French press review 19 April 2012

With just three days to go to the first round of the French presidential election, there's no shortage of balanced advice, sober analysis and rabble-rousing rant in today's French newspapers.

Heading the balanced advice cohort are centrist Le Monde and popular tabloid Aujourd'hui en France. They both offer detailed guides to all 10 programmes proposed, complete with critical analysis and an estimation of the financial feasibility of each major proposal.

The latest opinion poll shows the Socialist François Hollande leading current president Nicolas Sarkozy by five per cent in Sunday's first round.

And the gap between the two widens to 16 per cent in a potential second-round face-off.

So Hollande has the all the makings of a bookmakers' favourite, with several key defections from the Sarkozy camp showing that some of the incumbent's erstwhile allies feel that the good ship Sarkozy is about to go down with all hands and it might be time to start swimming to safety.

Thus Martin Hirsch, Sarkozy's solidarity minister, and Corinne Lepage, Jacques Chirac's environment minister, have been joined in the exodus by Fadela Amara and Brigitte Girardin. They've all said they'll vote for Hollande on Sunday.

At least that's four people who've made up their minds.

Because, according to the front page of right wing Le Figaro, no fewer than one quarter of French voters are still unsure who they will support next weekend. For Le Figaro, these undecided millions are going to have a decisive impact on Sunday's outcome.

Also crucial will be the overall level of participation, since an earlier opinion poll suggests that one-third of voters may stay at home on Sunday. And, as any two-bit political analyst will tell you, high abstention is always good news for right-wing candidates, since older voters vote and older voters tend to be conservative.

Which brings us to the question of far-right contender, Marine Le Pen, featured on the front page of this morning's left-leaning Libération.

The headline leaves nothing to the imagination. It reads "The threat" and suggests that Le Pen Junior is in a position to repeat the surprise first-round victory achieved by her father, Jean-Marie, back in 2002. Current opinion polls give the daughter 17 per cent of first round voting intentions, slightly more than her father actually scored in 2002, and that was enough to beat the Socialist contender, Lionel Jospin.

If that sort of earthquake is unlikely to strike twice, Libé goes on to say that a strong showing for the far right and a defeat for Sarkozy is likely to accelerate the implosion of the mainstream right as represented by the UMP. More worryingly for the left-wing paper, Le Pen's daughter has managed to tome down the xenophobic rant and make the far-right policies of the National Front almost respectable.

In this, says Libé, she has been greatly helped by Sarkozy who, by harping on about immigration and insecurity, opened up the two key areas in which Le Pen has managed to convince voters that her ideas make sense.

The main story in business daily Les Echos warns that Europe's banks are still under extreme pressure and don't have the cash needed to provide cheap loans to get the continental economy turning over again.

Catholic La Croix looks forward to the end of a fundamentalist crisis. The story has nothing to do with Islam, the fundamentalists in question are the ultra-conservative Catholics who follow Marcel Lefebvre in feeling that the Church has been going down the tubes since the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. The ultras still celebrate the Mass in Latin, they don't like dialogue with other Christian movements, they sound as if they'd be happy to see the Spanish Inquisition back in business.

Now, it appears, there are moves afoot to bring the right-wingers back into the Catholic fold, but Pope Benedict says reconciliation will not be at the cost of any compromise on the Church's determination to talk to other believers. God bless them all. They sound like they deserve one another.