French press review 22 March 2014

The French press has been examining former President Nicolas Sarkozy’s denunciation of a plot against him in the wake of mounting corruption claims that are undermining his prospects of a comeback.

Le Monde says Sarkozy's blistering attack on Interior Minister Manuel Valls, Justice Minister Christiane Taubira, the Magistrates' Union, the press and on French President François Hollande, even though he didn’t refer to him by name, is a ploy to mobilise his Conservative political base on the eve of local elections.

The paper is particularly dismayed by Sarkozy’s comparison of the court-ordered tapping of his phones to spying by East Germany's Stasi police. It underlines a stinging rebuke from President Hollande, who expressed his revulsion that a former French leader describes his country as a dictatorship.

Le Monde believes Sarkozy’s is under pressure to comfort his hardcore political base in the UMP, which is being eroded by a growing number of Conservative barons trooping towards ex-Prime Minister and Bordeaux Mayor Alain Juppé in a drive to stop Sarkozy from staging a political comeback in the 2017 Presidential elections.

Aujourd’hui en France also criticises Sarkozy’s obsession about the "Stasi" methods of the French judiciary. The paper claims it hasn’t gone down well in some UMP circles including UMP founding father Alain Juppé, who has expressed disgust about the "unthinkable" reference, while a supporter of Sarkozy’s Prime Minister François Fillon branded the content of the letter as “selfish”.

Sarkozy’s former ministers told Aujourd’hui en France that the letter is a vintage reflection of its author -- crude, erratic, frontal and aggressive. A UMP lawmaker told the Parisian paper he stopped reading the piece after 15 lines - where Sarkozy expressed "no desire today to get involved in our country's political scene." The MP says he felt blighted by the idea that the same Sarkozy has not stopped sending feelers out to measure the enthusiasm of the UMP faithful about a possible political comeback.

Le Figaro, the right-wing newspaper Sarkozy chose to publish his stinging missive, speaks enthusiastically about a so-called "Sarkozy effect" which has electrified the conservative electorate hours ahead of local elections across France on Sunday. According to the paper, despite the sharp criticism his letter has received from the Left, it has galvanised right-wing voters traumatised by the lacklustre campaign.

Libération accuses Sarkozy of rushing to entertain vagaries and half truths, instead of responding to the allegations piling up against him. The paper claims he was just one of 35,000 French citizens subjected to judicial phone taps in 2012. It ridicules his cries about being the victim of a witch-hunt, arguing that phone taps are all carried out on judges’ orders, noting that illegal eavesdropping in France is a crime punishable by two years in prison.

For Libération, the multiplication of scandals around Nicolas Sarkozy and the verbal war he declared in Le Figaro has heavily polluted the campaign for Sunday’s vote. It argues that while the Socialist-led majority expects to lose some key cities, the surge of the Conservatives will be limited, rendering it hard to draw any national lessons from what is, above everything, a local election.