French press review 3 June 2016

While the weather, the Euro football and various strikes continue to mesmerise most editors, Communist Pärty daily L'Humanité gives the front-page honours to the 28-nation Middle-East peace conference, due to open today in Paris, without any Israeli or Palestinian participants.

DR

Forget the floods, the strikes and the football, suggests L'Humanité, this morning's main story concerns the international peace conference on the Middle East, due to open today here in Paris.

The communist daily's main headline reads "The impossibility of everyday life in occupied Palestine".

Today's conference is an attempt to relaunch the Arab-Israeli peace process but it will be seriously hampered by Israeli opposition to it.

L'Humanité says the situation in the occupied territories continues to worsen, that the programme of Jewish settlement building is expanding, that the physical space in which to establish a Palestinian state is rapidly diminishing.

The communist daily fears that none of the 28 countries involved in today's talks will have the courage to stand up to Israel.

What flooding tells you about your neighbours

You wouldn't think that flooding was open to political interpretation? You'd be wrong.

Le Monde and Le Figaro go for broadly factual headlines, Le Monde telling us that two central Parisian landmarks and major tourist attractions, the Musée d'Orsay and the Louvre, will be closed today so that the staff can help shift the treasures stored in the basement to higher floors. Le Figaro goes for the drama with a headline announcing that part of France is drowned by the worst flood since Noah.

Catholic La Croix has a front-page picture of very wet volunteers pulling a boat-load of slightly less wet neighbours through the flooded streets of the town of Nemours, at the centre of one of the worst-affected areas.

The headline is hopeful: it reads "Floods, love, sharing and togetherness." According to La Croix, many of the flooded zones have seen a positive reaction from local political representatives and a lot of solidarity between neighbours.

Left-leaning Libération, in contrast, says the flooding has left every man, woman and child to his or her own devices. I suppose it all depends on the neighbours.

Crisis? What crisis?

Le Monde looks at the way the media are presenting the nation to the world with just eight days to go to the start of the Euro 2016 football finals.

For weeks the front pages have been dominated by news of strikes, protest and social unrest provoked by government efforts to reform labour law. We've had train strikes, missing metros, non-flying planes, nuclear power plants on slow time, fuel shortages. As if all that wasn't bad enough, the country is submerged following the wettest few days since records began. And, as Prime Minister Manuel Valls has recently been reminding us, France remains the number one target of the Islamic State armed group.

Even the London-based Independent is getting in on the act, suggesting that France is almost as badly off as biblical Egypt, needing only a plague of frogs to complete the picture.

Spanish daily El Pais says France is an uncomfortable concentration of current European woes: terrorist fears, xenophobia, mass immigration and strikes. Mercifully, they don't mention the weather.

And the Wall Street Journal sums it all up with a photograph of an anonymous Frenchman, up to his waist in flood waters, wading home clutching two baguettes. "France, 2016" reads the caption, as if we lived on a different planet. Have they already forgotten New York 2012?

Chinese to take another chunk of French capital

The Le Figaro editorial has discovered something potentially worse than the plague of frogs. It appears that the Chinese are about to snap up another of the Top 40 French businesses, the Accor hotel group.

The problem is not the actual takeover, says Le Figaro, that's part of the global game called capitalism. What is worrying is the vulnerability of major French businesses, once so financially powerful as to be untouchable.

What is needed, says Le Figaro, is greater government support for big business, and more investment of French wealth in the local brands. But to make those two things possible, according to the right-wing paper, we'll need a presidential election.