French press review, 21 June 2010

The French football team's bad performance, both on and off the field, dominates the headlines this Monday. Along with a fair bit of financial news - not all of it cheerful.

Financial daily Les Echos goes for the good news. No, not that French football has redeemed itself (more on that in a jiffy), but that China is set to allow for a gradual appreciation of its currency. The Chinese central bank announced on Saturday that it was dropping its pegging of the renminbi to the US dollar. This just ahead of the G20 summit in Toronto.

Incidentally, the renminbi is also called yuan outside of China, where it is called yuan renminbi, or yuan, the people's currency. So there.

It will not be a substantial appreciation of the currency, China has warned, and Les Echos highlights the fact that previous similar changes by Beijing between 2005 and 2008 have not helped improve the balance of trade between China and the rest of the world. It is worth explaining that a pegged yuan gives a definite advantage to Chinese exporters.

More financial headlines, this time in the weekend edition of centrist Le Monde. The story is one close to its home patch: France is ready to revise downwards its forecast for growth - this after the International Monetary Fund and the European Commission cast doubt on the French official figure of 2.5 per cent for 2011 and 2012. What does it mean? Well, that the government will have to cut back further on tax rebates if it is to reduce the country's 8 per cent deficit to 3 per cent in 2013, as Paris promised Brussels it would do.

But for the French man and woman in the street, that will involve some serious belt-tightening, as the government will have to find some 100 billion euros in savings in the next couple of years.

So, to football now. Paroxystic psychodrama, it's how the daily sports paper l'Equipe describes the crisis hitting French football at the World Cup.

Under the headline, 'La France en car' (a phonetic play on words: France on board a coach) a reference to the players' decision to boycott their training session yesterday and get onto their team coach instead of returning to their hotel. But 'La France en car' could also be heard as 'France in the quarter-finals' - a cruel dig given the poor results so far achieved by the players.

"Sad" and "pathetic" are just two of the words used to describe the players' rebellion and the image the whole episode gives of French football and France in general.

Two other dailies also focus on the crisis facing les Bleus: right-wing Le Figaro, under the headline "French football implodes," claims the sport has reached its lowest point. And left-leaning Libération hits upon a pun: Le 'Footoir', which combines the French shortcut for soccer, le foot, with the word foutoir, or, politely put, 'mess'.

Some relief from grim football news and economic forecasts with Catholic La Croix. But it is not all fun and games, as the paper focuses on the remembrance ceremony for the 25 people who died in the floods that hit the south of France last week. The interfaith celebration will held tonight in the presence of president Nicolas Sarkozy. The picture on the front page shows people praying in a church on Saturday. And the headline sums up the mood: solidarity and recollection.

Communist L'Humanité has other priorities: 'Roll back Sarkozy', is the paper's frontpage headline. It was the war cry at the party's three-day congress that took place at the weekend.

The party has a new leader, and most of its 210 national committee members have been re-elected.

All that may well fail to impress French voters - the party has dropped dizzyingly low in the polls - as the paper's editorial acknowledges. It warns that the Communist Party sprang out of the starting blocks last weekend, but the finishing line is a long way off.

So the CP will have to live up to the challenge it has set for itself, L'Humanité concludes.