Nicolas Sarkozy wants to speed up the launch of the proposed tax on financial transactions in Europe because he thinks this might help his re-election bid. His meeting with Angela Merkel on Monday was a glorified campaign event, write German media. Merkel helped him out a bit, in a sign that the French-German axis remains intact at the start of a tough year.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy. facing a tough battle for re-election in just four months, used Monday's summit with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin as a campaign event to show voters back home that he's tackling the euro crisis, said German media commentators.

Sarkozy said last week he was ready to go it alone and introduce a financial transactions tax just in France if necessary rather than wait for the whole European Union to sign up to it -- an unlikely prospect given that Britain is refusing to impose such a tax for fear of damaging the City of London, Europe's biggest financial center.

Merkel, keen to show nervous markets that the Franco-German alliance is intact at the start of what promises to be another difficult year in the euro crisis, praised Sarkozy's stance and even made a minor concession, saying for the first time that she could envisage the tax being introduced just in the 17-member euro zone rather than the full 27-member E.U.

The tax, based on concept proposed by U.S. economist James Tobin who called for a tax on currency transactions in the early 1970s, has been under renewed discussion since 2011 when the European Commission proposed a plan to tax stock, bond and derivatives trades from 2014, potentially raising €57 billion ($73 billion), much of it from Britain, the region's biggest trading center.