French press review 29 May 2014

Only three papers to hand this bank holiday morning and the news is anything but festive.

Le Monde leads with the stunningly bad news that the government has overestimated the tax contribution to last year's budget by 14 billion euros and that the state accounts watchdog has warned that the predictions for this year are not any more realistic.

That's a kick in the head for a government already cricised for "unprecedented" tax hikes and which is currently having its three-year stability plan examined by the Brussels technocrats. If the figures are wrong in Paris, they're hardly going to look much better to the euro-dudes.

Then there's French unemployment, which right-wing Le Figaro reports increased, again, last month. That makes six straight months of additions to the length of the national dole queue, a total of 440,000 more people unemployed since the election of President François Hollande and a sad record of 3.36 million out of work.

It's very bad news for a president who has repeatedly made employment his priority.

Le Figaro's editorial is unforgiving, saying that these statistics are the inevitable result of two years of false promises and inaction, against a background of a "monumentally rigid" labour law. Employees are overprotected, employers strangled by red tape. Not one of the 7,400 articles which constitute French labour law can be touched and would-be employers remain on the sidelines, it claims.

Worse, wails Le Figaro, the neighbours are all doing better. Germany is close to full employment, even Italy and Spain have seen the dole queues shorten. Is it any surprise, asks the conservative paper, that in those three countries, the ruling parties all did well in last week's European parliamentary elections?

On the morning that the Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan has ordered the national army to take the fight to the Islamic insurgents of Boko Haram in the north-east of the country, left-leaning Libération reports from Maiduguri, the capital of Borno State, where the failure of the national security forces has led to the formation of a local militia involving 30,000 civilians.

Given that there are grave concerns about the capacity of the underpaid, poorly equipped and demoralised Nigerian army to match the sophisticated firepower of the very determined holy warriors, it is an open question as to how well local militia groups armed with sticks and spears will fare.

As mentioned in this morning's African Press Review, the main story in today's Nigerian Guardian reports that the latest wave of violence in Borno and Plateau states has defied security measures, claiming 57 lives.

Gunmen suspected to be Boko Haram insurgents used dozens of four-wheel drives, pickup vans, motorcycles and even an armoured personnel carrier to attack Gurmushi border village. Gurmushi is a farming community near the frontier with Cameroon and 125 kilometres north of Maiduguri, the state capital.