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French press review 30 June 2015

“Pay Day” for Greece as the deadline to service its 240-billion-euro loan from Western creditors expires tonight. And more startling revelations about the massive economic spying of France by the US national intelligence agency.

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It’s 30 June and Greece has until tonight to cough out 1.5 billion euros due to the International Monetary Fund under a bailout plan or face default and exit from the Eurozone.

Greece has a debt worth nearly 180 per cent of its gross domestic product and has been receiving 240 billion euros of bailout cash since 2010. But the country’s leftist Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras told creditors including the European Union and the European Central Bank that Greece can’t pay, opting instead to submit the creditors' latest cash-for-reform plans to a referendum on 5 July for endorsement by the people.

As the Greeks took to the streets Monday for mass demonstrations against the latest bailout proposals, L’Humanité publishes a banner held aloft by protesters in front of the Greek parliament in Athens, reading: “Our lives do not belong to the creditors!". The protest took place as huge queues formed at ATMs around the city, with workers waiting for hours to withdraw the 60 euros they are allowed per day.

A furious L’Humanité holds that in a country where unemployment has more than doubled to 25.6 per cent since 2009 and where the government has been forced to halve pensions and benefits, the referendum was the best move the Greek premier could make. According to the Communist party daily, the vast majority of the Greek people are bound to reject the plan because the creditors are demanding swingeing austerity cuts, forcing the country into years of painful recession.

L'Humanité points out that at a time when Premier Tsipras chose democracy, the oligarchs like Germany’s Angela Merkel, France’s conservative opposition leader Nicolas Sarkozy and Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission’s president, opted in unison to "shoot on sight", and "bombarding" the Greek people's "freedom to choose".

The daily also condemns some French newspapers for trooping behind them with quite some pitiful headlines   Le Journal du Dimanche branding Tsipras as a “master blackmailer" and Libération and Le Monde qualifying him as “irresponsible”, while Le Figaro’s correspondent in Brussels denounced the referendum as a Bolsheviks coup d’état.

Le Figaro won’t rule out a last-minute miracle. The conservative publication says the pressure being made to bear on the leftist Syriza government by the financial markets could bring some sense in the heads of the Greeks. That was after Standard & Poor's downgraded Greece's credit rating deeper into junk territory, while its sister agency Fitch also cut Greece’s ratings on four major Greek banks to "restricted default" on Monday.

La Croix says that even if the door separating Greece from Europe has narrowed considerably, a resumption of negotiations between Athens and its creditors cannot be excluded. The Catholic daily was reading the lips of EU leaders who hinted last night that they could still be open to an agreement after tonight’s deadline, aware that a Greek exit from the Eurozone would leave a permanent scar on the community.

And Libération published fresh revelations about the other shady dealings of the American NSA spy agency. According to the paper, the documents released in collaboration with WikiLeaks show that the US administration also resorted to massive economic spying on France, obtaining highly sensitive information on major industrial contracts passed since 2002.

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