French press review 9 February

by Molly Guinness

Article published on the 2010-02-09 Latest update 2010-02-09 08:27 TU

Le Monde says the New Anticapitalist Party is causing a stir by selecting a candidate that wears a veil. Feminism is one of the party's stated values. Members of the left have called the decision manipulative, an aberration, shocking. Aurélie Filippetti, a member of the Socialist Party, has even advised the party leader to re-read Marx. The candidate, Ilhem Mossaid, says she shares the NPA's feminist and secular values.

After the burqua and national identity, is sexuality at school the new national controversy, asks Le Monde. Luc Chatel, the Minister of Education, has annoyed some people. He is not in favour of a homosexual cartoon being shown to primary school children. Sébastien Watel's film The Kiss of the Moon battles against discrimination through the love of Felix the Cat-fish for Leon the Sun-fish. Chatel says primary school children should learn about anatomy and reproduction, not about homosexuality. A little fish and a little bird falling in love is fine, apparently. Two little fish? No, says Le Monde. As to the anatomical problems of interrelations between fish and birds, I can't explain that.

But talking of fish, Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister of Scotland and his deputy, have become embroiled in a scandal called Lunchgate. Le Figaro tells us their party supporters bid a total of £12,500 to have lunch with them in the Scottish parliament. The cash was destined for dubious cause of the Scottish National Party, but Salmond has cancelled the lunch dates after an outcry over cash for access.

A new law, Loppsi 2, aims to protect France against new forms of bad behaviour, like cybercrime. Catholic La Croix gives a pensive headline: 'Freedom and security; a difficult marriage'. Communist L'Humanité is more hardline, opening its coverage with 'A sign of the times,' and quoting one Loppsi critic who says it reveals a conception of society at the limits of paranoia.

 

Left-leaning Libération leads with what it calls the Besson fiasco. Yesterday, French Prime Minister François Fillon buried the grand project of his Immigration Minister. Yes, I'm afraid we're back to the old national identity debate.

 

Libération underscores its scorn with an editorial entitled 'Rabbit fart', which I guess we might delicately translate as 'damp squib'. What was supposed to be a debate that would raise vast and fundamental questions has ended in a retreat to the sound of a broken trumpet, says Libération. We had foreseen a grand spectacle brimming with intellectual lyricism, apparently, but what we got was a shabby interministerial compromise to sort of continue the debate but not really. Libération, by the way, has mocked the debate ever since its beginning.