French press review 29 June 2015

Greece is in the fangs of all the national dailies after Athens calls off debt reform talks and announces a referendum on creditors' proposals, to be held days after a repayment deadline.

In order to avoid a flight of cash, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras shut banks until 6 July and imposed a daily 60-euro limit on ATM withdrawals as choas looms.

Foreign tourists, a vital engine of the Greek economy, are however to be exempt from the restrictions. The drastic measures to protect Greece’s banking system against the threat of mass panic came after the European Central Bank said it would not increase its financial support to Greek lenders despite early signs of a chaotic bank run.

Athens opted to consult the people about what to do with the massive 323-billion-euro debts after a week of crunch talks with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Eurozone creditor. The loans represent 4 per cent of Greece’s gross domestic product and it would take 30 years for Athens to pay it back on the conditions being proposed by its creditors.

Le Figaro says it doesn’t see how Greece can avoid falling over the precipice of default as early as Tuesday evening after rejecting the pre-conditions set by its creditors.

Liberation’s big bang is about “the clash of democrats” taking place in Europe. The left-leaning newspaper explains that by calling the referendum Prime Minister Tsipras has flung open the doors to a “Grexit” – meaning an exit from the Eurozone.

Le Monde points out that the referendum is scheduled to be held on 5 July, well beyond the 30 June deadline. That’s when Athens is due to pay the IMF 1. 5 billion euros for the servicing of its debt, under a bailout plan approved by the Bretton Woods institutions.

According to the newspaper, Alexis Tsipras is using the referendum as a weapon by asking the people to speak out without pressure and blackmail from anybody.

L’Humanité jumps into the fray pointing out that it is effectively up to the Greek people to decide, not the master blackmailers and Eurocrats trying to stage a financial coup d’état in Athens.

And for the Catholic daily La Croix the referendum is Tsipras’ trump card. According to the paper the Greek Prime Minister called the popular vote knowing fully well that the people are going to say a massive “No” to the ultimatum set by its western creditors.

Meanwhile, Yassin Salhi, the terrorist who confessed to the police to decapitating his boss in a suspected jihadist attack on a gas factory outside Lyon, is the subject of renewed scrutiny from Libération.

The paper reports that police have traced the selfie Salhi took with the severed head to a mobile number in Canada through the online messaging service WhatsApp. The owner of the subscription is Sebastien Youniss V, a French man from Vesoul who left for Syria in 2014. According to Libé, Yassin Salhi used WhatsApp to "show off his exploit", not by accident but clearly by design.

The paper says that the network created by American internet entrepreneur and computer engineer Jan Koum has 700 million active users around the world exchanging 30 billion text, photo and video messages every single day.

WhatsApp belongs to a new wave of internet service providers knowns as OTT or “over the top” which leapfrog traditional telecom connections to put two users in contact, using a telephone number as the unique ID. It is a service reputed to be harder to monitor than the mobile networks of other operators, according to Libération.