French press review 23 November 2011

Papers pay tribute to former president's wife and humanitarian activist Danielle Mitterrand. The Sarkozy/Merkel tandem has its differences over the debt crisis. France's Green/Socialist alliance has its differences, too. Are the media helping the far-right with saturation coverage of a girl's murder? And will the French health service close down because of the 35-hour week?

Libération gives the front-page honours to Danielle Mitterrand, widow of the last French Socialist President, François Mitterrand. She died yesterday at the age of 87.

She will be remembered as a woman of extraordinary dignity, a human rights activist, a supporter of Western Sahara's Polisario Front, Iraq's Kurds, France's illegal immigrants, to name just three of the oppressed groups she helped.

Conviction, combat and courage are the words most frequently associated with a woman who will be missed.

Nicolas Sarkozy is on the front page of business daily, Les Echos, where the French president is said to be ready to change the rules governing the troubled eurozone.

Les Echos says France and Germany are leading the charge towards a bright new future in which sovereign debt crises will be a thing of the past.

But there remain crucial divergences between Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The most crucial of those divergences concerns the part to be played by the European Central Bank (ECB).

The Germans don't want the ECB to get any more involved than it already is in the buying of government bonds to bail out sinking eurozone nations.

First of all, because it's illegal and strictly forbidden by the ECB's charter.

Second of all, because that kind of help could just encourage lazy governments to soft-pedal on the vital structural reforms and austerity plans, knowing that the Big Bank will always come to the rescue.

The Germans don't want the eurozone patched up, they want it fixed. So buzz off, European Central Bank.

Right-wing paper Le Figaro is happy to report that Green Party presidential candidate, Eva Joly, is at war with Socialist Party presidential candidate, François Hollande.

The principal bone of contention is nuclear power, a thing the Greens want none of, but which Hollande realises is a crucial part of the French economy.

Eva Joly has just returned from a visit to the area around the ruined Japanese nuclear power station at Fukushima.

For her, putting an end to the French nuclear industry is not a political or technical question, but a moral one. Whatever the advantages of nuclear energy, says Eva Joly, the risk is simply too great.

Joly is expected to win about four per cent of the votes in the first round of next year's presidential election.

Hollande would like to collect those supporters in the second round face-off, and he probably will, whether Eva Joly likes it or not.

She's hardly going to ask the ecologists to vote for the UMP or the far-right National Front.

Communist L'Humanité is angry at what it considers government manipulation of last week's tragic rape and murder of French schoolgirl, Agnès Marin.

According to the communist daily, the authorities are using public anger and emotion to propose new security legislation, with no other ambition than to appeal to far-right voters.

L'Humanité says the audio-visual media have played their unwitting part, forgetting the lesson that should have been learned back in 2002, when shocking images of a pensioner, beaten-up by robbers, were all over French TV screens just three days before the first round of the presidential election.

And surely helped Jean-Marie Le Pen defeat the Socialist, Lionel Jospin, for a place in the second round.

Let's be sensible, says L'Huma. Editors are right to give tragic, human stories due prominence.

But is it right to see an isolated murder take precedence over current events in Syria or Egypt?

Popular tabloid Aujourd'hui en France devotes its main story to a time-bomb for the French hospital system.

Since the 35-hour working week was introduced in 2002, workers are allowed to accumulate time-off to compensate them for working longer than 35 hours in any given week.

Medical personnel, notoriously, work very long hours, and can rarely leave the office when the whistle blows.

Now French hospital workers have a total of two million days off to take before the end of next year.

Which will either cost more than the state can afford in cash compensation, or close down huge swathes of the medical machine.