French press review 17 December 2013

There's a tiny bit of good news for French people, as long as they've got jobs. Ayrault loses a battle in an attempt to bring the Treasurery under control. Hospitals are unederstaffed.There's confusion over some bones.

The closest you can get to good news on this morning's French front pages is the main headline in business and financial paper, Les Echos.

There, we are assured that, despite the crisis and unemployment at its worst for 16 years, those lucky enough to have jobs are slightly better off than they were 12 months ago.

According to Les Echos, salaries have increased by about one per cent more than inflation. The problem is that, in sharp contrast to Spain and Germany where wages have actually been reduced in an effort to boost competitiveness, here in France employers have chosen to cut back on staff rather than on pay.

Libération gives pride of place to the failure of French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault to get a tighter grip on the nation's financial administration. Last month, according to the left-leaning daily, Ayrault ignored the advice of Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici and attempted to move two of his own men into key positions in the ministry's inner machinery, to give the prime minister more control over the purse strings and, crucially, to pave the way for future fiscal reform.

The financial coup didn't work, says Libé, because the guy Ayrault wanted to get rid of, treasury director Ramon Fernandez, is still in place and is showing no signs of preparing to loosen his grip. Libé describes the Treasury as a state within the state, with commandant Fernandez looking as if he has won the first round at least.

Libération says this failure will further weaken a prime minister already in deep do-do in the opinion ratings and perhaps put more pressure on the leader of government's bizarre relationship with the president, François Hollande.

The pair aren't rivals in the style of Giscard and Chirac or Sarkozy and Fillon but their apparent friendly working relationship has not prevented a series of embarrassing blunders and a free fall in the ratings of both men. How long they will be prepared to share a parachute probably depends on how much further the president feels he has to fall. Don't expect anything dramatic before next year's local elections.

Tabloid paper Aujourd'hui en France reports that the French social services last year spent 500 million euros, three times the total deficit of all public hospitals, to pay replacement doctors, simply because most establishments don't employ sufficient medical staff. Estimates vary, but there may be as many as 6,000 vacant posts for doctors in French public hospitals and paying replacements costs between 600 and 3,000 euros per day, depending on the degree of specialisation.

On inside pages, we learn that portions of a skeleton found in the Mediterranean off the chic sourthern city of Antibes last February do not belong to the person originally identified by police experts.

Parts of four adult bodies were discovered in the same bay by a local diver. DNA testing revealed that one of the victims was Stéphane Hirson, who disappeared nearly 20 years ago, when he was just 18 years old.

His family learned that tragic news by reading a press report, the Antibes police having contacted local journalists before thinking of the impact the announcement might have on the missing man's family. That was bad enough but it gets much worse, since more detailed DNA analysis has since confirmed that there is no link whatsoever between the Antibes skeletons and Stéphane Hirson.

A new police inquiry has been launched to discover who the Antibes dead really are.

Catholic La Croix gives pride of place to the debate about ways and means of bringing human life to a dignified end in the case of incurable illness involving terrible suffering.

A citizens' panel was asked by the government to consider the whole issue with a view to changing the legislation. The citizens have proposed the legalisation of "assisted suicide" where the sick person is provided with the chemicals and equipment needed to end his or her life but makes the final gesture without any interference.

It's clearly a tortured and tortuous subject, where legislative clarity and day-to-day reality will frequently be at odds. But that's already the case, so perhaps an attempt to widen the legal basis of the way in which we think about euthanasia is not a bad thing.