French press review 15 October 2011
Saturday’s French papers are dominated by Sunday’s second, deciding, round of the Socialist Party primaries.
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Le Figaro comments in an editorial that the two are graduates of France’s prestigious school of administration and groomed by ex-EU commissioner and Martine Aubry’s father Jacques Delors. Both are also interventionist and the right-wing paper believes the deciding criteria for leftist voters will be about the candidate best placed to beat President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2012.
According to Le Figaro, Hollande is favoured to emerge victorious if we go by the latest polls.
France, Le Figaro says, cannot resolve its problems without taking into account those of its European neighbours, its inevitable partner China and irreversible globalisation. They are beating their chests now but it will be a different ball game tomorrow, the paper says.
It will be wishful thinking, it says, for the Socialist candidate to even imagine that he will impose, decree or negotiate, as they do during party meetings at Solferino Street, when he comes up against Chancellor Angela Merkel, President Barack Obama, Chinese leader Hu Jintao and British premier David Cameron.
The regional newspaper La Montagne believes François Hollande is set to win if we go by the mathematics of the primaries.
Both candidates, the paper says, are fervent Europeans, pragmatic social-democrats who are engaged in reigning in the country's debt and stagnating economic growth. Martine Aubry, it argues, facilitated his triumph by exacerbating differences under the pretext of chasing wolves and the fuzzy ideas of her opponent.
La Montagne also explains that what she has succeeded in doing instead is to push undecided voters to go cast their votes in favour of her Siamese twin brother.
On its part, La République des Pyrénées, based in the south-west of the country, sees the primaries as a grand trial run ahead of the 2012 presidential elections. The primaries’ organising commission said Friday it was troubled by the incendiary language and polemics resulting from it.
The paper says the strategy was most notable of Martine Aubry’s camp as they battled to catch up with frontrunner Hollande. The regional newspaper believes her “all leftist “ strategy targeting working-class voters will not pay off in the ballot box, as French voters grow increasingly conscious of the urgency of tackling the debt burden. More so, it argues, the working-class vote is more attracted by realism than by incantations.
Some papers comment about the ruling party’s desperate attempt to counter the momentum gained by the Socialists through the presidential primaries.
Le Figaro says that the UMP centre-right coalition is planning a counter attack at its national conference on Tuesday. Speaking at a meeting of MPS near Tours on Friday, Prime Minister François Fillon branded the Socialists as kings of backpedalling, determined to reverse the gains of Sarkozy’s presidency. That’s just a signal of how fired up the UMP is right now, writes the right-wing paper.
La Dépêche du Midi thinks the event was hurriedly arranged and determined by circumstantial factors, as the party spent the last three weeks commenting more about how François Hollande is performing than political action.
And the newspaper ridicules the UMP’s decision to make the Socialist Party presidential project, the main item on the agenda of Tuesday’s party convention. La Dépêche du Midi says the fact thatthe parliamentary television channel that has won the contract to cover the live event is a clear indicator that few will be watching, in contrast to the estimated seven-million audience that watched Wednesday’s crunch debate between the would-be Socialist candidates.
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