French press review 27 May 2014

Elections, of one vintage or another, dominate this morning's French front pages...

First, there's the continuing fallout from Sunday's European elections, with Le Monde assuring readers that the French political landscape has been devastated by the victory of the far right Front National.

Left-leaning Libération calls for a reaction from all moderate republican politicians to bridge the gap between the ordinary French person and the ruling classes.

Because those ruling classes are deep in the do-do.

Fewer than 6 per cent of last Sunday's voters cast a ballot in favour of a group supported by the current French government. No French president has ever had to govern with such a tiny electoral base. François Hollande's political fragility is remarkable.

And things are not much better over at the conservative UMP. The main opposition party had hoped to follow up on their strong showing in the French municipal elections two months ago with a victory in Europe. They were effectively wiped out by the far right. And that's bad news for the already contested UMP party leader, Jean-François Copé, who'll face the party's political hard core this morning, with nothing less than his political future at stake.

As for the broader question of the future of Europe, the 28 heads of state and/or government are to meet this evening in Brussels for a crisis summit on the parliamentary elections. The crisis is a psychological one, since pro-european parties will occupy the overwhelming majority (521) of seats in the new 751-seat Strasbourg assembly.

Communist L'Humanité is harshly critical of what they call the "crazy wager" of president Hollande and prime minister Valls. This is a reference to the determination of the ruling couple to maintain their broad political direction, with both Valls and Hollande insisting that austerity is the only way forward.

L'Humanité reminds us that there are no further elections until 2017, opening the risk of unspecified "disorder" in a country which could become "ungovernable". That could be to the advantage of a reorganised UMP, with many party stalwarts now calling for the return of Nicolas Sarkozy.

A more worrying possibility is that the Front National will continue to profit from socialist inaction and conservative ambition, so that the first round of the 2017 presidential election will end like the first round in 2002, when an earlier Le Pen ousted Lionel Jospin, and the word "earthquake" entered the French political vocabulary.