French press review 9 September 2014

This morning's edition of Communist L'Humanité is guest edited by five Palestinian prisoners, including Marwan Barghouti, the Fatah leader arrested in 2002 and currently serving five life sentences in an Israeli high-security jail. It's a symbolic gesture, of course: the paper has been put together by the regular editorial team and is no different from any other edition.

But this is the sort of gesture in which the communist daily takes pride. L'Humanité was, for example, frequently censored during the French war in Algeria for having taken the side of those fighting for independence. A front page editorial warns that, if the paper were to disappear, with it would vanish a tiny voice for freedom and justice.

Centrist Le Monde is a lot more down-to-earth. The main front-page story there tells us that more than one million French households have had to ask the tax authorities for an easing of their income tax burden. Since the austerity-era increases in tax were first introduced in 2011, applications for a reduction have increased by 20 per cent. At the same time, the number of warnings for non payment sent out by the tax authorities have more than doubled, to nearly 10 million. Le Monde says taxation is "strangling" the French middle class.

CatholicLa Croix gives pride of place to what the paper calls "five priorities" for the in-coming European Commission, to which august assembly the president-elect, Jean-Claude Junker, is currently putting the finishing touches.

La Croix says the new lads and lassies are going to have to get the European economy growing again, so that they can help individual governments in the fight against unemployment. Then there's the question of Ukraine, with the commission caught between respect for Russian military and economic muscle and a desire to respect Ukrainian wishes to be more European.

On the energy question, Europe needs to find alternative gas and petrol suppliers. Thirty per cent of EU gas currently comes from Russia, a fact which doesn't help in the diplomatic arm wrestling with Vladimir Putin.

The new commissioners will also have to get up to speed on the free-trade negotiations with the United States, so far shrouded in utmost secrecy and giving rise to wild rumour and public disquiet.

Last but not least, there's the question of immigration. Despite local economic difficulties, Europe continues to attract poor workers from south of the Mediterranean. La Croix laments the fact that immigration was not recognised as a specific portfolio for a commission vice-president.

There are huge problems: Italy needs help rather than criticism from its neighbours as it struggles to deal with the boatloads of hopefuls who arrive on Lampedusa; no reliable figures are available for the actual number of official asylum-seekers in each state in the union. And that's unlikely to change, says La Croix, as long as national governments continue to be petrified by the potential negative impact of a race-based immigration policy.

Yesterday, conservative paper Le Figaro was telling us that the right-wing UMP party wants Nicolas Sarkozy back as president. Today, left-leaning Libération throws another stumbling-block in the man's path back to power.

Libération claims to have evidence that Sarkozy used his contacts and influence to set up an investment fund. Since he had recently been kicked out of his job as French president and was, at least temporarily, sick of politics, he was perfectly entitled to set up anything he liked, provided it was legal. And Libé is unable to find anything illegal in the whole set-up. The point simply is to reinforce a prejudice against Sarkozy as the friend of the super-rich, and therefore an unsuitable candidate for the job of president of those who can't afford dental care.

The main story in right-wing Le Figaro has the French defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian calling for action in Libya, with the desert south of that country seen as the hub of north African terrorism. The danger is already great, according to the minister who will meet his European counterparts later today in Milan to discuss security problems. And if the various, currently autonomous groups, from Boko Haram in Nigeria to Islamic State in Iraq, ever achieve some kind of operational unity, Europe will have an even more terrible menace on its doorstep. To say nothing of what the united bad guys could do to the locals.