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French press review 21 October 2016

Is the outcome of the US presidential election a foregone conclusion with Hillary Clinton the obvious winner? Why has French far-right leader Marine Le Pen suddenly taken an interest in the old? World wine production is down compared to last year. And are the French a nation of pessimists?

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Le Figaro wonders if Hillary Clinton has already won the US presidential race.

If the opinion polls are to be believed, Clinton is already well ahead of Republican challenger Donald TrumpG and will do better than Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.

The statistician who has made this prediction, on the basis of the results of 32 opinion polls, says he is prepared to bet 50 dollars on a Clinton victory but he wouldn't risk 250.

The reason for this caution?

The fact that the people who vote are never the people interviewed by the pollsters. There's a forest of figures available and they'll support very different interpretations.

We just have to wait till the dust settles on 8 November.

Marine Le Pen goes in search of the older voter

An analysis piece in left-leaning Libération looks at the impact on the far-right National Front of Marine Le Pen's efforts to soften her party's image.

Moving beyond the cliché of skinheaded hatred of practically everything and everyone even vaguely different which was in fashion when her father was party chief, Marine Le Pen's charm offensive has widened the far-right's electoral base considerably.

But older voters continue to resist, says Libé, because they are frightened off by the "antisystem" aspect of the National Front's programme.

With six months to go to the presidential election, in which she is given every chance of winning the first round, Le Pen yesterday went in search of the older voter, opening a party conference in Paris on the theme of ageing well in a society ravaged by isolation, lonliness, diminishing spending power, decreasing pensions and growing health costs. She plans to send out teams to talk to older people about their concerns.

With one quarter of the French electorate already past the age of 60, it is worth the effort. And these are voters who vote, not like the complainers and abstainers in other age groups.

Eighty-six percent of those over the age of 60 voted in the 2012 presidential election but only 13 percent supported the National Front candidate.

The old folk had better watch out! Madame Le Pen has already set up 11 similar task forces, with objectives as varied as attracting suburban voters to convincing the compost and recycling community that the National Front cares for the environment.

World wine output in decline

Right-wing Le Figaro reports the tragic news that the world's wine industry is at a 20-year low.

Because of weather problems, global wine production will be down to a miserable 259 million hectolitres, a decline of five percent on last year.

Not half empty, half full!

Le Monde's Ideas page carries an article headlined "The French have a tendency to see everything grey as black".

Earlier this week, the centrist paper published a report showing that the country has lived through a decade in which individual incomes have remained frozen; that the richest 10 percent have eight times more to leave to their kids than the national average; that half of all unqualified French people under the age of 25 are out of work; and that there's a seven-point gap in the employment figures for native French and the children of immigrants, even with identical qualifications.

Not a lot of equality, in other words.

The report sparked a storm of critical reaction. So the authors are back to defend their thesis that France is far from well but that rumours of her demise are greatly exaggerated, especially by close family members.

In answer to their critics they quote Oscar Wilde, who famously said he never read any book he was asked to review for fear of having his opinion influenced.

Did the critics read the report? The authors are not sure.

They stress that their sole intention was to point out the gap between the available economic statistics and the way those statistics are read by the average French person. The glass may be half full, the French insist on seeing it as half empty.

And the reason for this national pessimism is that the descendents of the Gauls, Visigoths and Saracens have lost faith in their institutions . . . business, schools, the public services, social security, the state, representative democracy. All are seen to have failed to mobilise our individual and collective potential.

The good news is that French pessimism is actually a form of lucidity. They have spotted the cracks in the "social contract" and are therefore helping to repair the edifice by pointing to the fundamental problem. Perhaps.

We need nothing less than a new grammar of social existence, say the savants at France Strategy, a thinktank attached to the prime minister's office that produced the original report. And we should also avoid hysterical screaming about how bad things currently are. Negative exaggeration won't help anyone. Think grey, not black.

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