French press review 19 March 2013

Good news at Airbus, more bad news for the Socialists, those are the big front page stories.

The main headline at Catholic La Croix reads "Airbus on a cloud," describing the euphoria following yesterday's signing of the biggest contract in the European aircraft manufacturer's history. The Indonesian company Lion Air has ordered 234 Airbus A320s, for nearly 19 billion euros, a huge boost for a sector which employs an estimated 162,000 people here in France.

Airbus is a mult-national operation, of course, with Germany, the United Kingdom and Spain joining France in contributing to the jigsaw puzzle that is the completed machine.

Ironically, the ordering company, Lion Air, remains on the black list of civil aviation authorities in Europe and the United States. Technically, Lion Air-operated flights are banned from landing at European and American airports. The company has a bad reputation for flight delays, but still accounts for 45 per cent of the Indonesian market, where it is the largest privately-owned airline.

Business daily Les Echos also salutes the Airbus contract as a boost for a sector in which European cooperation has proved its worth.

But the financial paper warns that these enormous orders are going to create difficulties for sub-contractors, already struggling to meet the demands of a company with five thousand planes on its order book.

Airbus itself is having trouble recruiting qualified technical and engineering staff, despite having guaranteed work for at least the next decade.

While the French president, François Hollande, was proudly overseeing the signing of the Airbus contract, his Socialist party was having the stuffing knocked out of it in a bye-election, losing nine points on their winning performance of June, 2012, and being eliminated in the first round.

The vacant seat will now be decided in a second round fight between the main conservative UMP and the far right Front National.

That, trumpets right-wing Le Figaro, is proof of the ever-growing unpopularity of the Socialist leadership and will amplify left-wing fears that the French voter is no longer prepared to be treated like a docile patient with a terminal illness.

The weekend defeat changes nothing in practical terms, since the government's absolute majority in parliament remains intact. But it is clearly a negative message for the Socialists, and a warning ahead of local elections due next spring.

On hostages, Le Monde says France is no longer prepared to pay for the release of its nationals. As early as January, president Hollande warned the families of the various French hostages currently in the hands of separatist, religious or criminal organisations, that France's reputation as a payer of ransoms was simply putting the security of all French nationals overseas in danger.