French press review 6 March 2015

France’s ruling Socialists fear a drubbing in regional elections. The government promises to clean up the ghettos but doesn’t seem to have the money. Is gender parity in France improving? And can hosting the Olympics and/or the Universal Exhibition restore the dignity of the French people?

Le Figaro seems happy to report growing fear gripping France’s ruling Socialist Party (PS) as the polls predict their historic defeat in upcoming regional elections.

According to the right-wing newspaper the PS could lose up to 40 divisions in the départementales, scheduled on the 22 and 29 March, due to their horrible record. The government has rushed to calm fears of mass redundancies as French unemployment runs at record levels, three weeks to the vote which predicts massive gains for the far-right Front National (FN).

“It is going to be a big slap in the face,” writes Le Figaro.

Even left-leaning Libération is resigned to the worst.

It points to a sign of the hard times the Socialist government is going through – its inability to raise the resources it needs to implement key reforms especially the fight against the “ghettoisation” of the poor suburbs at a time all economic indicators have turned red.

The paper is particularly frustrated that Prime Minister Manuel Valls is now obliged to resort to half-baked measures to tackle the territorial social and ethnic “apartheid” and daily discrimination he spoke of after January’s Charlie Hebdo attacks.

While Libé welcomes the mobilisation of the state for education, youth empowerment, the spirit of belonging and secularism, it holds that the government has definitely missed the opportunity to address key aspirations of its left-leaning electorate.

L’Humanité asks whether gender parity is improving with an opinion poll that asks men and women how sexist France is today.

It asks interviewees how they believe things have progressed over the last 10 years.

Women take a dimmer view of the situation than men on all counts.

Where 53 per cent of the total finds that access to the civil service has improved, 49 per cent of women do, while 16 per cent say it had got worse.

On access to the labour market as a whole, the result for the whole sample is 50 per cent for improvement, 13 per cent for deterioration, while among women 41 per cent think the situation has got better and 23 per cent think it has got worse.

The papers are marvelling at what “bipartisanism” can produce in this politically polarised France after the city of Paris launched its twin bid Thursday to host the 2024 Summer Olympics and the Universal Exhibition in 2025.

Le Figaro and Libération welcome the “great move” supported by a string of CAC-40 bosses and civil society leaders, who have pledged their determination to help what Catholic daily La Croix describes as the "celebration of a people’s meeting".

One enthusiastic UMP lawmaker tells Libération that hosting the twin events would even help “restore the dignity of the French people”.