French press review 17 October 2011

Expectations run high in France ahead of next Sunday's Rugby World cup final against New Zealand while the guessing is over for the candidate from the Socialist Party who will most likely face Nicolas Sarkozy in next year's presidential election.

Right-wing Le Figaro gives pride of place on its front page to the French rugby victory, but they can hardly ignore the fact that the Socialist faithful yesterday chose François Hollande as the party's candidate in next year's presidential election.

The headline could not be less inspired, perhaps because Le Figaro finds the news less than inspiring. "The left chooses Hollande for 2012," we are told, point blank.

But the Figaro front-page editorial is a lot less bland.

Headlined "Now the Socialists face the real problems," the article says that François Hollande faces major political and psychological challenges. Politically, the chosen one now has to somehow re-unite the various left-wing currents represented by the six original candidates in this election.

It will not be easy to create a coherent synthesis from the "hard Left" of Martine Aubry, the "anti-global-economy Left" of Arnaud Montebourg, the "anti-nuclear Left" of Eva Joly and the soggy Socalism represented, according to Figaro, by Hollande himself.

And the socialists have to show some way of financing their various propositions. These include increasing the number of teachers recruited, reversing the current policy of replacing only 50 per cent of retiring civil servants, and finding starter jobs for three hundred thousand unemployed young people.

Psychologically, the challenge will be to re-unite a party that has publicly exposed its profound divisions. No one, says Le Figaro, will easily forgive or forget the nastiness of the primary campaign.

Left-leaning Libération accepts that a certain amount of fence-mending has to be done, but sees the real challenge elsewhere.

The next round in this fight is going to be against a right-wing opponent, and the job will be to convince the broader French electorate, not just left-wing sympathisers, that the socialist programme is both credible and workable.

The French are sick of Sarkozy, says Libé. Hollande & Company now have six months to convince us they can do better.

Another election gets honourable mention inside Le Figaro. The graduates of the English university of Cambridge were recently called on to elect a new chancellor to replace Prince Philip, the queen's husband, who had to retire from the purely honorary post on his 90th birthday.

Normally, it's a shoo-in, the candidate chosen by the university authorities gets the job, no debate, no primaries, no democracy.

Not this time, no sirree. No fewer than three contenders put themselves up against the official choice, the supermarket millionaire Lord David Sainsbury.

The least typical was one Abdul Arain, a Kenyan grocer who stood in the election in an effort to prevent Sainsbury's from building a mega-supermarket opposite his shop. He managed to get six per cent of the vote, but I wouldn't hold out much hope for his business.

The Shakespearean actor Brian Blessed got a quarter of votes, while the luxury left-wing lawyer Michael Mansfield picked up 17 per cent for his campaign against government moves which have virtually tripled university fees.

150,000 votes were cast, with the winner, Lord Sainsbury, the only candidate to have a vote, because he was the sole Cambridge graduate in the race. And you thought the socalist primaries were complicated?

The front page of communist L'Humanité looks back exactly 50 years to the 17th October, 1961, when a demonstration by Algerians living in Paris, calling for independence for their home country, was violently repressed by French police officers.

Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of protestors were killed, their bodies dumped into the river Seine. The final death toll was never established. France has never accepted legal responsibility for the killings.