French press review 26 November 2015

President Hollande's diplomatic marathon to build an anti-Daech coalition in rocky terrain as he flies to Russia. Despite national unity rally, blame game erupts over systemic intelligence failures that eased the designs of the terrorists. And populist National Front posts strong gains in run up to December's regional elections as insecurity becomes the key issue in France.

DR

President Francois Hollande’s search for a grand coalition to fight the Islamic State armed group continues to inspire the front page comments by the French newspapers.

The process is "in an impasse", says Le Monde, following the damaging consequences of Turkey’s shooting down of the Russian fighter jet for allegedly violating its airspace.

“Erdogan, the precious friend of Daesh”, headlines the Communist party daily L’Humanité. The paper scorns the Turkish President and his military chiefs who on Wednesday said they didn’t know the warplane shot down was Russian.

The Kremlin reacted to the incident by unveiling plans to deploy its most hi-tech air defence the S-400 anti-aircraft missiles to Latakia in north-western Syria. The S-400 missiles have a range of about 400 kilometres meaning they could reach deep into Turkey or pose a potential threat to US-led coalition planes.

Ankara has since said it is ready for "all kinds of cooperation" with Russia, after Moscow warned the shooting of the plane would have serious consequences.

Le Monde reports that after defending his single anti-Daesh coalition before President Obama in Washington and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Paris Wednesday, President Hollande is flying to Moscow today on what it sees as the most difficult lap of his diplomatic marathon.

Le Figaro agrees that that the downing by Turkey of the Russian Sukhoï fighter jet seriously compromises Hollande’s project, pointing out that the border incident has instead helped the Kremlin to consolidate its military position in Syria, rendering Russia masters of Syrian airspace which could complicate the air operations of the US-led coalition.

Libération, holds that Russia is certain to use the shooting of the war plane to continue playing its so-called dubious game in Syria, propping up the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, and not focusing on IS jihadists.

For Le Monde the French President should be quite frustrated to realize that the terrorist attacks in Paris have not delivered the momentum he expected to put an end to the divisions sparked by the Syrian crisis.

Libération also investigates the grave intelligence failures which allowed the eight terrorists to carry out their horrible project without being detected. It was due to the gaping holes in the intelligence dragnet according to the left-leaning paper that spy services were incapable of tracking them down.

Some experts blame the failures to President Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision in 2008 to merge the state security agency and counter intelligence services which caused malfunctions in years of valuable work carried out by his predecessors.

Some experts consulted by the newspaper point to the trap of an all hi-tech based strategy concentrated on the surveillance of massive data by machines at the expense of the more efficient human-collected information.
Still, some experts blame the flaws to the shortage of intelligence information analysts and the failure of EU member countries in putting in place the tools and mechanisms on intelligence cooperation.

Le Parisien claims that the November 13 attacks in which Islamist gunmen killed 130 people in the French capital have boosted the popularity of the National Front ahead of next month’s regional elections.

According to a new Odoxa survey for BFMTV and Le Parisien/Aujourd'hui en France, Marine Le Pen’s party is now running neck and neck with the Socialists on 23 percent, in the strategic Ile de France region.

According to the poll, while the conservative coalition led by Valerie Pécresse continues to lead in the surveys, the National Front is poised to cross the symbolic benchmark of 25 percent.

The Parisian publication says the fight against terrorism has overturned the expectations of voters with 52 percent of Parisians describing it as their top-most concern. The safeguard and creation of jobs is now a preoccupation for just 33 percent of eligible, voters, ahead of 26 percent of polled people want radical improvements in the public transport sector.