French press review 10 February 2016

French farmers are angry. So are French socialists. And there's a lot of simmering anger in Tunisia too. How many French MPs turned up at the National Assembly on Monday to vote on the first part of the bill on terrorist legislation? And how many people died in detention in Chad while Hissène Habré was president?

DR

There's a lot of anger on this morning's front pages. Firstly, French farmers are angry according to Le Figaro. There's just two weeks to go to the annual Agricultural Show here in Paris, and the right-wing paper says the government is bending over backwards to boost farm incomes and calm things down to ensure that the Paris show does not become a highly-mediatised battleground.

The unemployed are angry in Tunisia, that's L'Humanité's main headline. Their new government has made security its priority, rather than employment. There are protests, hunger strikes, and public buildings are being occupied by people who want to work. There's revolution in the air, according to the communist daily.

And a huge number of French socialists are going to be angry if they don't get to vote in a primary election to choose the party candidate for next year's presidential face-off. An opinion poll in left-leaning Libération suggests that 81 percent of left-wing voters want to have the chance to decide who should represent them. Fifty-five percent of the same socialists are convinced that a victory for François Hollande is not a welcome prospect. A majority of them think Manuel Valls, the current prime minister, would be the best man to carry the presidential flag.

Le Monde reports that only 136 of 577 French MPs (that's less than 25 percent) bothered to show up at the National Assembly on Monday to vote on changing the constitution.

We're talking about the integration of the provisions of the current state of emergency into ordinary law, a proposal which has drawn widespread criticism, notably from rights group Amnesty International.

A major change to French law, which 76 percent of elected representatives saw fit to ignore.

Why?

Well, says Le Monde, Monday evening is always a bit thin at the National Assembly. And non-participation in the vote does not mean the representatives of the people were not there for the debate. Deputies always show up for the solemn vote at which legislation is formally enacted into law, even if that can happen only after a series of debates like last Monday's.

Some parties questioned by Le Monde on the absence of their members for a decision of huge symbolic importance said their members had made a strategic political decision to boycott the vote. If you can understand that, you may have a future in French politics.

For the record, Le Monde notes that 107 socialist deputies (37 percent of the 287 elected members) took part in the vote, but only 10 of the right-wing Republican group (five percent of the 196 elected memebers) were there at the end.

The emergency regulations will now inevitably become part of the French constitution.

An article inside Le Monde looks at how Chadian prisons were run under the regime of Hissène Habré, former president of Chad, currently being tried on charges of crimes against humanity, torture and war crimes by a special African tribunal in Dakar, Senegal.

The centrist paper notes that, according to a Chadian commission of enquiry, 13 prisoners died each day during Habré's reign, from June 1982 to December 1990. That's 3,000 days, and 40,000 dead prisoners.

Washington, which needed an ally against Libya's Ghadaffi, supported Habré with money, equipment and CIA advisors. Paris provided the regime with trainers drawn from the external security wing of the intelligence services.

Le Monde also notes that the world's stock exchanges are having a nervous time this week. The prospect of a third global crisis, after the subprimes in 2008 and sovereign debt in 2011, is now a real possibility. This time it could be the banks which bring the whole edifice crashing down, since they have seen their share values massacred and are heavily exposed on emerging markets and in the energy sector, both doing badly.