French press review 8 September 2014

Local politics, potential and actual disasters . . . that's probably a fair summary of this morning's headline stories.

In fairness, the local political stories could also be seen as a catalogue of potential and actual disaster.

Communist L'Humanité's main story is a ringing call for an end to the current government and its slavish austerity policy. "If France is to avoid catastrophe," reads the headline, "the left must dump Hollande and Valls."

The article explains that the voices of revolt, on the far left and even within the mainstream Socialist Party, have got to make themselves heard. The unpopularity of the president has brought the prime minister down in his wake. The danger, says L'Humanité, that the same infection will now spread through the left wing of the political establishment, eventually draging the entire country into disrepute.

The communist paper is particularly hot under the collar about recent government attempts to control social security fraud (seen as an attack on the unemployed); by allegations that the president doesn't even like poor people; and yet another political figure forced out of government in a financial scandal.

This situation can not be allowed to continue, said the national secretary of the French Communist Party at the weekend. The tragic fact is that, for the first time in French history, the extreme right leader, Marine Le Pen, is given as the clear winner of a presidential election second round battle against the holder, François Hollande.

According to the main story on the front page of conservative paper, Le Figaro, the regular right-wing UMP party is just waiting for its champion, Nicolas Sarkozy, to return to the political battlefield. Calls for a comeback by the former president were repeated at a weekend UMP meeting in the southern city of Nice.

Not everybody is equally enthusiastic, especially those who risk seeing their own presidential ambitions go down in flames if Sarko does come back. Alain Juppé would like to see a clean, fair fight, decided in a primary election. François Fillon, who doesn't like either option, has gone mystical in the face of the possible return of a man he clearly detests: "we're living through the moral equivalent of May, 1968," he said at the weekend, and if anyone, even François Fillon, knows what that's about, would they ring in and let us know.

As the African Union prepares for today's emergency meeting on the ebola crisis, Catholic La Croix asks how the disease has continued to spread, despite the impressive means deployed to limit the epidemic. Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone have been worst hit so far, with their public health systems completely disorganised by the impact of the killer disease.

There's a possibility that vaccination against ebola will be available by November. French medical experts remain sceptical that an effective vaccine can be produced so rapidly.

Perhaps more worrying is the question of the experimental treatment of ebola sufferers. Last month, the World Health Organisation decided that it was legitimate to administer untested drugs to patients already suffering from ebola. The fact remains that 40 per cent of those infected recover naturally. That makes it hard to evaluate the efficiency of these experimental treatments. And it also raises the question whether some victims will die from the disease or from the cure.

The main stories in Le Monde and Libération both look at the same facts: the possibility that Medhi Nemmouche, the man suspected of killing four people at the Jewish Museum in Brussels, might also have been one of the kidnappers of the French journalists recently freed in Syria.

Le Monde notes that NATO has finally managed to agree to some sort of military response to the threat posed by the group known as Islamic State. How that response will be organised, who will be its targets, and whether a cold war behemoth like NATO is the best machine to use against modern terrorists are delicate questions that remain, for the moment, unanswered.

Libération says Medhi Nemmouche was planning to attack this year's Bastille Day celebrations on 14 July. He allegedly vowed to kill five times more pople than Mohamed Merah, the man who murdered seven victims in and around the southern French city of Toulouse in 2012.