French right quarrel over Trump election lessons

Donald Trump's election as US president has cast a shadow over the French mainstream right's selection of its candidate for next year's presidential election. With primaries at the end of this month, would-be candidates are claiming the US resullt shows they are the right person for the job but for varying reasons.

Alain Juppé with Claude Chirac, daughter of former president Jacques Chirac AFP

"The way some people are trying to exploit what has happened in the United States is ridiculous," Alain Juppé, the former prime minister who is favourite in the opinion polls, said on Thursday.

Although on Wednesday he said Trump's election showed the "dangers of demagogy and extremism", on Thursday he warned against trying to "transpose what has happened in the United States for the 20 and 27 November", when the two rounds of the right-wing's primaries take place.

"I'm thinking of the National Front and I'm also thinking of some of my competitors," he said in apparent reference to former president Nicolas Sarkozy, who is trailing him in the polls.

Juppé mocked the argument that because the polls got the US result wrong they "don't mean a thing".

"I'm not Hillary Clinton and who's Trump in our camp?" he asked, adding that "drawing conclusions simply on the grounds of personality is ridiculous".

"Let's be credible!" he commented on the claim that the US result is a challenge to the establishment. "Nicolas Sarkozy isn't part of the establishment?"

And Juppé, in a rare move for a practising politician, spoke out in defence of elites.

""We need elites," the former prime minister, whose opponents criticise him as a remote technocrat, insisted. "They are what lift is up. And then the elites must listen to the people, too."

At a rally in Bordeaux, the city where he is mayor, on Wednesday evening Juppé laid into the National Front, slamming those who "wallow in the gutter" and "set the French against each other, the elites againt the people".

Sarkozy attacks weakness, Fillon wants Russia rethink

Sarkozy on Wednesday interpreted Trump's victory as a rejection of woolly liberal thinking on immigration and terrorism.

He took a swipe at Juppé, declaring that "there will be no place for impotence, weakness and renunciation".

Another would-be presidential candidate, François Fillon, came to Trump's defence.

Trump was the candidate of the Republican Party, "which is in no way a populist party", he declared, while admitting that he has a "way of expressing himself that is a bit out of step" with the rest of the party.

Trump should be judged by his action in government, the former prime minister said.

Fillon, who has frequently defended Russia's policies, agreed with trump that current US policy towards Moscow has been "disastrous" and called on Europe to "rethink our relationship with Russia".

The only woman in the race, Nathalie Kosciusko Morizet, judged Thursday that the US result showed that it was "urgent to ensure" that globalisation "benefits everyone".

To read our coverage of this year's US presidential election click here