PARIS — “How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?” Gen. Charles de Gaulle said.


His distant successor as president of France, who is to be elected Sunday for a five-year term, faces the same puzzle of how to reform a perennially rebellious country to meet the economic challenges of the 21st century.


The conservative president, Nicolas Sarkozy, set out with great energy in 2007 to shake things up but ran out of steam after loosening the 35-hour workweek and raising the minimum retirement age to 62 from 60 in the face of great resistance.


His most recent move has been to reduce labor costs by cutting social insurance charges on payrolls and raising value-added taxes on goods and services instead.


The Socialist challenger, François Hollande, the hot favorite to sweep Mr. Sarkozy from office in the runoff election Sunday, says he will reverse that switch and sounds disinclined even to try the structural economic changes advocated by many economists and the European Union.


“Does anyone really believe that liberalism, privatization, deregulation, which led us to where we are today in the financial crisis, will help us get out of this crisis?” Mr. Hollande said last week when asked whether he would emulate measures being taken in Spain and Italy.


“I believe that today the way we can create growth is through new technologies, through higher education and new energy sources,” he said.


The inconvenient truth is that most of the French are too comfortably off — despite 10 percent unemployment, a flatlining economy and a national debt approaching 90 percent of annual economic output — to countenance radical changes to their way of life.


While there has been plenty of hand-wringing about deindustrialization and relative economic decline during the election campaign, particularly in comparison with neighboring Germany, there is little, if any, sense of urgency.


This is partly because France has been immunized from the crushing bond market pressure that drove Greece, Ireland and Portugal to seek bailouts and Italy and Spain to undertake draconian austerity measures and structural changes.


A brief moment of drama in January when Standard & Poor’s stripped France of its AAA credit rating for the first time evaporated after borrowing costs held steady and other credit raters did not follow suit. France still borrows at historically low rates of about 3.1 percent for 10-year bonds, partly because investors assume its fate is tied to Germany’s, but also because it has a rock-solid track record of being able to raise revenue.


Public services work well, the country has an ideal geographic location and a large consumer market, with a well-educated work force and high hourly productivity — just as well, given how few hours the French work, on average.


Another reason for wariness of change is that successive French governments have burned their fingers trying to overhaul protective labor laws, the minimum wage, health care benefits and an underfunded pay-as-you-go pension system.


Strikes and mass street demonstrations, with broad public support, defeated attempts to overhaul special early retirement systems for some public employees in 1995 and efforts to create a lower-wage first employment contract for young people in 2006.


The French, it seems, would rather live with nearly 25 percent youth unemployment than see the minimum wage or rigid job protection for incumbent workers eroded. And many are unwilling to see any connection between the two.


Some of Mr. Hollande’s economic advisers, speaking under cover of anonymity to avoid embarrassing the candidate in the final days of a tense campaign, say he would be more of a reformer as president than he dares to say before the election.


The Socialist would offer trade unions a grand bargain of seats in corporate boardrooms and more consultation in government in exchange for cooperation in overhauling the pension system and accepting necessary public spending curbs, they say.


Whether France’s weak and divided unions, steeped in a tradition of confrontational relations, are ready to share such responsibility remains to be seen.


Mr. Hollande’s main hope is the C.F.D.T., the second-largest union confederation, which has long favored negotiated change over strikes but is overshadowed by the larger, Communist-led C.G.T. and sometimes outflanked by smaller but more radical unions.


Mr. Sarkozy made a brief effort to negotiate with the unions on pension overhaul but ended up imposing it from the top down against mass protests. He has spent much of the campaign denouncing the unions, especially the C.G.T., as “intermediate bodies” that distort the will of the French people.


If he is re-elected, France could well see a “third round” of the presidential election in the streets this year, as frustrated unions protest his plan to force retrained unemployed people to take the first vacancy they are offered.


The tens of thousands of activists who attended rallies of the Communist-backed Jean-Luc Mélenchon are a warning of the resistance any president may face if he tries to roll back what most French people consider social rights.


The “Nixon to China” theory of politics suggests Mr. Hollande might have a better chance of achieving incremental changes to the welfare state and labor markets than Mr. Sarkozy, because he may face less militant opposition from the unions.


After all, some of his economic advisers say, between 1997 and 2002, Lionel Jospin, a Socialist, opened more state enterprises to private capital than any conservative prime minister.


Mr. Hollande has said that if he is elected, he will immediately begin a European negotiation on measures to revive economic growth. He has also said he will call an immediate audit of public finances.


That could give him political cover to make public spending cuts because of a worse-than-expected inherited fiscal and economic position, and to agree to pursue some structural changes in a compromise with Germany on a European growth pact.


Paul Taylor is a Reuters correspondent.