French press review 21 November 2013

Ayrault's tax revamp is judged risky. French multinationals are judged untruthful. Europe is urged to strip off the hair shirt. Les Bleus say goodbye to mediocrity.

Right-wing Le Figaro gives pride of place to the promise, made earlier this week, by French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, to overhaul the tax system.

A day after business paper Les Echos said exactly the same thing, Le Figaro warns that its a risky undertaking, with the added danger that any reform will probably lead to an increase in the tax burden for the Figaro-reading middle classes.

This morning, Les Echos announces that French businesses are world champions in the taxation stakes. Companies here pay the second-highest level of direct taxes in Europe. When you add in the social charges which employers have to pay, you reach a total tax bill of about 65 per cent, the paper says.

They have other reasons for gloom this morning at the French multinationals, Véolia, Areva and Auchan. Those three companies have just been named the winners of this year's Pinocchio Prizes, awarded by a group of French non-governmental organisations to the commercial operations which tell the biggest lies. Pinocchio is the little wooden boy whose nose gets longer with every fib he tells. The story appears in Le Monde.

Véolia get their wooden nose in the category "let's all work together, but we'll keep the cash" for the company's aggressive appropriation, exploitation and destruction of natural resources, notably in India.

Areva, active in the nuclear industry, wins in the "greener then green" category for a deliberately dishonest presentation of its own environmental impact. They're used to this sort of honour at Areva . . . the company won two awards in the first year of the Pinocchios in 2008.

And then there's the supermarket chain Auchan, which gets the "clean hands, full pockets" award for its association with suppliers who bought clothes from Rana Plaza in Bangladesh. In April 1,133 textile workers lost their lives when a Rana Plaza factory collapsed. Auchan never offered a centime in compensation to the families of the victims.

As for the losing companies, including Total, Air France, Apple and the Société Générale bank, they'll get another chance next year, sure that their every self-serving press release will be carefully read by Friends of the Earth and compared with what's really happening on the ground.

Left-leaning Libération celebrates the end of austerity. Apparently, as reported yesterday in communist L'Humanité, the European Commission is beginning to wonder if the bread-and-water diet imposed on us all to solve the economic crisis was such a good idea after all.

Apparently, the cure has only worsened the disease, depressing gross domestic product; boosting unemployment and stopping consumers from doing what they do best.

The big questions now are, what can individual governments do to get their economies going again? And is Europe sufficiently united, politically and economically, to move beyond the hair shirt insisted on by German Chancellor, Angela Merkel?

How did the French football team beat their Ukranian opponents on Tuesday night? Well, obviously, by scoring more goals. But how did they transform themselves from two-nil losers in Kiev last week to three-nil heros in Paris?

It all came down to words . . . of encouragement, of determination, of support.

The team, which sports daily L'Equipe said was engaged in a relentless search for the limits of mediocrity, finally came together and played like a team as opposed to 11 talented individuals.

On its inside pages Le Monde attempts to explain why France was so reluctant to come to terms with Tehran at the first round of negotiations on the Iranian nuclear programme, last week in Geneva.

While the Americans seemed ready to sign a deal and move towards the ending of sanctions, sanctions which deprive the West of two billion dollars-worth of Iranian crude oil every week, the French were insisting on caution, proposing 20 amendments to the final document.

The collapse of that first round of talks was blamed on the intransigence of French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who refuses to trust the smiling diplomacy of the new Iranian president, Hassan Rowhani. Fabius wants cast-iron guarantees that Tehran will never produce a nuclear weapon. Laurent Fabius, remember, was French prime minister in the 1980s when Paris was targeted by terrorist attacks which most analysts still blame on Iran.

Yesterday Iranian Supreme Guide Ayatollah Khamenei declared that Israel will eventually "disappear from the global landscape". The Western negotiators are wondering what other horrors might be hiding behind Rowhani's smile.