French press review
The problems facing the future of the Eurozone countries following the crisis in Greece in the issue taxing Thursday's French newspapers.
Communist L'Humanité looks forward to this evening's meeting of the European heads of state in Brussels.
The menu is likely to be monotonous and hard to digest . . . how best to save Greece from bankruptcy, and haul the rest of the eurozone back from the brink of total disintegration.
The communists don't like the various remedies likely to be considered over tonight's bread-and-water dinner. Issuing huge numbers of bonds will simply play into the hands, and pockets, of the speculators. No one believes in a federal system, with a single overall finance minister, because it's hard to see one man, or woman, managing two dozen economies, each with its internal problems and local political pressures.
But something is going to have to be done. The Greeks are in open revolt against the austerity measures insisted upon by the Athens government to impress the paymasters in Brussels. The Germans are beginning to whine about having to pay to bail out a bunch of euro-squandering Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, Irish and Greeks.
As the main headline in L'Humanité menacingly suggests, the Eurozone leaders have a stark choice between change and self-destruction.
Catholic La Croix looks at how Europeans are adapting to a life of austerity. As any Greek would tell you, they aren't.
The Irish are, according to the Catholic daily, somewhere between stoicism and outright rebellion (which just about describes my countrymen at the best of times, so, not to worry). La Croix says the Greeks are resigned to a future of fiscal rigour and general hardship, but the catholics obviously haven't been watching the television pictures of disgruntled Greeks throwing things at the police.
Meanwhile, the Portuguese are giving their new Prime Minister the benefit of the doubt. Portuguese voters elected a centre-right government earlier this month, so it wouldn't seem right to start burning cars, just yet.
Libération looks at French take-home pay, as the gap between the rich and the rest of us goes on getting wider. Ninety per cent of the French population has an average annual salary of 17,000 euros, nine per cent have a comfortable 50,000 euros, with the remaining 1% struggling to make ends meet on anything between 100,000 and 1,300,000 euros annually.
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