French press review 4 October 2016

What really happened in last Sunday's Hungarian referendum on immigrant quotas? What is likely to happen in next year's French presidential race? And do economists take global warming sufficiently seriously?

Le Monde tries to figure out what really happened last Sunday as Hungarian voters decided to refuse European Union directives on how member states should share the refugee burden.

Ninety-eight percent of those who voted agreed with their right-wing Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, that only the Hungarian parliament can decide who gets to live in Hungary. But less than 40 percent of reistered voters bothered to cast a ballot, meaning that Sunday's "result" is invalid.

Le Monde says Orban has lost ground, especially with his European partners.

The prime minister himself says Sunday was a huge personal triumph: more people supported his call for an end to imposed migrant quotas than voted in favour of Hungary's 2003 accession to the European Union.

Hungary, by the way, has been asked to provide homes for 1,300 of the Syrian and other refugees currently stuck in Greece. You heard correctly, just one thousand three hundred unfortunate victims of war. And the government campaign for a rejection of imposed quotas cost 49 million euros, proportionally seven times more than the cross-Channel neighbours spent to reject a united Europe.

For how long could you feed and house 1,300 people with 49 million euros?

How many runners in a two-horse race?

Left-leaning Libération wonders if the outcome of the 2017 French presidential election is a foregone conclusion?

The paper publishes the results of an opinion poll which confirm the likelihood of a second round clash between conservative Alain Juppé and far-right leader Marine Le Pen. But Libé then goes on to remind us that voters are strange beasts and opinion polls have got it appallingly wrong in the past.

At its broadest, the new poll confirms three tendencies: they are, the diversity of left-wing opinion, the solidity of Alain Juppé's presidential stature and the enormous popularity of National Front leader Le Pen.

"The diversity of left-wing opinion" is a polite way of saying that the socialist house is in dangerous disarray. Five figures - Emmanuel Macron, Prime Minister Manuel Valls, President François Hollande, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and  Arnaud Montebourg . . . are each credited with about 20 percent support among left-wing sympathisers as the best candidate to reunite the left - no recipe for unity.

Juppé is confirmed as the man most French voters want to see as their next president. He gets 47 percent support in this latest poll, the same level as in December last year, and 20 points clear of his nearest right-wing challenger, who is former prime minister François Fillon, not former president Nicolas Sarkozy.

Juppé's main rival, according to the Libé poll, is Emmanuel Macron, former economy minister under François Hollande, now freelancing on a vague liberal-leftist programme, much liked by the business community, distrusted by the trade unions and grassroot socialists.

Le Pen is holding her own with between 23 and 30 percent of voting intentions for the first round.

But Libé says we have to keep a couple of things in mind in looking at these poll results.

Election campaigns do have huge and often surprising influence. Ask Michel Rocard, or Edouard Balladur, or Lionel Jospin, three candidates who simply couldn't lose. And then did.

Juppé's image may become less appealing to left-leaning voters as he gets precise on the details of retirement and the length of the working week.

And 35 percent of those polled say they are close to no political party and want something new from these elections.

Economists to blame for global warming?

An article on Le Monde's Ideas pages suggests that economists are the real reason for catastrophic climatic change.

This is because classic economic models work on the basis of an ideal system, with a smooth, homogenous planet, where linear processes are at work, linking perfectly informed consumers to perfectly efficient producers. Waste and pollution have no place in such a world and so they don't exist for the vast majority of economists.

Worse, even the ones who try to get to grips with reality are off the dial. The economist William Nordhaus asked 20 top dudes in the discipline to estimate the impact of global warming on global domestic product. They decided that we risked losing about 5.5 percent, if the temperature rose by 6.0°C.

Given that the climate scientists have warned of Armaggedon if we exceed 2.0°C, a six-degree increase would not just slow world economic growth, it would drown two-thirds of humanity and starve the survivors.

Le Monde says a major rethink of the fundamental economic model is urgently required.