French press review 5 July 2013

The papers are all about the ousting of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi and the bombshell news of ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy’s resignation from France’s top constitutional authority.

Speculation had been rife in France about what Sarkozy would do, in the wake of what his friends described as a smear campaign, after he was accused of being at the centre of a string of scandals: allegations that the former Libyan dictator Moamer Kadhafi bankrolled his presidential campaign, the Bernard Tapie 400 million euro reparations scam, the Karachi affair, a presidential opinion surveys scandal and the Bettencourt illegal campaign funding affair.

The straw that broke the camel’s back came on Thursday when France’s highest court, where Sarkozy sits, upheld a decision that he breached official spending limits during last year's election campaign. According to Les Echos, France's electoral finance watchdog tallied Sarkozy’s campaign spending at nearly 23 million euros, which exceeded the spending ceiling by 2.1 percent. Under the law, he is not eligible for reimbursement of 47.5 percent of his total campaign spending since he lost to Socialist François Hollande in the vote.

Libération says that on top of the 11 million euros of which Sarkozy deprived the UMP, he also needs to return 150,000 euros advanced by the state for the campaign. It is the first time that a candidate reaching the second round of presidential elections has seen his campaign expenses rejected.

Aujourd’hui en France says the ex-President will cost his party 11 million euros, which has made him furious and has pushed him to try to regain his freedom of speech, as he braces for a standoff with the so-called faceless political enemies seeking his downfall.

The rejection of Nicolas Sarkozy’s campaign funds threatens to throw the main opposition UMP party -- already reeling from a leadership battle -- into further financial chaos, according to Le Figaro. The right-wing paper reports that the party’s chief Jean-François Copé has convened a crisis meeting next week, to examine its response to the grave decision and to prepare a massive membership enrolment and national contribution scheme to boost the party’s finances.

The political situation in Egypt is a front page story in some of today’s French dailies. The communist party daily L’Humanité celebrates the triumph of peoples’ power. Libération reports that the country is back to square one, as the army announced a transitional period and carried out a sweep across Islamist circles.

La Croix examines the uncertainties and questions that remain after Morsi’s removal: the military's return to power, the embarrassment that the overthrow of the democratically-elected government is causing in Washington, and the security risks likely to arise from the sidelining of the Muslim Brotherhood and their Salafist allies.