French press review 2 April 2014

Yesterday he had to share the front pages with President François Hollande. This morning he has them all to himself. Who is he?

A few more clues perhaps?

He's described by centrist Le Monde as a risky bet.

Popular Aujourd'hui en France says he'll have to walk a tightrope, while right-wing Le Figaro is happy to point out that his nomination has turned the French ecology camp an unhealthy shade of green.

All this fuss is, of course, about the new prime minister, Manuel Valls.

He's currently trying to form a fighting cabinet, without the participation of the Green party and against a background of division among his Socialist colleagues.

The nation's political analysts are having a field day, trying to guess who's going to be in, who out when the new government is announced, some time later today.

Le Figaro says that, behind the official emphasis on efficiency, the new team will have to balance the interests of the president and the prime minister. In the face of the energy, ambition and popularity of Valls, Hollande will need to show that he's still, after all, the boss.

The key posts are going to be Valls's old job at the interior ministry and the can of worms that is the finance ministry.

Le Figaro says Laurent Fabius is unlikely to move from foreign affairs, Jean-Yves le Drian will stay at defence, unless he's forced elsewhere and Stéphane Le Foll will probably still be minister of agriculture by this time tomorrow.

Beyond those few near-certainties, it's every man, woman and child for him - or herself.

What will become of Ségolène Royal? Most commentators expect her to get a job. Maybe education? Justice?

To return, briefly, to the new French political landscape, it is worth noting that the newly elected mayor of Paris, the Socialist Anne Hidalgo, was, like the new prime minister, born in Spain.

It's perhaps ironic that, as the xenophobic far-right Front National party makes huge advances on the electoral front, two of the top political jobs in the country go to people born abroad.

What else is happening in the world?

Well, communist L'Humanité wants us all out on the streets in 10 days' time, to protest against austerity.

Catholic La Croix looks at the danger of the spread of the ebola virus across west Africa, as the death toll in Guinea rises to 78 with a further two suspected cases in neighbouring Liberia.

Libération looks at the situation in the Central African Republic, where the local judicial system has been virtually destroyed by the year-long civil war. In the absence of formal justice, acts of vengeance are being perpetrated on a daily basis, leading to a spiral of retribution and hate.

Le Monde says the European Central Bank is terrified the European Union's economy is going to go into recession. While Mario Draghi and the rest of the number-crunchers in Brussels have been fighting the good fight against inflation, keeping price increases below the two per cent level, struggling producers have been virtually giving the goods away, meaning that the dreaded inflation is currently a limp shadow of itself at a mere 0.5 of a per cent. The problem is that this sort of deflation is not related to increased productivity but to increased fears among producers.

The European Central Bank says it's not deflation, just very slow inflation. But neither Washington nor London can tell the difference and both the US and English central banks having begun to free up the credit supply in an effort to get their wallowing economies moving again. Europe's financial directors meet tomorrow.