French press review 28 March 2017

From toxic waste to toxic political accusations, there's plenty of poison in this morning's papers.

Le Monde's main story says the continuing campaign by scandal-damaged right-wing presidential candidate François Fillon is causing confusion in the ranks of the conservative faithful.

No one believes he has a rat's chance in a dog pound of winning but they have to go on pretending. That's politics.

The centrist daily reports that the man who represents the sole hope of the mainstream right-wing Republicans party in next month's first round of the election is increasingly isolated. Only a hard core of supporters remain on board, with most others deserting the sinking ship with a view to limiting the damage to their own chances in the summer parliamentary elections.

And Le Monde notes that outgoing President François Hollande will at least be remembered as the most travelled of French leaders, his 206 official trips easily beating the previous record of 167 set by Nicolas Sarkozy when he had the top job.

Is French socialism on its last legs?

The main story in right-wing Le Figaro warns that the rivalry between Socialist candidate Benoît Hamon and the centrist challenger Emmanuel Macron risks blowing the French Socialist Party assunder.

This is because several Socialist heavyweights have thrown their weight behind Macron and former renegade minister Hamon is going backwards in the opinion polls.

Le Figaro says the very survival of the Socialist Party is at stake, with a real risk of a terminal division between those in Jean-luc Mélenchon's hard-left bloc, the pro-ecology camp and various reformist groups before the parliamentary elections.

The light at the end of the tunnel is radioactivity

Left-leaning Libération devotes its front page to the dangerous problem of nuclear waste, with the thought-provoking headline "See you in 100,000 years," a reference to the fact that the various leftovers of the contemporary nuclear power industry will still be lethally radioactive when the dinosaurs return.

The additional problem is that current solutions, which include a plan to bury some of the worst waste 500 metres below the French countryside, scare some of the locals and should, suggests Libé, terrify everyone else, since geological history has taught us that an awful lot can happen to currently stable land masses over 10,000 centuries.

A different but no less toxic problem

On the very different timescale of the French presidential election, with the first round now less than one month away, Libé notes the efforts by six of François Fillon's faithful supporters to interest the French judicial authorities in the alleged crimes of current President François Hollande.

Hollande is accused of various criminal activities with a view to preventing the conservatives from returning to power.

Every elected representative is legally obliged to alert the law if they have suspicions that some other elected representative is up to no good.

The problem is that the alleged crimes are barely substantiated, frequently out of focus, not to say off the wall, and all come from a recent book called Welcome to the Interior Ministry, already the source of Fillon's allegation of a secret clique working to harm his chances of election.

Written by three journalists, two of them from the weekly satirical paper Le Canard Enchaîné, the book is said to be heavy on speculation, light on proof and offers no stunning revelations. Fillon has himself admitted that he fired off his secret clique claim before he had even read Welcome to the Interior Ministry.

The class of 2017 could do better

Financial daily La Tribune notes with alarm a recent opinion poll carried out among business leaders.

According to 43 percent of the bosses questioned, no one of the leading five candidates in the race to be the next French president has presented economic policies any better than the competition.

Forty-one percent of the movers and shakers feel they are ignored by the top five contenders, while 39 percent think that none of the five offers any real chance of change on the economic horizon.

To add to the confusion, Fillon is rated best of a bad lot by the same sample of business leaders.