Back in 2008, Nicolas Sarkozy told angry fishermen that he would do something about the quotas that were threatening their livelihood. This Thursday he said that "the time has come to base all our decisions on the management of marine resources on reliable, independent, and generally accepted scientific opinion."
It's hard to fault the president for making the right call in the end, but it would have been better if he'd avoided the need to renege on an impossible promise.