French press review 10 December 2014

Does France have a shadow president? Will the Socialists be split asunder by the “Macron law”? Will the growing rich-poor gap harm the world economy? And is Angela Merkel’s success not quite all its seems?

Libération gives the front-page honours to economist and writer Jacques Attali, calling him "The other president".

A former advisor to Socialist leader François Mitterrand, Attali has had privileged access to several administrations since, whether of the left or right.

The main reason he's back in the news right now is that Libération sees his guiding hand behind many of the provisions of Economy Minister Emmanuel Macron’s bill currently being debated and intended to get the French economy moving again by boosting growth and business activity.

Le Monde asks a number of experts to run the rule over the proposed law and the general finding is that it's not a bad first step in the right direction but is unlikely to be sufficient to really stimulate growth.

Right-wing Le Figaro warns that this law is going to cost the Socialist majority dear in terms of cohesion and could result in the use of the constitutional clause known as 49-3 under which the government takes complete responsibility for a proposed law.

That has the effect of immediately ending the debate and the law is adopted without a vote, unless an absolute majority of deputies are opposed. It's a draconian measure and would be bad news for a government which still has a theoretical majority. But it may be the only way to prevent an open war with Socialist rebels who disapprove of the general trend of current economic policy.

The main bones of contention in the proposed law concern a freeing up of the rules for entry to the legal profession (disliked by the solicitors), changes to the law on job security (disliked by the unions), and a limit on the fees charged by the private companies which own the nation's motorways (disliked by, you guessed it, the companies concerned and their shareholders).

The advantages are that some parts of the law might actually work, though on different time scales and with varying impacts on the overall economic situation. At least Paris will be able to tell Brussels that a serious effort has been made to tackle thorny topics and that should also encourage foreign investors.

Le Monde's main story says that the global gap between rich and poor has continued to widen over the past three decades. If you are lucky enough to be in the top 10 per cent of the world's richest people, then you are 9.5 times better off than the average at the bottom end of the scale, among the 10 per cent of the world's poorest.

In the 1980s the difference was a factor of seven but, since then, the poor have got more so.

While this is bad news for the poor, Le Monde points out that it's also bad news for practically everyone else since it has negative effects on education and mobility and they translate directly into less growth for the world economy. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that inequality has cost 8.5 points to world wealth production over the past 25 years.

On its inside pages Le Monde looks at the huge recent success of German Chancellor Angela Merkel at her party's annual congress, suggesting that she still faces severe criticism from the youth wing of her own Christian Democratic Union and from businessmen angry at Merkel's decision to divert funds to pensions for mothers, instead of investing in education and research.

When you add her failure to convince Vlad the Bad to get his military ass out of Ukraine and her ability to annoy the spendthrift Italian and French neighbours about their national budgetary excesses, you end up with a woman whose political security is more apparent than real.