French press review 30 March 2013

President François Hollande’s keynote television interview on Thursday continues to attract front-page comments from the national dailies.

Le Monde takes up what it claims was a missed opportunity for the president to reassure the nation caught in a conundrum and hit by an avalanche of alarming statistics: near-record unemployment of over 10 per cent, sliding purchasing power due to increases in taxes and social charges, a 1.8-trillion-euro public deficit. This is amid forecast by the national statistics agency, Insee, the European Commission and OECD that the French economy will manage only 0.1 per cent growth this year.

According to Le Monde, while Hollande deserves some credit for the pedagogical tone he adopted while explaining his policies, he was evasive about how he plans to lead the nation out of the budgetary impasse.

Ruling out further tax increases in 2013 and 2014 won’t calm the boiling fiscal discontent, says the paper. For Le Monde significant efforts have to be made to bring down public spending, an essential and explosive issue which Hollande deliberately avoided.

“Hollande, caught up by the debt and deficits,” crows Le Figaro. According to the right-wing daily, the avalanche of statistics which came down on France this week exposes the extent of the damage inflicted on the economy.  

For Le Figaro, expensive, public-funded job-creation schemes will not reverse the joblessness trend, let alone halt the slide of purchasing power. For the right-wing newspaper what France need is not a tinker man with the tool kit Hollande claimed to have created for tackling the crisis but a radical reformer who has cast off the demons of an outdated recipe it brands as “social demagogy”.

Libération posts a quite surprising headline about Hollande standing with “tools in hand, after leaving his ideas in the dressing room”. For western regional paper Le Courrier de l’Ouest, Hollande who was a harsh critic of his predecessors msu have known that his turn under the critical spotlight would come.

It is a bitter potion he is refusing to drink, says the paper, especially as some of his Socialist comrades have worked hard to fill the cup.

"The left clamours for its own law banning the Islamic veil”, headlines Libération. This is after Hollande’s declared intention on Thursday to extend the right-wing legislation to private creches.

Aujourd’hui en France says a fiscal evasion exodus is facing France as Swiss banks court the country’s largest fortunes. The Parisian newspaper runs startling revelations by an ex-UBS banker about how Switzerland’s leading banking institution has made life easier for would-be tax dodgers running away from France.