The French papers continue to sift through the fallout from Sunday's presidential first round. How are the two survivors preparing for the next two weeks?

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Le Monde says the result, with centrist Emmanuel Macron leading far-right contender Marine Le Pen, exposes the existence of two nations in France. At least two.

Cities against rural areas; pro-Europeans against sceptics; rich against poor; nationalists against those in favour of openness; traditionalists against innovators . . . the list goes on.

Le Monde says the policies proposed by the two surviving candidates are diametrically opposed on virtually every important question - their attitude to Europe, their vision of society, the environment, Russia.

Two different visions of the liberal economic model

Even on the economy, where both have campaigned on a liberal platform, the options are profoundly different.

Both want to bring down the social charges and taxes alleged to be hampering business development, both have promised to freeze value-added tax, and either fereeze or abolish the local charges we pay on our houses in apartments.

But that's as far as the similarities go. Macron is a pro-European liberal, convinced that you just need to let the market free and it will do its own thing, generating profits and creating jobs.

Le Pen is also an economic liberal, Le Monde argues, but nationalist first and foremost.

She wants to get out of the single European currency and set up protectionist trade barriers to boost the French economy. Leaving the European Union would, she claims, save a fortune in what we wouldn't have to send to Brussels. And then there are all the expenses she says are associated with illegal immigration. Le Pen intends to deprive foreigners of state medical care, drasticaly limit their access to other social assistance and penalise companies who take on foreign workers.

Divergent views on French debt



Conservative daily Le Figaro, lamenting the absence from the second round of François Fillon and his "serious" proposals for reducing the French debt burden, says the approaches of Macron and Le Pen diverge completely on the question of what to do with the 2,170 billion euros the country owes its various creditors.

The contrast is summarised by Le Figaro as between Macron's controlled austerity and Le Pen's economic and budgetary sovereignty.

The former economy minister wants to meet the limits imposed by Brussels, Le Pen intends to tell Brussels where to put its limits.

Hostility to National Front less marked than in 2002

The front page of left-leaning Libération warns against a too rapid assumption that Macron will win in two weeks' time. The paper warns that, with the refusal of Jean-Luc Mélenchon to give clear advice on hos to vote to his disappointed supporters, the campaign against Marine Le Pen is likely to be less solid that that which her father faced in the second round in 2002.

Libé says the strategy of the National Front leader will now be to gather the confused survivors of a disintegrating political landscape and so create a cross-party consensus similar to that which rejected the European constitution in 2005.

Libération's analysis adds another division to the electoral map in the wake of Sunday's first round, suggesting that you can now draw a line from the Atlantic port of Le Havre to the Mediterranean city of Marseille, cutting the country in two, with Macron doing best south of the line, Le Pen collecting her best results to the north.

The new president is going to have to do a lot of reconciliation.

Ten years lost in Sri Lanka's battle against malaria

There are other things happening in the world. Libération looks to Sri Lanka on this, World Anti-Malaria Day, and notes that the mosquito-born killer disease, now officially eradicated on the Indian Ocean island, could have been beaten a decade earlier had it not been for the war against the Tamil Tigers.

Fourteen years after Saddam, Kirkuk still seeking stability

Catholic La Croix looks to the city of Kirkuk in northern Iraq, 14 years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, currently controlled by the local Kurds who see Kirkuk as the natural capital of a broader Kurdistan but whose ambitions face the opposition of the Islamic State armed group, the oil greed of the non-functioning government in Baghdad, the hostility of Turkey and the antagonism of Iran.

Not a simple situation, to say the best of it.

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