French press review 29 October 2013

The torment of taxation is continuing to make front-page news here in France.

The main headline in business daily Les Echos says President François Hollande is caught in a trap on the question of the "ecotax" on transport companies.

The basic idea is a good one: make the owners of heavy goods vehicles pay for the damage they do to the roads and to the environment. The problem is that the extra cost will be passed on to the producers of the goods transported, many of them already on the verge of bankruptcy because of the crisis.

And the new charges clearly don't favour companies based in peripheral regions like Brittany, since they're obviously going to cover more kilometres, and so pay more tax, to get the goods to the large urban markets like Paris and Lyon.

The new tax has them hopping mad in Brittany where the local economy is already suffering badly from the shrinking of the market for agricultural produce. The prime minister is to meet regional representatives later today. Having already offered to reduce the Breton ecotax bill by 50 per cent to compensate for the extra distances involved, Jean-Marc Ayrault looks likely to be forced into another embarrassing climbdown. And all this for a law that was proposed, debated and passed unanimously under the last, right-wing government.

Les Echos says the authority of the government will not be enhanced by yet another concession. 

That's also what the front page editorial in right-wing Le Figaro is saying but the style and approach are more colourful.

The editorial is headlined "The empty house," a reference to the conservative sense that there's nobody in charge, that the Socialist government is making it up as it goes along, lurching from crisis to crisis.

According toFigaro, the sports minister won't speak to the football clubs, many of whom face a 75 per cent income tax bill for paying their star employees over a million euros; the agriculture minister is deaf to the despair of farmers on the verge of nervous and financial breakdown; the minister in charge of the small industries sector has been missing without trace for several weeks.

It's all the fault of the president, François Hollande, who is, says Figaro, running the country the way he ran the Socialist Party, splitting hairs and searching for the impossible synthesis which will satisfy all parties in every debate. The disgraceful episode which followed the expulsion of the young Roma girl, Leonarda Dibrani, shows a president whose policy is unclear, whose voice is inaudible and whose authouity is questionable, the paper says.

An opinion poll published in tabloid Aujourd'hui en France shows that Hollande is now, officially, the least popular French president since 1981, when current poling techniques were first introduced. Only 26 per cent of voters questioned expressed a favourable opinion of the head of state, with the prime minister doing only slightly better with 27 per cent.