Conservative Nicolas Sarkozy, winner of Sunday’s French presidential election, is committed to a slimmed-down, quick treaty modernizing the EU’s institutions to replace the more ambitious constitution rejected by French and Dutch voters.

Sarkozy, 52, has pledged to relaunch Europe fast in tandem with German Chancellor Angela Merkel after a bout of self-doubt that followed the French and Dutch referendums in 2005.

Reaching out to the rest of Europe after his triumph, Sarkozy said: “I want to launch a call to our European partners, with whom our destiny is deeply linked, to tell them that I have been European all my life...Tonight France is back in Europe.”

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said he was confident Sarkozy would help find an early solution to the EU’s stalled institutional reform.

EU officials said things would have been much more difficult if his Socialist rival Segolene Royal had won. She had pledged to hold a fresh referendum on an augmented constitution incorporating more social policy.

Across the Channel, British Prime Minister Tony Blair has said he will announce his departure date this week, clearing the way for his almost certain successor, finance minister Gordon Brown, 56, to take over by July.

Brown’s European ambitions are less clear. He has criticized the EU as inward-looking, obsessed with its institutions and resistant to free trade and open markets.

But British analysts who know Brown and his top advisers say he is likely to want a smooth start with his European peers, not least because he may want to distance himself from U.S. President George W. Bush, Blair’s close ally.

“He will try to be a European leader,” said Anthony Giddens, a sociologist and Labour member of the House of Lords who was the intellectual father of Blair’s “Third Way” vision of a modern, market-friendly social democracy.

Speaking at The Centre think-tank in Brussels last week, Giddens said Brown would want to be less intimate with the White House than Blair, and being more remote with the EU would raise the risk of Britain becoming “stuck between two super-entities”.

British diplomats say Blair had Brown’s consent when he called last month for a rapid amending treaty to salvage the key institutional reforms in the defunct constitution stripped of the trappings of statehood such as a flag, anthem and holiday.

A slimmed-down treaty would provide for a long-term president to replace the EU’s six-monthly rotating chair, a foreign minister probably under another job title, and a streamlined voting system based more on population size.

“What unites Brown and Sarkozy is their determination to avoid a referendum, which is more important than anything else,” a senior European Commission official said. Merkel, who has emerged as the pivotal EU leader in the last 18 months and holds the rotating presidency, has vowed to broker a deal in June on a way forward for institutional reform with a timetable and broad outlines for a new treaty by 2009.

The leadership change in Britain and France should help her achieve that goal but uncertainty remains over the acquiescence of the Czech Republic and Poland, whose conservative nationalist leaders want to alter the voting system reform.

Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform think-tank, said Merkel and Sarkozy would form a new leadership duo in the EU, supported by Barroso, a center-right ally.

“The question is whether Gordon Brown joins them to form a triumvirate,” Grant said. That would depend on how he managed domestic political pressures and a Eurosceptical media.

“If Brown becomes prime minister with a significant deficit to (Conservative opposition leader) David Cameron in the polls, it will require great courage for him to defy the tabloid press and push an amending treaty through parliamentary ratification. He will not win any domestic dividends for doing so,” he said.

Britain would be weakened and isolated in Europe if it did block a slimmed-down treaty, Grant said, losing sway over issues close to Brown’s heart such as free trade, economic reform, development aid and climate change.

Some seasoned EU watchers forecast tension between Merkel and Sarkozy for the leadership mantle in Europe, and over the French leader’s proclaimed economic nationalism.

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