French press review 18 December 2013

Claude Guéant, the former interior minister who was a key ally of ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy, gets front-page treatment in both Le Monde and Libération ... but not for reasons he would welcome.

You probably remember Monsieur Guéant, Sarkozy's unsmiling interior minister, a man with all the charm and charisma of a down-market undertaker.

Yesterday he was even more grim-jowelled than usual, since he had to spend most of the day in police custody, trying to explain to the boys in blue what happened to the estimated 10,000 euros the former minister received each month in cash, taken from a fund for undercover investigations supposedly to pay bonuses to some police officers but which money may have been used to buy fridges and cookers for Guéant's private use.

Libération says the police found bills in Guéant's private home earlier this year for 25,000 euros' worth of kitchen equipment, bills which were settled in cash. That would be bad enough, if it turns out that the cash was really intended to finance police work, but there's an additional suspicion that some of the floating cash may have been used to finance a presidential campaign or two.

At the other end of the spectrum of human misery, Catholic La Croix looks at the way the unusually harsh winter in the Middle East is affecting the estimated 2.5 million Syrian refugees currently living in neighbouring countries. It has snowed recently in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, where thousands of Syrians are living in tents. Their only source of heat is oil stoves but keeping them supplied with fuel is not easy. The camps are typically on high ground, with poor infrastructure, so access for deliveries is not easy. Heating oil used to cost seven Syrian pounds per litre before the civil war; the current price of a litre is 65 pounds.

And, of course, the refugees in neighbouring countries are only part of the problem. The World Food Programme (WFP) reckons that at least half Syria's 23 million inhabitants live in an insecure food situation (that's WFP-speak for "are frequently hungry") and over nine million are surviving on humanitarian aid.

Says one aid worker interviewed by La Croix, the thing the refugees need most right now is for peace to return to Syria.

Financial daily Les Echos looks at the failure of French government attempts to reduce public spending.

The debate on next year's budget has hardly subsided and already the powers-that-be are warning that they need to save an additional 50 billion euros between 2015 and 2017 if the national debt is to be brought down to merely galactic proportions.

Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault will this very day chair a meeting of a committee called the MAP - that stands for the French version of "modernising public action" - whose job is to find ways of cutting state spending, while the state itself is to look after local expenditure, reducing the national health bill, and paying less to help struggling businesses. Les Echos suggests that the MAP won't lead anywhere positive.