French press review 14 January 2011

Hard right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen steps down; leader Zine El Abidine Ben Ali moves to appease demonstrators in Tunisia and France's pharmaceutical industry, embroiled in a controversy over a deadly diabetes drug, goes under scrutiny. Those are the stories on the front pages of today's papers.

Left-leaning Libération looks at the French extreme right wing, the National Front, due to choose a new leader this weekend as Jean-Marie Le Pen steps down. The article is headlined "A dark French story". Back in 1984, the same Libé gave the headline "Shock" to the fact that National Front candidates had collected a total of 11 per cent of votes in the European elections. That was then. National Front support is up to 22 per cent, according to an opinion poll published earlier this week. And Marine Le Pen, daughter of the incumbent and roaring favourite to take up the reins of power from Papa, intends to widen even further the party's electoral base, getting away from the skinhead, foreigner-hating image and suggesting a milder form of foreigner-hating likely to attract less rampant right-wing voters who feel that Nicholas Sarkozy and the lads have the country on the high-road to Hell.

Libération's editorial looks back at four decades of Jean-Marie and his poisonous party, under the headline "The black years". The leftist paper says the Le Pen success story . . . from a rabble-rousing marginal trouble-maker to a second round presidential candidate . . . is more the result of the failure of main-stream politicians to fix what's wrong with France and show real leadership. Beating the National Front is not a question of a change of rhetoric says Libération, it's a question of changing reality. That was true for the father, it will be true for the daughter as well.

Business daily Les Echos looks at European sovereign debt, that's the sort of debt that can cost a state its sovereignty. Just ask Greece or Ireland. Earlier this week, the struggling Portuguese managed to plug a few leaks in their economy by selling more than a billion euros worth of government bonds. But it turns out that a third of all Portuguese bonds are owned by neighbouring Spain. Since Madrid is getting short of cash itself, the Spaniards may shortly be obliged to call in some of those bonds. Which will put the screws on Portugal, and could cause Spain to go galloping to the European Central Bank, looking for bailout boodle. Europe is not entirely unprepared for such an eventuality, with the Belgian Finance Minister calling for a doubling of the rather unfortunately named stability fund to 1,500 billion euros.

Tunisia dominates this morning's other front pages.

Le Monde's main headline was written yesterday morning, and is more than slightly out of date. It reads "Ben Ali shaken by popular up-rising".

That was then. Clashes continued in a number of Tunisian cities and towns on Thursday, despite presidential calls for calm and the imposition of a curfew.

Then, yesterday evening, as reported in this morning's editions of Libération, La Croix and Le Figaro, president Ben Ali appeared on national television, calling on the police to stop using live ammunition against demonstrators, promising complete freedom of information, and price reductions for certain crucial goods. The man who has ruled Tunisia since 1987 also said he won't stand for re-election in 2014. Ben Ali accepted that he had misread the situation which has led to nearly a month of rioting, promising to widen the political spectrum and make Tunisian politics more inclusive.

Catholic La Croix widens the focus to include Algeria and Jordan, like Tunisia torn by public anger against the failure of corrupt regimes to deal with the deadly cancer of youth underemployment, or to keep a cap on the prices of basic necessities. La Croix salutes the part played by the internet in enabling the sharing of real information between protestors, and the coordination of their acts. The Ben Ali and Bouteflika regimes may become the first real victims of the virtual world wide web.

Greedy drug companies are on the front page of l'Humanité. The Communist daily says, with characteristic calm and balance, that the big commercial laboratories churn out inefficient or dangerous products, and are interested only in disorders from which they can ensure a huge return on their research investment. The same companies, says Humanité, rob the social security system, and are embroiled in an incestuous relationship with the very authorities supposed to supervise them. The controversy over Mediator, the diabetes drug which may have gone on killing patients long after it was recognised as dangerous, is, says the Communist daily, just one example of the deadly clash of interests between government, health authorities and the drug producers.

What is certain is that the French pharmaceutical industry is in the best of health, whatever about those obliged to swallow its products, with a turnover in excess of 50 billion euros last year. "Santé," as the locals like to say.