ALSTOM 
Alstom, maker of France's TGV high speed trains and 20 percent controlled by the state, said last week it would stop making rolling stock at Belfort, where its first steam locomotive was built in 1880.
It cited a lack of orders and a need to streamline production. Four hundred Belfort workers are to be offered jobs at other sites and the plant reduced to doing maintenance by 2018.
Politicians from all sides are crying foul, with some calling for a rethink of a contract French state-owned railways operator SNCF and its partners recently awarded to German competitor Vossloh.
Ministers said they were not told in advance about Alstom's plan, and Alstom Chief Executive Henri Poupart-Lafarge was summoned last Thursday to a meeting with Hollande.
With French unemployment sitting at around 10 percent since Hollande was elected in 2012 and a wide-open presidential election looming in April, no politician can afford to ignore such a highprofile case, despite its relatively small scale.
"The president of the republic has given us a target: to make sure Alstom's railway activities are maintained," Finance Minister Michel Sapin said on Monday after a meeting with ministers.
"Hollande fears a new Florange" read the front page headline of Le Monde newspaper, a reference to the Florange steel furnaces which closed soon after he took office.
THE ALSTOM TOUCH
For decades, governments of both right and left in France have intervened to protect their industrial champions from the pressures of globalisation.
This is not the first time Alstom has been front and centre, having touched the careers of a number of next year's potential presidential candidates.
More than 12 years ago Alstom was struggling, and the German company Siemens wanted to buy its power turbines division.
Nicolas Sarkozy, then the finance and economy minister and later president of France, balked at the idea. After fierce lobbying at the European Commission, he won permission for a state bailout in 2004.
Sarkozy hopes to represent the centre-right Les Republicains and its allies again in next year's presidential poll.
A decade later, in 2014, Alstom was back in trouble as orders dropped. This time the buyer of the power business was U.S.-based General Electric.
GE's bid was deeply controversial in France for the loss of industrial power it appeared to imply, and amid worries about French jobs.
This time, under Socialist Hollande's presidency and with no credible alternative, the deal went through.
It sliced off about 70 percent of Alstom's revenue base but the economy minister of the time, Arnaud Montebourg, arranged for the state to take control of a 20 percent voting stake in the slimmed-down Alstom in a bid to protect what was left.
The borrowing arrangement under which the government holds its stake expires in February, soon before the election.
Montebourg later resigned in protest over pro-business labour reforms, and is now running for president himself.
His successor, Emmanuel Macron, is also touched by the Alstom factor. Last year Macron promised to protect jobs at Belfort. He resigned last month to prepare a possible presidential bid of his own.
Alstom has 12 sites in France and employs about 9,000 people. A spokeswoman would not comment on the political aspects.
"We have presented a project in a context (loss of orders) which everyone knows about," she said. "We are talking about the transfer of 400 jobs within France."
Alstom expects the workload at its French sites to fall by 30 percent by 2018.
In the year to March 2016 and shorn of its power division, Alstom made a net loss from continuing operations of about 1 billion euros (0.82 billion pounds).
Nevertheless, Alstom says urbanisation and environmental concerns make its outlook bright, and it has been winning contracts abroad, including a $2 billion U.S. order signed in August.
But analysts note that some of these deals have involved agreements to build the trains in the countries where the orders have been made.
(Additional reporting by Jean-Baptise Vey, Cyril Altmeyer and Geert De Clercq; Editing by Greg Mahlich)
By Andrew Callus
