TODAY, after months of consultation, the cabinet of France’s Socialist government is set to approve a flagship bill designed to liberalise the economy and boost growth. Known as the loi Macron, after Emmanuel Macron (pictured), the young economy minister, it is supposed to be the government’s answer both to slow growth and to sceptics who think that France is not ready to shake up its over-regulated economy. It will be as scrutinised in Brussels and Berlin as it will be at home.

The draft law is the brainchild of Mr Macron and Manuel Valls, the centre-left prime minister. Both want to steer the Socialist government towards more business-friendly policies. The bill, which will go to parliament in late January, is a mixed bag of measures. They include loosening Sunday-trading rules; selling between €5 billion and €10 billion of state shareholdings; liberalising the country’s inter-city coach industry to boost competition with trains; and deregulating certain professions, such as notaries.

Some of these plans may appear anodyne. It scarcely seems revolutionary, for instance, to allow shops in certain tourist areas to open on Sunday once a month, up from five times a year under current rules. The planned deregulation of some professions has already been diluted due to lobbying; pharmacies, for instance, will keep their monopoly over the sale of non-prescription drugs such as paracetamol. And the bill is expected to say nothing at all about the 35-hour working week, despite Mr Macron’s regular criticisms of its constraint on French business.

Yet they add up to a useful reformist package, and have been welcomed by Medef, the French employers’ federation, as a “real step in the right direction”. One measure of the boldness of the draft law is that it has upset both conservatives on the political right and members of President François Hollande’s own Socialist Party on the left. Before the bill was unveiled, notaries and pharmacists took to the streets to protest, and some of the more left-wing Socialist deputies laid into it. The latter have little time for Mr Macron, an unelected former investment banker, and even less for anything that smacks of liberalism.

Left-wing deputies consider the bill a betrayal of the concept of social progress, and an embrace of the commercial thinking more typical of Nicolas Sarkozy, Mr Hollande’s centre-right predecessor. The draft law “calls into question all the historic battles of the left,” charged Marie-Noëlle Lienemann, a Socialist deputy, this week, referring to working on Sundays. “My objective,” said Pascal Cherki, another Socialist member of parliament, “is not to vote for all the measures that Sarkozy did not manage to pass and which we fought against in opposition.”

The bill will test how far the government is prepared to go in matching its market-friendly talk with concrete measures. It will also test Mr Valls’s political determination. A few Socialist deputies, who have abstained recently over the budget, have even threatened to vote against the Macron law, an act of outright rebellion. If his restless deputies make it too risky for Mr Valls to try to push the law through parliament, he will need to decide whether he is ready to force the changes through by decree.

The French government insists that the law is aimed purely at reviving the economy, which is in its third year of near-zero growth. But it is also an important negotiating point with Brussels. The European Commission recently granted France an extra three months before deciding whether to sanction its breach of budget-deficit rules. In theory, this judgment is independent of structural reform. But the unspoken deal is that the commission will give France the nod if France does more to loosen its over-regulated economy. Before this week’s draft law, Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, upped the stakes, saying in a newspaper interview that “what is currently on the table is not yet enough.” Mr Valls and Mr Macron need to persuade Berlin and Brussels that the new law is liberalising enough—and their own colleagues that it is not liberal at all.