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French press review 3 May 2017

Could her lack of a clear strategy on getting France out of the European single currency cost Marine Le Pen dear in Sunday's second round against pro-European Emmanuel Macron? A majority of Jean-Luc Mélenchon's supporters say they won't vote for either candidate. And François Fillon opens fire in his legal battle against weekly satirical magazine Le Canard Enchaîné.

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In its printed edition, Le Monde says the European currency is at the very heart of the debate between presidential contenders Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen.

He, the liberal economic centrist, is in favour of the euro and says domestic austerity is essential to ensure that France meets the budgetary requirements of the single currency.

She of the far right, equally liberal on most economic questions, wants to take France out of Europe and the euro, reinstall tarrif barriers to protect French producers, bring back the good old days of the franc, the local currency administered by the central bank in Paris, not by a bunch of faceless technocrats in far-away Brussels.

Le Pen changes tack on euro

The main headline in conservative paper Le Figaro says the plan to withdraw from the eurozone is destroying the credibility of Marine Le Pen's campaign.

To such an extent that the far-right candidate has noticibly changed tack on the euro, pushing her economic arguments, which depend in a large majority on France leaving the European economic union, into the background.

Le Figaro says her proposal to have two parallel monetary systems - the franc and the euro - is simply nonsense and would lead to endless, destructive speculation against the new national currency as it floated against the euro.

A majority of Mélenchon's troops refuse to back Macron

Le Monde's web edition reports a sort of back-handed boost for Le Pen, with the news that a majority of those who supported Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the hard left in the first round, in which Mélenchon collected well over 19 percent of votes, will not support Macron in next Sunday's second round.

That doesn't mean they're going to vote for Le Pen, who is at the opposite end of the political spectrum. But nearly two-thirds of Mélenchon voters who responded to a party questionnaire on internet say they will either abstain or spoil their votes next Sunday.

Is Fillon's Canard Enchaîné case a lame duck?

And while we're talking about winners and others, another of the first-round losers, François Fillon of the mainstream Republicans has decided to attack the weekly satirical magazine Le Canard Enchaîné for its part in his crushing defeat.

Fillon has decided to base his complaint on French electoral law which prohibits, among other things, the publication of false information or slanderous rumours likely to influence the outcome of an election.

Since the man himself has admitted the fundamental truth of most of the charges against him, Le Figaro says, he would have found it difficult to mount a case for libel. And the right-wing daily goes on to wonder how far he'll get with what looks, at first glance, like a fairly lame duck (sorry, Le Canard!) case in a nation proud of its tradition of press freedom and independence.

A legal expert interviewed by the right-wing daily says Fillon's only hope will be to prove that the weekly paper was manipulated by a third party. And that's where the subject gets interesting since Fillon has already accused outgoing president François Hollande of having been behind a dastardly plot to prevent him from winning and has promised to prove it in the courts.

What will happen after Sunday's presidential election?

Going back to next Sunday's face-off, left-leaning Libération asks how either of the two survivors can hope to run the country, given that neither has a political machine likely to win a parliamentary majority.

The answer is "with enormous difficulty". The political structure of the Fifth Republic has seen three not particularly successful cohabitations, with the president and the parliamentary majority coming from different sides of the political spectrum. The president does have a broad range of powers - he or she names the prime minister and can dissolve parliament - but he or she is carefully supervised by parliament and subject to a lot of control.

Libé asks us to imagine Macron president, with Mélenchon as his prime minister. "Strained" and "difficult" are the best terms the paper can come up with to describe the situation, suggesting that neither man would see his campaign promises easily realised.

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