French press review 13 December 2011

Change in North Africa following the Arab Spring, the ongoing saga of the eurozone crisis and rumblings in the bowels of the French nuclear industry dominate Tuesday's French newspapers.

The economics supplement of Le Monde looks at how the new islamic governments in Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco will manage to make the transition from theology to social reality.

The ordinary people in each country expect a lot from their new rulers. Those new rulers are falling over backwards in their efforts not to scare off foreign investment. Or foreign tourists.

But they also have to deal with the political pressure represented by the supporters of strict Sharia Law, which refuses, among other things, to allow banks to loan money on credit.

Le Monde's analysis suggests that the new rulers have, in each of the three cases, sketched only the vaguest economic programmes.

Perhaps because they haven't had sufficient time to come to terms with the responsibilities before them. Perhaps because too much clarity might not be good for business.

But, warns Le Monde, those who suffered to make the Arab Spring a political reality won't wait for ever to see the benefits of their popular revolutions trickle down to the revolutionaries.

Le Monde also carries an article by the Financial Times economist, Martin Wolf.

He says that the Sarkozy-Merkel solution to the European financial crisis won't work, because the German chancellor and the French president answered the wrong question.

According to Martin Wolf, the problem is not a lack of budgetary discipline by eurozone member governments.

The real problem is each country's current account deficit, the amount of money a nation needs to keep functioning on a daily basis. This is the famous balance of payments, which sets off likely receipts against inevitable debts.

Until the great American crash of 2008, governments used to borrow the money to tide them over from the private sector. But that source has virtually dried up.

So the public sector has been called-in to fill the need, and that has led to the spiral of endebtedness which has seen Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain and Italy all clammering at the door of the European Central Bank to save themselves from going belly-up.

What we need, says the wise Martin Wolf, is not more austerity but more credit, more consumption, more competition, more economic activity to stimulate growth.

Throw more cash at the Greeks and the Irish, says the Wolf-man, and encourage them to spend it. Sounds like lunacy.

Only when individual nations are once again able to balance their books without needing an external handout will the European financial crisis come to an end.

Business daily Les Echos looks at extreme-right National Front plans to take France out of the eurozone.

Despite the expense and difficulty of staying inside the monetary union, any attempt to leave would be a total catastrophe according to Les Echos.

The business paper says as many as one million jobs would be lost; anything between 6 and 19 per cent of the nation's wealth would evaporate; and it would cost two billion euros to issue new currency to replace the euro.

"We were right!" trumpets the front page of communist L'Humanité. What they were right about this time is that the Lisbon Treaty was a bad bag of nails.

L'Humanité says Lisbon is the root cause of the current crisis, that the treaty has increased unemployment, has ravaged public services, diminished the voice of the ordinary voter, and destroyed lots of small businesses.

Both right-wing Le Figaro and financial paper Les Echos look at rumblings in the bowels of the French nuclear industry.

The big cheese in French nuclear circles is Areva, an operation likely to lose around one and a half billion euros this year, mostly because the post-Fukushima world is not too hot about nuclear power, but also because of ill-timed investments in the mining sector.

Money must be saved - one billion euros over the next twelve months - and that means jobs will be lost.

Speaking of jobs, French footballer Nicolas Anelka has got a new one. The former star of PSG, Arsenal, Real Madrid, Liverppol and Chelsea has moved to China, to play for Shanghai Shenhua.

And he'll be paid 230,000 euros each week for his trouble. Nice work if you can get it.