Countdown begins to French snap elections, with discouraging headlines for Macron

Press review time now for you here on France 24. Antonia Kerrigan's with us today. She's starting here in France, 6 days out from the first round of voting. Marine dependence, National Rally surging ahead in the polls. But as we've said, the president is looking down the barrel of a defeat. What are the papers saying about it, Antonia? Well, what's interesting today, Stuart, is that what we can see is the French press are very much taking Emmanuel Macron's defeat as a bit of a given. If you look at this front page, they're talking about Emmanuel Macron faced with the spectre of a cohabitation. As we've talked about in recent weeks of cohabitation is where you've got a president and a Prime Minister who aren't from the same political families and, of course, who are charged with governing together. The president said in his open letter today, sorry, excuse me, yesterday, that he will remain in position until 2027. And he's also said to those around him that he refuses to become a lame duck. But obviously, he's having to face this prospect that he could be governing alongside a Prime Minister from the National Rally Party. These are two men from radically different political traditions, and you don't really know each other that well. So the article inside the Figaro is pointing out that, you know, this will be unlike any cohabitations we've seen before and might even raise questions and difficulties for the president as he pursues his diplomatic duties. Will other world leaders recognise what he says as representing what France says, knowing there's someone else back in Paris potentially saying something else entirely? The Liz Ecourt, another French broadsheet has on its front page Lebete de de Mercignon with Bar de la Gabrielle etal and Milanchon. Sort of. Liz Ecourt has taken a tiny bit of license putting Milanchon on there because he's not definitely the left's candidate. But in short, there's this discussion of not just now but afterwards is talking about Inside the Pages, a column headed for the candidates of the major parties, The post Macron has already begun. And what they're saying is essentially, Emmanuel Macron knows he won't be renewing a majority with these upcoming parliamentary elections. And all the hats are being thrown into the ring, not just for Prime Minister, but for the presidency in 2027. You've found a new poll, haven't you? This is in the British paper The Financial Time. It seems to kind of add insult to injury really for the presidential camp, you might say. So the parties. So this poll is about how the French people trust the different parties to handle the economy. 25% most trust the traditionally populist National Rally. So that's a bit of an upset nouveau from popular coming in second. That's the left wing coalition and then Emmanuel Macron's party of start up nation coming in 3rd place. The margins are of course small, but it does say something that this majority party currently in power that's really pushing a programme of stability and perhaps fiscal responsibility is to is polling so poorly on this question, perhaps partly due to a recent tap on the wrist from Brussels regarding the budget deficit. Now, we mentioned this in the news that death toll on this year's Hajj topping 1300 pilgrims due after temperatures rose as high as 49° in Saudi Arabia during the the Pilgrim in Shimeka. Absolutely. This New York Times piece puts the spotlight, as it says on the underworld Hajj industry. Now, as you talked about in the news, the Saudi government are massively trying to attribute this enormous death toll to a number of unauthorised pilgrims this year. Now, what this article tells us about is the fact that an official pilgrimage, an authorised pilgrimage package, cost between 5:00 and $10,000, which is enormous, especially in countries like Jordan and Egypt where there's been rising economic hardship. So tour operators apparently are shortchanging those who are really desperate to make this pilgrimage and, you know, dealing with illegal brokers and smugglers. The article tells the story of Madam Al Tawab. This is someone who was desperate to make the pilgrimage, who paid $3000 for something she thought was fully within the rules and in what she paid for. She was promised air conditioned buses and good conditions to make the journey, and in the end she ended up walking miles in the heat. And she is one of those 1300 people who died during making this pilgrimage. The Saudi paper Ashark Al Awsat is going back over the Saudi Health Minister's statement in which he says that 83% of the pilgrims were unauthorised to be making that journey and free healthcare was provided to those in need on a massive scale. This is quite a late reaction from the Saudi government and many will find that it is dismissing their responsibility in this matter. Well, let's stay on. Well related if not directly linked subject. Climate chaos, A new infrastructure project in India, maybe playing with fire or should we say water? Making promises it might not be able to keep. What does? Can you tell us about this? Well, so the Atlantic are calling it a mega river. And it's the story put forward by the Hakai magazine, also picked up by the Atlantic. It's an idea first floated in the 19th century by an irrigation engineer, reignited in the 1980s and now about to be launched. There's a bit of a repeat pattern in India's weather. We've seen this enormous heat wave recently, temperatures above 40 for weeks and weeks in a row in the city of New New Delhi. We also see periodically these horrific images of devastating floods. So the engineer way back when and the government now are thinking, how about what if we were to link rivers together to redirect where there's excess to where there's a deficit? And the idea is to irrigate millions of hectares of crops, and that's 200 billion cubic metres of water per year that will be redirected for a price tag of 168 billion U.S. dollars. There is a problem, and that is that recent studies suggest that given 1/4 of India's rainfall is then evaporate, is evaporated from the land to fall elsewhere. Recent studies are concerned that there could be a drop in rainfall in some of the areas where it's needed because it would just interfere with what is, in fact a much more complex water cycle than we might imagine. On a lighter note, let's end on that. Here in France. Another year, another national stag imitation championship. What's what's this? Well, Stuart, it's all anyone's talking about. Yeah, this local regional paper, Lardoni, it's about the stag imitation contest in which contestants must imitate the mating cry of a deer. It's not for the faint hearted. And if those of us who think it would be easy, we couldn't be more wrong. One of the organisers told the paper that preparation for the event involves 25 hours of work a week over the course of a year, so it's no mean feat. OK, we do have some footage of it that we might be able to bring up with so we can get an idea of what that audio is. There we go. Oh, my goodness. I thought you were gonna give us your impression for a minute. Antonio. 25 hours a week for a year. I haven't had the time. You can just do it in between press reviews. Thanks very much. Antonio Kerrigan, bring us a press review on France 24. A lot more coming up here. Here on France 24. Do you stay with this if you can?