French press review 17 April 2014

Algeria and austerity share the honours on this morning's French front pages.

Catholic La Croix says the presidential election in Algeria will fool nobody, either inside or outside the north African nation. Abdelaziz Bouteflika will be re-elected, despite grave concerns about his health and capacity to govern. The danger, according to the Catholic daily, is that the frustrations endemic in Algerian society . . . principally due to youth unemployment and poverty . . . could boil over in the wake of a vote that few people believe will be either free or fair.

And, so, to austerity.

According to tabloid Aujourd'hui en France, we're all going on another bread and water diet. The new prime minster's plan to save the French economy is "unprecedented" in its ambition, says the Paris daily, and will hit the middle and poorer classes hardest.

In broad terms, state spending will be reduced by 18 billion euros, local government will get 11 billion less from central coffers, ten billion will somehow have to be knocked off national spending on doctors, pills and hospitals, with a further 11 billion to be saved on social security spending. That all adds up to a neat 50 billion euros, exactly the amount needed to get the French national debt down to 3 per cent of French productive capacity.

All of which looks very neat on paper, unless that paper is right-wing Le Figaro, or communist L'Humanité, or left-wing Libération. Manuel Valls has managed to annoy just about everybody, wherever they stand in the political spectrum.

Conservative Le Figaro says the proposals will have minimum impact on the national debt, maximum impact on those within the Socialist party who are already angry at recent presidential moves into the murky territory of social democracy. Worse, says the right-wing paper, it's a storm in a beer bucket anyway, since the prime minister is just tinkering with the figures instead of instigating necessary structural reforms.

And, says Le Figaro, the fact that Manuel Valls says money must be saved in a louder and more authoritative voice than his predecessor does not actually save any money.

Apart from the volume of delivery, nothing has changed, says Le Figaro. What is needed are precise figures, details of how the money is going to be saved, not broad platitudes about the need for a leaner, more combative state machine. And when Valls starts making concessions to those angry members on the left of his own Socialist snakepit, says Le Figaro, the entire empty exercise will draw down the wrath of Brussels and the ratings of those grumpy geezers, Standard, Poor, Fitch and Moody.

Is there anything interesting in the papers?

Well, Libération reports that Iran has won the ninth football world cup for robots. The competition was held this year in Teheran, and involved three German teams, one from Holland, and the victorious Iranians who clearly made maximum use of home advantage. In case you're wondering, the competition is for teams of four identical robots manufactured by a French company. The skill is contributed by the programmers, who have to devise ways of enabling their machines to act smarter than their competitors.

And you thought the enrichment of uranium was the national sport in Iran!

Le Monde's business supplement says the slowdown of the Chinese economy has been confirmed. As the construction industry slows down, economic growth for the Asian giant is slowing to 7.4 per cent. The old guys who run the country are delighted, since the inevitable depreciation of the yuan will boost exports and slow down local spending. Less positive is the impact of the Chinese chill on other emerging economies, heavily dependant on Beijing-based buyers of raw materials.

On its analysis pages, Le Figaro blames American indifference to the economic plight of Russia following the collapse of the USSR in 1991 for the current state of the former soviet state's economy, for the anti-western political line chamipioned by Vladimir Putin, and, by implication, for the current crisis in Ukraine. As Edward Luttwak, a strategist at the CIA explains, "Americans think Russia is all about 'Anna Karenina,' in fact it's all about Ghengis Khan."