French press review 26 April 2011

Why it's unwise to insult Kate Middleton on Facebook, what Sarkozy and Berlusconi will discuss in Rome, how immigration absorbs economic shock, no good news from Syria and

Let us begin with a royal wedding story.

According to Libération, Scots Guardsman Cameron Reilly will not be attending Friday's big bash in London, he won't even be on duty that day.

Cameron, you see, made the mistake of calling bride-to-be Kate Middleton a "stuck-up cow" on his Facebook page. He was angry because Kate and William passed in front of him while he was on duty last Friday, and Kate just gestured with her hand, without even looking in poor Cameron's direction.

"She's an idiotic, stuck-up bitch," writes Cameron of the girl the entire world adores and envies. "I'm not good enough for her. She's a snobby wagon."

According to his Facebook page, Cameron's other interests are "beer with a high alcohol content" and "causing trouble". Indeed.

The main front-page headline in business daily Les Echos tells us that the key questions at today's Rome summit will be immigration and the economy.

The French and the Italians are meeting to decide how to repel the latest supposed invasion by thousands of Tunisians, intent on submerging Europe under a tsunami of human misery.

Sarkozy and Berlusconi are on the case. The lads will discuss the possibility of once again closing the borders between European countries inside the so-called Schengen zone, where anyone with a legal identity card is currently entitled to travel freely.

On an inside page, Les Echos looks at the real impact of immigration on the French economy, and, surprise, surprise, that impact is mostly positive.

With an intake of 100,000 people every year, France is among the countries in Europe which accepts the smallest number of immigrants.

There are just three immigrants for every 1,000 French nationals, compared, for example, to 18 for every 1,000 Swiss.

And where would we be without them?

An economist interviewed by Les Echos says that, during the crisis, immigrant workers acted like a shock-absorber in the labour market, enabling those of French origin to stay relatively better-off.

Another expert explains how immigrants are saving France from the economic impact of its ageing population. Take the foreign workers out of the equation, and you will have to spend an additional three to five per cent of gross national product on social measures for the ageing unemployed.

All of which is far too complicated for an electorate which would much rather have the simple spectre of the fearful foreigner waved before its glazed eyes.

The Socialists are shocked and horrored. They say Sarkozy is campaigning on a ticket stolen from the far right-wing National Front.

After today's summit in Rome, life is unlikely to get any easier for Tunisians who thought that the hardest part would be getting across the Mediterranean.

Catholic La Croix looks at the same story, remarking that the Tunisians themselves were happy, despite poverty and their own political difficulties, to accept ten times more immigrants than Europe does. Those immigrants, an estimated 200,000 of them, came across the border from Libya, and were welcomed with open arms. The Tunisians find the current European attitude a bit hard to swallow.

Communist L'Humanité looks to Syria, with a front-page headline saying that Bachar al Assad is on his way down a dead end. Since foreign journalists are banned from Syria, the news seeping out is very partial, but none of it is good.

Le Figaro looks at the same story on inside pages, putting the news together from the same diverse and dubious sources being used by the world's media, but with the same bottom line of a regime under enormous pressure, playing the last-chance card of military repression.