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French press review 2 November 2015

There's plenty of variety on this morning's French front pages . . .

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Le Monde gives top billing to what the centrist paper calls "South Sudan's forgotten war".

Barely four years after independence, half the population of South Sudan is facing famine and a quarter of South Sudanese have been forced from their homes. The world's newest nation holds the global record for illiteracy. Life expectancy is 55 years.

A Le Monde headline says independence was not a takeoff but a crash.

Communist L'Humanité reveals how bosses stole a year of pensions from their employees. This refers to last week's deal between the employers and certain unions which will push the effective retirement age for the majority of French workers to 63 years.

The French Communist Party says the deal is "a denial of democracy and a social disgrace".

Catholic La Croix says refugees are giving Germany the jitters. The paper says the huge numbers of asylum seekers arriving in Germany are saturating the systems put in place to receive them and are also causing major political tensions within the ruling coalition.

Left-leaning Libération wonders if the forthcoming French regional elections are going to be another disgraceful defeat for the ruling socialists or perhaps the beginning of a miraculous renaissance.

They clearly don't have much faith in the renaissance option, offering the government the possibility of a small, medium or mega defeat.

Libération's editorial says there is a real need to get mainstream voters once again interested in politics in order to counteract the impact of the far-right Front National, adept at getting supporters to the polling stations by dishonestly blending terrorism, islam and migration into an all-purpose scarecrow.

The paper says voter apathy isn't the left's only problem. Many of those who supported the socialists in 2012 have been disappointed by the social-liberal drift of the current administration and will thus find themselves effectively disenfranchised, unable to vote socialist but unprepared to vote for anyone else.

Unless, of course, President Hollande and Prime Minister Valls take urgent action to boost the economy and ease the plight of the least well-off.

Right-wing Le Figaro is happy to announce the abject failure of François Hollande's recent media blitz: "Holland's hypercommunication drive hits the wall" is how Le Figaro sums it up. Despite a swathe of official visits and media interventions, says Le Figaro, the president's bottom-scraping personal popularity shows no sign of liftoff, and his omnipresence is beginning to get on the nerves of his socialist colleagues.

The elections in Turkey are, interestingly, mentioned on only two front pages, those of Le Figaro and L'Humanité.

Le Figaro notes that President Erdogan's AKP party emerges with an absolute majority, but without the two-thirds of parliamentary seats which would have allowed it to change the Turkish constitution.

L'Humanité says Erdogan's "strategy of fear" has paid off for the AKP. The communist daily says the president managed to stigmatise the main opposition Peoples Democratic Party as an ally of kurdish "terrorists" who are seeking autonomy from Ankara.

On inside pages Le Monde carries the reassuring news that modern man (at least here in France) plays an active role in the running of his family. According to the latest economic and social review published by the national statistics agency, one quarter of men actually do more domestic work than their spouses (meaning that 75 per cent do less), but they still have a tendency to hog the more satisfying tasks.

French wives thus routinely get stuck with vacuum cleaning, ironing and peeling the spuds, while French husbands interact with the children or engage in creative do-it-yourself projects.

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