French press review 3 February 2015

Le Monde, Le Figaro and Libération all give pride of place to the political dilemma facing UMP party president, Nicolas Sarkozy, in the wake of Sunday's first-round elimination of the UMP candidate in the by-election in the eastern constituency of the Doubs.

The Doubs is lost in the mountains between France and Switzerland, and is the sort of place that most people who weren't actually born there would never have heard of, were it not for the fact that this is, or was, the constituency of socialist MP and former minister, Pierre Moscovici, who had to give up his seat when he became Europe's Economics guru.

Last weekend, the extreme right Front National topped the poll in the first round of the race to replace Moscovici, followed by the Socialist Party. Those two will face-off next Sunday. It would obviously help the socialists a lot if Sarkozy was to call on all UMP voters to support the left-wing candidate, and thus prevent the far right from adding a parliamentary seat to their recent series of election triumphs. But Sarko is in favour of the neither-nor non-solution: he's going to reaffirm the UMP line, defined by himself back in 2011, which allows party voters to make their own decisions, without any directive from the hierarchy.

Le Monde says the UMP president faces a risky choice between two bad solutions. Either Sarko asks the UMP faithful to support the socialist "enemy" to block the real bad guys, thus strengthening the extreme right conviction that the mainstream parties are a twin-headed monster with a shared agenda, or he makes no call, thus making a major contribution to another potential Front National victory.

Left-leaning Libération looks at the various arguments put forward by the mainstream right to justify a non-decision against the extreme right. The find all the excuses offered by the UMP for its refusal to take a stand more or less lacking in good faith. Asking UMP voters to support the left is an insult to those voters, is one such argument. Libé says it's pure tosh, since advice is not a directive. The voters remain free to vote however they wish, or not at all, whatever the party big-wigs and earwigs tell them to do.

The real problem is that Sarko and the mainstream right need all the help they can get, and are not too fussy about where it comes from. They simply don't want to offend the growing number of voters who find that the Front National is the only political organisation currently asking the right questions That the answers the extremists propose are frequently hair-raising, rarely republican and are not the sort of thing you'd wash a respectable hog in, is a different matter. But a vote is a vote, whatever the mindless prejudices of the person who casts it.

And Libé wonders just how bad it would be for the French National Assembly to have to welcome a third Front National deputy. The UMP have already said that such a perspective is not exactly going to endanger the survival of the French Republic, and they're right. Three extremists in a house with 577 seats is no big deal. But what about the question of principle, asks Libé, going on to demand how many Front National representatives would have to be elected to the French parliament before the republican parties decided that it was time to wake up and join forces against the extremists.

Just so those who came in late know what we're talking about, Marine Le Pen's Front National wants to re-introduce the death penalty in France, they want to take the country out of the eurozone and the European Union, they want to send those born in France of foreign parents back to the countries of their parents, they want no more immigration. Libé's editorial describes Front National policies as "broadly xenophobic and dangerous for civil liberties".

Conservative Le Figaro is having none of this nasty politiking, saying that 67 per cent of UMP sympathisers support the neither-nor solution to next Sunday's problem. But Le Figaro also reports that Alain Juppé, a potential right-wing presidential candidate in the 2017 election, has made his position very clear. He believes himself to be morally and in conscience bound to vote for the socialist candidate. And that's what he will do. Bravo, Alain Juppé.

Le Figaro's editorial is not impressed by such a demonstration of republicanism. For over the past quarter of a century, says the writer, the socialists have used the same tactic every time they've faced the Front National in a second round duel. They blow the trumpets of virtue and morality, calling on the good people of the right to come to their assistance. Let us not yield to their ridiculous intimidation. The real reason for the rise and rise of the Front National is socialist incompetence. The real challenge is for the UMP to start convincing voters that the mainstream right can offer a real alternative. In the meantime, neither-nor is perfectly logical and respectable.

The socialists have called on the former president to do the honourable thing. He probably won't. His neither-nor may come to be held against him as a demonstration of neither courage, nor intelligence.