Michel Prada, the president of the Commission des Opérations de Bourse (COB), has added his voice to calls for an acceleration of financial reforms in France after the right's overwhelming victory in the French parliamentary elections.

For the past few years the former socialist government under Lionel Jospin had stalled reforms, such as on pensions and wholesale privatisation, in an attempt to keep the trade unions and some of their far left coalition partners on side. However, the victory of Jacques Chirac's Union pour la Majorité Présidentielle, an alliance of centre right parties which took 354 of the 577 seats in parliament, has opened the door to sweeping reforms.