French weekly magazine review 5 June 2016

Terrorism, Google and the real reason why labour relations are so bad in France . . . those are some of front-page offerings from this week's French magazines.

DR

L'Express goes for the nerves, with a main story promising to reveal the new terrorist threats facing France on the eve of the European football festival.

In fact, they're the old threats, a mixture of information, supposition, pure fiction and paranoia.

The authorities believe that there are, indeed, various groups or individuals already on French soil, prepared to follow the instruction of the spokesman of the Islamic State armed group, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, to kill unbelievers indiscriminately.

The fact that Euro 2016 coincides, more or less exactly, with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, adds a certain weight to the prophecies of imminent doom. The security forces are already stretched to the limit, worn out after weeks of policing labour protests.

The Euro is going to bring the sort of crowds and confusion that probably help terrorists. And the French security system does appear to have a few major problems, preventing the circulation of information between the various groups supposed to be tracking those who are planning attacks. All of which is bad enough but doesn't, in fact, bring us any closer to another terrorist attack than we were yesterday.

How scary is Google?

L'Obs looks at another danger threatening the French, and just about everybody else. That's the rise and rise of the internet monster Google.

Basically, Google knows everything about us, what we eat, read, think, who we phone, visit, love, hate. Where we are. And the company goes on investing billions in the purchase of information, all for the greater good of the human race!

Perhaps.

What is clear is that Google obviously feels the need to improve its image and has started spending money on social projects, literacy schemes, boosting small businesses, helping the printed press. To the tune of 100 million dollars per year.

Impressive?

That derisory sum is less than one percent of Google's annual global profit. And the handouts help to make the company even more difficult to live without. The crucial problem is that no one has yet proposed a way to control such a powerful multinational information machine. Very few governments have Google's financial clout or its access to individuals. The next global war could be fought by states trying to reclaim sovereignty from the masters of the internet. The very foundations of democracy may be at risk, L'Obs warns.

Why the French go on strike

Speaking of democracy, Le Point offers to explain why France is such an unhappy place when it comes to labour relations.

It all goes back 110 years to something called the Amiens Charter, a document in which the CGT trade union confederation set down its revolutionary ambitions. The CGT wanted to be nothing less than a social and economic actor beyond the control of the politicians, with a view to fundamentally reorganising French industrial and living conditions.

It didn't work, of course but, the right-wing magazine says, that hasn't prevented the charter from continuing to drive a certain element in the trade union movement with the uncertain consequences provoked by recent strikes and other disruptions.

What happened to austerity?

Weekly magazine Marianne wonders what happened to the dark old days of austerity?

Remember when the government told us on a daily basis that we'd have to tighten our belts to keep Brussels happy?

If we didn't cut umpteen gazillion euros from national spending, we'd be treated like the Greeks, the beach bums of the European community.

That was then. Now there's an election to be won and President François Hollande has, like any self-respecting politician with his back to the wall, reached for his chequebook.

Basing itself on official figures, Marianne calculates that the French leader has given away 5.4 billion euros so far this year. Nobody cares what Brussels thinks. The real problem is what the big giveaway is doing to the already suspect cohesion of the Socialist leadership. Because there are a lot of ambitious individuals watching Hollande giving away our money, fearful that he may spend enough to give himself a shot at being reelected.

French workers fed up

Le Figaro Magazine says the ordinary French worker is deeply angry about the way the strikes against labour law reform have slowed down the economy, made eveyday life more difficult and damaged the image of the country overseas.

Forty-five percent of those questioned by the right-wing magazine would like to see it made illegal for workers in strategic sites like refineries or nuclear power stations to go on strike.

Sixty percent think that the CGT union group has abused its position in bringing the country to its knees.

And 40 percent would have liked to see a more muscular response from the government right at the start of the dispute, 42 percent thinking the opposite, perhaps because neither side is convinced that the labour reform was finally worth all the trouble.

Count your blessings

While we're lost in the statistics, an article in Le Monde's magazine M says a global survey shows that, when you take holidays and time off into consideration, Parisians work an average of 31 hours per week, less than the inhabitants of any other major city in the world and far short of the official, and often bitterly lamented, limit of 35 hours. The unhappy French are in a different universe from the average worker in Hong Kong, who clocks up 50 hours at the grindstone each week.