French press review 26 January 2012

Socialist Party presidential candidate, François Hollande,  unveils the details of his campaign platform today. There are 87 days to go to the first round of the election of the next French president and Frank has come up with 60 proposals in a 41-page document.

There's a lot of detail here, so we'll just skim a few of the key points. There'll be a new tax system for businesses . . . the bigger the operation, the bigger the tax bill, the idea being to give a competitive edge to small and medium enterprises. Companies which make excessive use of temporary employees will also be penalised. The obvious danger is that the big operations will simply move elsewhere.

And the same goes for the banks, threatened with having to separate their lending and investment activities and pay much higher levels of tax on their profits. If they don't like it, they can always move the head office to Switzerland.

Hollande is going to finance his proposals basically by closing tax loopholes and ending Sarko-era generosity to the super-rich. Which way is Switzerland?

What he doesn't say, and it's a surprising omission, is how the minimum wage is going to evolve. And there's little in the 41 pages to convince voters that President Hollande would do much to improve their buying power.

Tonight Hollande will appear on national television to explain his programme, with the Foreign Minister, Alain Juppé, asking the hard questions.

Business daily Les Echos looks at key economic indicators and finds that French unemployment figures worsened dramatically last year.

There are now 152,000 more people out of work than there were one year ago, with the young and the over-50s especially badly affected. And very few French businesses are thinking of hiring. There could be three million Ftrench unemployed by the time of the elections, and President Nicolas Sarkozy has been forced to put his social sales tax, a move aimed at making it cheaper for businesses to take on staff, on the back burner until next autumn.

Dossier: Sharia wars - Boko Haram v the military in northern Nigeria

Catholic La Croix looks at how Nigeria's various Christian communities are reacting to the threat of Islamic fanatism. There are 71 million Christians of various denominations in the country, making them Nigeria's second biggest religious group. But they remain divided, says La Croix, over what place they should occupy on the political stage.

On inside pages, Le Monde gives space to Côte d'Ivoire's president, Alassane Ouattara, currently on a state visit to France.

Part of the reason for the Ivorian president's trip is to thank the French authorities for their intervention last April, at the height of the crisis which saw Ouattara and former president Laurent Gbagbo in a battle to control the country. If France had not become involved, says Ouattara, Côte d'Ivoire would have seen a genocide worse than that in Rwanda.

The Ivorian leader is happy to defend his policy of political and ethnic reconciliation. He says everyone suspected of crimes against their neighbours will be tried, and that there'll be no favours shown to his own supporters.

On the economic front, all efforts are to rebuild the coffee and cocoa sectors and get Côte d'Ivoire back in the ranks of the emerging nations.

On French politics, Ouattara says he has many friends in the Socialist Party but has been invited by Sarkozy and won't be having any meetings on the side. On who might win the next election he simply says he doesn't meddle in French politics.

Libération reveals the shocking fact that the average Briton is becoming more dishonest. A recent poll shows that keeping money found in the street, not paying your bus fare and telling lies are now regarded as acceptable by a majority of those questioned, reversing the findings of a similar poll carried out 10 years ago.

The only increase in honesty concerns social service fraud, which now has an 85 per cent disapproval rating, up from 78 per cent in the year 2000.

The author of the study warns that personal dishonesty could lead to the collapse of society, as people become more selfish and see less point in making an effort, whether at school or in the workplace.