FRENCH COMMIES GOING BUST; MAY SELL OFF "FAMILY JEWELS"

UK TELEGRAPH:

Sarkozy's sweeping victory in last month's presidential election, however, and the prospect of another landslide for his party in the parliamentary elections - with the first round today - have spelled disaster for the French Communist Party.

So bad were the presidential election results that the "people's" party is reportedly on the brink of bankruptcy.

Famously supported by poets and intellectuals including Pablo Picasso, the surrealists André Breton and René Magritte and poet Louis Aragon, the Communists were historically never short of a few francs.

But they were always secretive about their funding, partly because some of it came from the KGB.


Now the party has been forced to admit things are "seriously tight", after claims that it plans to sell the family silver, including its emblematic Paris headquarters - a listed building designed by the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer [left] - and valuable art including Mona Lisa with Moustache by Marcel Duchamp [below - left].



In the "catastrophic" election campaign, party leader Marie-George Buffet ran up a £3.7 million bill that yielded less than two per cent of the votes. Under France's complex system of political funding, the collapse of support meant only £550,000 was reimbursed by the state, rather than the £5.4 million the party would have received had it won at least five per cent of the national vote.

It could get worse. Opinion polls predict Mr Sarkozy's party will take between 400 and 460 of the 577 seats in the Assemblée Nationale.

The opposition Socialist Party, which is in disarray, is praying for a "symbolic" minimum of 120 seats.

That would leave the Communists on the brink of disaster, with predictions that they will hold as few as four of their current 21 seats in the parliamentary elections, thus losing the privileges and funding given to official parliamentary groups, which need at least 20 MPs to receive public cash.

According to Le Monde newspaper, the director of a "large modern art museum" said he had been visited by a Communist Party delegation, asking him to value the large Fernand Léger fresco, Liberty I write your name, which hangs in the party headquarters - [print version - left].


"I was led to believe they were in the process of selling their last assets," he said.

THIS IS FITTING AND PROPER: THEIR IDEOLOGY IS BANKRUPT; SO TOO NOW ARE THEY.

(On another level, this demonstrates how powerful and even epochal the Sarkozy presidency might very well be.)