French press review 25 June 2012

Greece, Europe and the euro are among the main stories on this morning's front pages....

Le Figaro's main front page story asks "Did the Greeks lie to the rest of us?"

It's bad enough that we're baling them out to the tune of 35,000 euros for every man, woman and miniature mousaka-muncher, now there's a suspicion that they didn't keep their promise to freeze public-sector recruitment, part of the deal when we gave them the first gazillion-euro handout to save them from bankruptcy.

There are dark suspicions, writes Le Figaro, that Athens may have taken on no fewer than 70,000 new civil servants, cleverly masking the jobs to avoid the wrath of those whose money they were allegedly misusing. Greece has categorically denied the allegations, but Le Figaro says observers remain sceptical.

The story first surfaced in a centre-left Greek weekly magazine, and is based on two reports: one from the European Central Bank, the other from the acting Finance Minister, indicating that the socialist Pasok government, having promised to sack thousands of state employees actually took on seventy thousand new ones, and a further 12,000 at the local government level.

Says one commentator, it was necessary to find some way of easing social tension at the start of the crisis, and the best way was by offering jobs to party faithful. The prime minister, George Papendréou, alone, had 120 well-paid counsellors at the height of the crisis. They can't have been doing a very good job.

The main headline in business daily Les Echos reads "Paris and Berlin condemned to finding some way of saving the euro".

The Germans and the French do not, you will understand, see eye-to-eye on how best to keep the badly-leaking single European currency afloat.

The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, is expected in Paris this week. She'll have another go at putting manners on French president, Frank Hollande, before the next European summit at the end of the month. The main bone of contention seems to be how far you can push financial federalism without abolishing the idea of the independent nation-state.

Angela and the Germans want a mechanism which will give them more control over Europe. Frank, the French and anybody else who looks carefully at the dangers of such a move should probably be, at best, cautious, at worst, downright scared.

And while we're on the subject of nightmares, the financial paper also reports that the German economy is slowing down, with the prospects at their most bleak for two years according to a recent poll of business leaders on the other bank of the Rhine. Worse, the Chinese economy, the second most powerful on the planet, is beginning to get the sniffles.