European press review

We start this week with Europe’s cold snap. If you haven’t been reading about it in the papers, you’ve certainly been feeling it if you live on the continent. And there's continuing economic chill in Greece.

Wikimedia Commons

There are some 600 dead, many in Ukraine, Poland and Russia. For Germany’s Frankfurter Rundschau, the toll is proof of how precarious life is in eastern Europe.

The centre-left daily says Ukraine’s circumstances are tragic. With temperatures in the -30s during the week, poor people were freezing to death and hungry. Against this backdrop, oligarchs have amassed billions and flaunt their wealth with luxury yachts.

But things are also dire in European Union member Poland, where several people died of carbon monoxide poisoning from faulty heating units. The east-west divide remains wide in Europe, and these shortcomings will only be overcome when EU powerhouses like France and Germany put social policy higher on the agenda, the paper says.

Turning to the economy, and after weeks of negotiations, Greek politicians have agreed on a package of measures to tighten spending. But its creditors are not ready yet to grant Athens a new bailout loan.

There is a general strike this weekend, and a parliamentary vote on the package, yet Greece’s European partners are determined to wait until the measures are signed, sealed and delivered.

Eurozone finance ministers are now set to meet Wednesday, as a March deadline looms for Greece to avoid a debt default. The daily Ekathiremini says talks on the new bailout have taken their toll on the main political parties.

The Socialists have to persuade left-wing supporters they haven’t sold out by backing a different plan from when they were in government. And the right-wing New Democracy, which initially opposed the bailout conditions, faces divisions now that it has finally signed up. The parties are reaping the whirlwind after decades of doing nothing about the problem, the centre-right daily says.

The problems are not confined to Greece. The debt crisis is also costing jobs and putting pressure on purse strings elsewhere.

In Bulgaria, the daily Trud reports that things have got very bad for school leavers. Things are so dire, it says, that eight women with university degrees recently applied for a cleaning job at a city prosecutor’s office.

And, you guessed it, they were turned down.

In times of crisis, people are looking for anything they can get to survive, the left-leaning newspaper says. There’s no choice for academics than to emigrate. Thousands of them are searching for work, a completely new trend that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. Of course the decision at the prosecutor’s office was logical. They were looking for a cleaning lady, not an economics expert. So tertiary educated Bulgarians can head to the airport – maybe they can get cleaners’ jobs abroad, the paper says.

Russia and China’s decision to veto UN Security Council action against Syria dominated the news this week. The two were widely criticised. Their veto came amid a spike in deaths in the city of Homs.

The Guardian has a slightly different take on the story.

The British daily’s commentator says there was no guarantee that the UN resolution would work, as it was an effort to impose a regime change. It might also have paved the way for foreign military intervention. The veto could now force the opposition to negotiate, rather than try to create the conditions for a Libyan-style no-fly zone.

For Britain and the US to pose as the friends of the Syrians is preposterous, the left-leaning paper says, given all the deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. It notes that as the conflict has escalated, so has the confrontation with Iran. And the Western moves against Syria could be seen as part of a proxy war against the Islamic Republic. The only way out is through a negotiated settlement, the paper says.

Lastly, to the Netherlands, where it was hoped this week that Europe’s cold snap might allow a legendary skating race to finally take place.

But, alas, no.

Fifteen years they’ve waited, and they’ll have to continue to wait. The organisers of the Eleven Cities race cancelled the skating event this week, because the ice is too thin and dangerous. Skaters had been shoveling snow off canals this week, so the waters could freeze better and allow the 200-kilometre race to take place for the first time since 1997.

Dutch paper De Volkskrant says it has been a long time since so many people hoped so passionately for one thing. If a government could channel this sort of enthusiasm, we’d be out of the economic crisis in no time, the centre-left paper says. But the Dutch can wait, just as Vladimir and Estragon waited for Godot, the tour will be here tomorrow.