French press review 6 December 2010

All eyes in the French press are still on Cote d'Ivoire, with the centrist daily Le Monde's front-page editorial saying “Laurent Gbagbo must admit defeat”. It says that while history will soon forget the legal quibbling that Gbagbo has set in motion to justify what it calls his “electoral hold-up”, it won't forgive him if he leads the country back into violence.Le Figaro, the right-leaning daily, is also concentrating on this by interviewing angry supporters of Alassane Ouattara.

They also quote members of France’s Socialist Party, who the paper says are old supporters and friends of Gbagbo's, calling on him to “respect the will of his people”. Left-leaning Libération also leads with a piece on what it calls Gbagbo's "hedgehog strategy" to remain in power. La Croix, the Catholic daily here, has a page of vox pops from on the ground in Cote d'Ivoire that make powerful reading. "I went to vote with joy, conviction and confidence," says one person. "You have to make your views known."

Libération's other big story this morning is a great multipage report on the year that the eurozone looked failure in the eye. As European finance ministers meet this evening for another summit on the crisis among single-currency countries, Libération's report claims to offer the inside track on two years of secret negotiations to keep the union from foundering. “Europe is a bicycle” says the editorial. “If it stops moving it falls over.”

Le Monde, one of the five international papers to get WikiLeaks material, has also done some digging for a big piece on Françafrique, the network of former colonies tied in various intricate and long-standing ways with the French government. It wonders whether President Sarkozy's declared mission of dismantling the old ways has worked, and cites American diplomatic cables saying that perhaps it has, pointing out that America could soon expand its influence in Africa without worrying resistance or interference from France. The leaked cables also express concern about increasing Chinese influence in Africa. There's sure to be more to come on this....

The press here is avidly following the so-called crisis in the Socialist Party, which has been urged to get its act together and choose a leader who can take on President Sarkozy in 2012. To recap, the party's former leader Ségolène Royal has said she wants another go - opinion in the party, meanwhile, seems to favour Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the chairman of the IMF, who hasn't said whether he'll stand - and now Martine Aubry, the party's actual leader, says she won't announce whether she's contesting the election till June. This is actually in line with the party's timetable, but you can sort of see the point of Libération's cartoon today, which has the legend "Two presidents in Cote d'Ivoire" and then a picture of several French socialist candidates wearing sashes and rosettes and saying, "We can do a lot better than that."

One of Le Monde's cartoons takes a swipe at recent calls by the former footballer and actor Eric Cantona, who suggested in an interview two months ago that people should hold a cash revolution: take all their money out of the banks in protest at the banks' handling of the global financial crisis. This seems to have rather gotten away from Cantona, with protest groups taking over and inciting people to a run on the banks in France tomorrow. The plan has been roundly derided by the French political right, though even the left seems to think supporters of the movement may not have enough financial clout to bother the banks. Still, a Le Monde cartoon has a team of UN peacekeepers surrounding a bank and calling on Cantona to come out quietly with his hands on his head and leave his money in the bank.

And without wishing to trivialise the situation in the two Koreas, Le Figaro this morning draws attention to what may by now be becoming a slightly old story: the press conference held by the chairman of South Korea's ruling party, in which he visited the island of Yeongpyeong the day after it was attacked by the North. Ahn Sang-Soo held up two objects which he said were shells fired by the North, but as many people subsequently pointed out on the web, they were in fact Thermos flasks. An opposition spokesperson has asked him to remember that he is not a comedian. This could all prove in rather bad taste if South Korea's live fire drills today don't go according to plan. We'll see.