French press review 21 November 2012

Three stories dominate this morning's French front pages. The loss of the nation's triple A economic status, the ongoing uncivil war in the main right-wing opposition party, the UMP, and the conflict in Gaza.

On Gaza, Le Monde's editorial laments the fact that a largely ignored truce is no substitute for a real peace plan. What will have been achieved, wonders the centrist daily, if we simply return to the situation as it was before the latest upsurge of violence?

It is not a simple conflict, to say the very least. There is the war between Hamas and Israel, a struggle in which the Islamist rulers of Gaza are becoming ever more powerful, whether measured in terms of their popular support or their ability to strike targets inside the Jewish state.

Then there's the struggle between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas, an authority no longer seriously considered by any of the parties in the real conflict. That doesn't mean that Abbas can be ignored, least of all by Israel, which continues to engage in a war of words with the only officially recognised Palestinian government, while undermining and enfeebling that government at every turn.

Apart from the ongoing Israeli blockade of Gaza and continuing expansion of Jewish settlements on the West Bank - with all the attendant bitterness and suffering - there's the unresolved question of sharing Jerusalem, of what to do with the territory overrun by Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War and the even older problem of the Palestinians displaced at the creation of the Jewish state in 1948, refugees ever since.

It is a nonsense, says Le Monde, to talk of a truce when the reality of peace is so far distant.

Which brings us to another fragile truce without real peace: the right-wing Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) might have to drop the word "union" from its name, in the wake of the bloodletting, backbiting and eye-gouging that marked the recent election of gentleman Jean-François Copé as party president.

The beaten contender, François Fillon, says he'll remain part of the family but his talk of political and moral division at the heart of the UMP is hardly inspiring. He's to make a statement on his political future in the next few days.

Centrist Jean-Louis Borloo, himself a refugee from the UMP but now president of the Union of Independent Democrats, says the myth of a united right has finally exploded. Borloo will obviously be hoping to collect some of the resulting body parts.

And then there's the lost horizon of France's triple A financial rating, already downgraded by Standard & Poor's, this week by Moody's, with only the Fitch ratings agency holding out in support of French sovereign solvency.

The markets have, broadly, remained unmoved, but right-wing paperLe Figaro is incensed at the left-wing incompetence it believes has led to this humiliation. Forgetting, as Figaro frequently does, that the Standard & Poor's downgrade came under the Sarkozy-Fillon government.