French press review 7 September 2015

In this morning's Paris dailies, a warning to French President François Hollande that he's running out of time if he wants to stand for reelection and a suggestion that he might be barking up the wrong tree anyway. There's also a look at how ordinary generosity to refugees could help change political attitudes.

DR

The front page of left-leaning Libération is a warning to President François Hollande that he has only one year left if he wants to be a candidate for reelection in the 2017 presidential bunfight. This because the French leader has promised not to run unless he manages to turn the French unemployment statistics around.

The president has a lot on his plate.

Right-wing daily Le Figaro publishes an opinion poll suggesting that François Hollande would lose in the first round of an election, finishing third behind either Alain Juppé or Nicolas Sarkozy of the conservative Les Républicains, with the far right Front National's Marine Le Pen coming second. Seventy-eight per cent of those questioned for the poll say they don't want Hollande to stand again.

Le Figaro notes that the president has recently been forced to change direction on the best way to fight the Islamic State (IS) armed group in Syria and on European migrant quotas. The right-wing paper's editorial says it was about time for the president to abandon positions which were both illogical and hypocritical.

Now all that remains to be done is sort out the diplomatic wrangling with Russia over what to do with Syria's Bashar al-Assad and devise an efficient military strategy to counter IS.

La Croix says only a resolution of the Syrian chaos will put an end to the migrant crisis. The Catholic paper emphasises the military, economic and political risks of a real engagement, suggesting that no one in the West currently has the courage to get involved on the ground.

Communist L'Humanité looks at the way ordinary citizens are organising to help the refugees that some European governments want to keep out. The Communist Party's paper wonders if popular solidarity won't soon start to exert its own political force and thus help to open the doors of a continent that has, so far at least, officially chosen to close its eyes, its borders and its heart.

Germany, meanwhile, saw its population grew by at least 13,000 over the weekend and the Le Monde's website says the police were still counting the new arrivals late last night. The German government is prepared to accept 800,000 refugees and seems to be already on the way to surpassing that figure.

Here in France the figures are less impressive. There were an estimated 8,500 people at Saturday's Paris march in solidarity with the refugees, in other words, as many demonstrators in France as there were refugees welcomed into Germany the same day.

Some participants expressed the fear that this was another wave of pointless emotion, like the Je suis Charlie demonstrations last January. One Chadian marcher, who has lived in France for the past decade, suggested that Europe needs to look at its contribution to the wars that have provoked this crisis.

"Europe sells weapons to everyone," he points out. "The multinationals rob African resources. Every economic sector is controlled by western interests. Europe says it's not possible to take in all the suffering people but it might be possible to stop sowing the seeds of that suffering."

Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right Front National party, was having none of that sort of logic as she closed her party's annual gathering in the southern city of Marseille yesterday. Migrants are not a gift, Le Pen assured the party faithful, they are a burden.

Speaking to 3,200 enthusiasts - about a quarter as many as the refugees who were being settled into new homes in Germany as she spoke - Le Pen refused to make any distinction between economic migrants and political refugees: this current wave has nothing in common with the exodus from Franco's Spain into France in the 1930s or the waves of Jews who fled Nazi Germany a decade later, said Le Pen. These people are economic migrants trying to enter a country without an economy.

Worse, Le Pen assured her audience, there is a clear link between increased immigration and Islamic terrorism, a point which she says only her Front National party has the courage to underline.

Le Pen promised to bring radical Islam to its knees if she is elected president in 2017.