French press review 23 June 2015

The Greeks haven't gone away but they've changed. Or perhaps the rest of Europe has changed to way it looks at them and their problems. Problems which are, by the way, only the tip of a melting iceberg for a European project insolubly torn between national needs and the federalist fairy tale.

La Croix gives the front-page honours to Europe's migrants, the people whose fate is, according to the Catholic paper, haunting the conscience of a continent. The harsh truth is that the continent's conscience has proved to be a very resiliant piece of equipment. Europe has other, more pressing, matters to be dealing with. So the migrants can drown, or starve, or sit in the no-man's-land between the French and Italian borders.

La Croix would like to see a distinction made between political refugees and economic migrants. As if dying for your political opinions was, in a strict sense, any different from dying of starvation.

The European Union is to have yet another crisis meeting on illegal immigration this very week.

The main story in communist paper L'Humanité says Europe's power brokers are trying to ensure that commercial secrets are kept from the taxpayers and consumers who keep the wheels of industry turning.

The European parliament has only to rubber stamp a decision by the judicial affairs committee that is intended to harmonise regulations between member states with a view to protecting legitimate commercial secrets. But, warns L'Humanité, the ultimate impact of the new law will be to endanger the work of journalists, whistleblowers and others who take huge risks to keep consumers informed.

Opponents of the new regulatiuons say existing laws protect businesses against the theft of their vital secrets. The additional rules are unnecessary, excessive and dangerous.

The communist daily reminds us of George Orwell's observation that the true business of the journalist is the publication of the facts that powerful people would like to conceal. The rest is just public relations.

What a difference a day makes. The Greeks haven't gone away but they've changed.

Yesterday they were a bunch of scoundrels and wastrels, scrounging further billions from a benevolent Europe which had got a pain in its collective bum from accommodating Athens.

This morning the mousaka-munchers are our friends, poor, certainly, in need of a helping hand but vital to the European project.

"They must stay," is left-leaning Libération's tear-jerking front-page headline.

"Race against time to save Greece," says right-wing Le Figaro.

While Le Monde looks at the various possible ways out of the dead-end of debt.

What can explain this sudden transformation of a nation . . . one day the pariahs of poverty-racked Europe, struggling neighbours the next?

Perhaps Libération comes closest to an understanding of the situation with the observation that at yesterday's last-chance summit of eurozone heads of state most European leaders recognised that getting rid of the Greeks would be a catastrophe for the single currency. The left-leaning paper's inside headline sums it all up by saying "They have to save Greece if they want to save Europe." Never, in other words, underestimate the power of self-interest, especially in politics.

Of course, the hard work still has to be done. Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has finally come up with a series of compromises on crucial budgetary questions. Right-wing paper Le Figaro says these latest promises must be examined with care but are at least a step in the right dircetion.

In case you think we're nearly out of the wood, think again.

Le Monde publishes an interview with the Yale University political scientist Bruce Ackerman in which he says the Greek crisis is only the tip of the iceberg as far as Europe's real problems are concerned. The whole European experiment is undermined by a lack of political legitimacy, says Ackerman, because of the continuing force of individual, national traditions. Look at Tsipras, caught between the Brussels moneybag and election promises to his own people.

The man from Yale says the rise of the right wing in Europe is the direct result of the 2008 financial crash and subsequent crisis. He thinks most sociliaists remain mute because they still haven't got over the death of Marxism.

Today Europe is governed by Berlin, according to Ackerman, by technocrats rather than by democrats. That is why they are so keen to put manners on Tsipras. He's too close to those messy voters. It is time for the people to retake the reins of power, says Ackerman.

Leave it to an American to invent the French revolution two centuries too late.