commissioner for Administrative Reform.
Internal Market Commissioner Charlie McCreevy has demanded explanations from Paris both on a decree declaring 11 industrial sectors including gambling as "strategic" and making foreign shareholding subject to state approval, and on a state-sponsored mega-merger of utilities Gaz de France and Suez, rushed through to fend off a looming bid by Italy's Enel for Suez.
France is not alone in trying to shield its companies from takeovers by "foreign" European firms - Spain and Poland are under investigation for similar moves.
But even Mr Chirac's own supporters in the Strasbourg-based EU legislature are worried by the perceived defensive nationalism of his final months in power.
"France seems to have caught protectionist flu," said European Parliament vice-president Françoise Grossetete, a member of Mr Chirac's ruling UMP party.
"This is a great leap 50 years backwards to the era of the state shareholder. It's is not a merger, it's a state-sponsored hostage-taking," she said of the Gaz de France/Suez deal.
Italy, itself in the throes of an election campaign, has been most vocal in warning of damage to European integration.
"This is not about corporate takeovers, it's about the future of Europe. If patriotic nationalism prevails... Europe will be paralysed," Italian Economy Minister Giulio Tremonti said this week. Several EU leaders have begun rolling out the red carpet for Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, UMP leader and frontrunner to succeed Mr Chirac, in the hope that he will be more market-friendly and free-trading, and less wedded to agricultural interests.
But a senior official at the heart of the Chirac government told an anecdote that suggests the problem may be one of a widespread mentality in the French establishment.
At the annual conference of French ambassadors from around the world last August, France's envoy to the EU, Pierre Sellal, was alone in arguing that the public rejection of the Constitution that Paris had championed, had created a major problem.
"Most said: 'It's good. It shows we know how to say 'No', or just said nothing," the official said.