French press review 29 March 2015

Ahead of Sunday’s departmental elections, the national magazines are dripping with tidbits from the campaign trail and the stakes of the crucial vote.

Everyone’s villain is President Francois Hollande, whose fruitless policies are to blame for the painful slap his Socialist party and their allies are bound to receive, according to Le Canard Enchaîné.

The satirical weekly chides him and his prime minister for behaving like the heroic musicians of the RMS Titanic, facing defeat in song and playing music to keep the passengers calm as the ship goes down. According to the journal, the Latin adage vae victis, or woe the defeated, increasingly belongs to the past if you go by conventional Socialist wisdom on damage control. The party lost 524 cantons in the first round vote and even if the polls project more losses in some of their traditional bastions in the north, east and south-west. Hence Le Canard Enchaîné’s appeal to embarrassed Frenchmen, not to blame them for celebrating what they believe is a narrow escape.

It has taken National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen and his daughter Marine just 20 years to complete the right-wing party’s political revolution, according to Le Point. The magazine says that 56 per cent of the party’s electorate earn less than 30,000 euros a year. That’s an indication that it has become the party of blue-collared workers. An IPSOS survey carried out for the right-wing magazine shows that 66 per cent of National Front voters are driven by immigration and security issues, unlike the UMP and Centrist electorate unhappy with the government’s fiscal policies.

L’Obs took a last tour around former left-leaning bastions about to be wiped out from the French political map. From Pas-de-Calais in the north, now National Front terrain, to Seine-Saint-Denis in the Parisian suburbs through President Hollande’s home constituency Corrèze, the lift is on the brink of extinction crushed by the ballot box and mentally exhausted.

Left-leaning Marianne has an edited photograph of President Hollande on its cover page, standing gallantly in a sinking boat, draped with the colours of la République française. The title calls it the "investigation of a drifting president". It is almost the entire blue-collar population which the official Left has abandoned on the roadside, warns the journal.

According to Marianne, flattened in the district election, the Socialist party has collapsed and the Left torn into shreds. This, while at the Elysée the head of state watches the boat drifting, unstirred, still dreaming to be the bulwark of the Left against the conservatives and the far right in the 2017 presidential elections.

President Hollande and Prime Minister Manuel Valls are the pin-up stars in this week’s L’Express, the right-wing magazine consecrating its cover story on “a Left in ruins”. The special report explores the causes of the electoral disaster, the crisis rocking French Socialism and the risks of a blockage of the government’s reform agenda.

Hollande’s greatest nightmare now according to Le Figaro is how to find the new majority he needs to govern. The publication is already betting on a first round defeat of Hollande in 2017 projected by some polls, claiming that it looks increasingly plausible in the light of the latest election results.

Nicolas Sarkozy has been unable to dissimulate his excitement at the twist the current elections have brought to his political fortunes. That’s what Le Point says after studying the mood in Sarkozy’s office. It’s euphoria everywhere, writes the right-wing publication. Le Point says Sarkozy is convinced that events have proven him right and he now believes that his return to the Elysée will be a simple formality.

Le Point says he is not the boss yet, listing little differences with ex-premiers Alain Juppé and Francois Fillon, both declared contestants of the UMP presidential ticket. Juppé refused to follow Sarkozy’s proposal to ban the Islamic veil in French universities and the provision of substitution dishes in school canteens for children who don’t eat pork.

Le Canard Enchaîné dissects Sarkozy's reaction to the UMP’s performance in the election. It reports that he found pleasure in the disastrous results of Alain Juppé ally and centrist Francois Bayrou who scored less than 1 per cent of ballots cast. “He’s been drugged out of his mind and couldn’t simply admit that I won”, Sarkozy is quoted as saying. Le Canard also learned that Sarkozy has been giggling about Juppé’s failure to win his home Gironde constituency, adding that he will have a hard time in 2017 to prove that despite turning 72, he is the ideal leader the country needs.

L’Obs says Sarkozy will first have to answer a 4-million-euro question before 2017. According to the weekly, he is due to be summoned shortly in connection with the UMP’s settling of his 2012 campaign funding case. Judges are reportedly seeking to get to the bottom of a transfer of 4 million euros into the party’s account.

L’Obs gives ten reasons why the very young CEO of Radio France facing a crippling strike can’t keep his job. Mathieu Gallet, 37, sparked a strike two weeks ago after unveiling a job-shedding restructuring plan. The left-leaning weekly says the unions have been fired up by revelations that Gallet had spent 105,000 euros just to renovate his office – 35,000 on furniture and carpets alone – while slashing jobs at the company.

Workers’ morale at Radio France had been sapped by four years of renovation work at the old radio house that has swallowed up nearly half a billion euros, according to L’Obs. It adds that Gallet is perceived by his staff as a seducer and an outsider with a weakness for a luxury lifestyle.

Le Canard Enchaîné also breaks more embarrassing news about the young Gallet’s fibbing and so called “bling bling” lifestyle. According to the satirical weekly, he didn’t hesitate to hire a private communications consultant for 90,000 euros to repair his image battered by the indefinite strike. More so, Le Canard describes him as a spend thrift and a repeat offender with a reputation established at his previous jobs.