French press review 02 Sept 2012

French President François Hollande is this week’s big story as the magazines analyse the worries of his government.

Le Point reports that doubt and anxiety have taken hold at the Elysée Palace with “a red alert blinking” about growing unemployment and the worsening deficit.

The weekly explains that jobless figures grew by 41,300 in July, taking the overall number of French unemployed to 2.9 million, while the budget deficit worsened by 1.7 million euros and now stands at 34.9 billion overall.

For Le Point, it has “gone past time for President Hollande to wake up” and the magazine explains that his “wait and see” attitude has cast a dark shadow over the “delivery capacity of his presidency, and caused France’s isolation in Europe as well as an 11 point drop in his popularity rating”.

L’Express has an inventory of Hollande’s so-called “cuckolds”: civil servants, youths, taxpayers, ecologists and teachers, who dreamed of life far from ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy’s so-called “brutal ways”.

The right-leaning magazine says that while it is still early to “explore the cemetery of betrayed promises”, people are bitter about the “marriage of convenience” President Hollande entered into, his electorate pointing to the “gap separating what he says, from what he does”.

Le Canard Enchaîné smells gas leaking from the Greens/Socialist alliance, amid mounting tensions over the government’s shifting nuclear policy.

The Far-Left is also on the war path with President Hollande, says Le Canard.

The paper detects a feeling of betrayal, following the government’s failure to honour Hollande’s promise to freeze spiralling fuel prices, the hard-line security policy of Interior Minister Manuel Valls, the resumption of the Roma expulsions and the government’s deaf ear to Left-Front calls for a referendum on the ratification of the European treaty.

The two left-leaning magazines build their front cover stories on the domestic problem involving the mother of President Francois Hollande’s four children, Ségolène Royal and the “First Girl Friend” Valerie Trierweiler.

“Women’s war: 15 years of dirty tricks” headlines Le Nouvel Observateur. The special report includes excerpts from Sylvain Courage’s new book “The Ex”, a captivating account of how this “very private matter is causing serious problems at the highest summit of the state”.

Marianne also reviews another just-published best seller, entitled “Caught between Two Fires” by Anne Rosencher and Anna Cabana.

The weekly describes the publication as “a cruel and pulsating chronicle of how an unprecedented experience has trapped the Elysée in a “political lovers' Bermuda triangle”, likely to destabilize Francois Hollande’s entire presidency.