French press review 12 May 2014

The separatist referendum in Ukraine, the missing Nigerian schoolgirls and the European parliament elections are all topics in today's French press.

The French papers are not impressed by yesterday's separatist referendum in Ukraine.

The country is well on the way to disintegration, laments right-wing Le Figaro, saying that Sunday's vote - condemned as illegal by the authorities in Kiev and by most Western governments - is likely to lead to a further territorial division in a country which has already lost the Crimean peninsula.

Left-leaning Libération says it's all the work of Russian president, Bad Vlad Putin, who wants to see the Kiev regime destabilised. According to Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Minister Andrii Deshchytsia, the weekend referendum - "a criminal farce" - was financed by the Kremlin.

Libé is harshly critical of the European Union for standing by powerless while Putin pulls the country apart with impunity.

The missing Nigerian schoolgirls make the front page of Catholic La Croix, despite the fact that they were kidnapped nearly a month ago.

The current interest in the fate of the missing girls is, of course, related to recent American and European offers of assistance to the Nigerian authorities.

Accurate information is difficult to come by. Nigerian papers this morning report that Borno state governor Kashim Shettima has passed on information to the military on the whereabouts of the kidnapped girls.

Without giving any details, Shettima added that he did not think they had been taken across the border to Chad or Cameroon. You have to wonder about the usefulness of the governor's information if he only "thinks" the girls are still in Nigeria.

Shettima has been under increasing pressure to find the girls. First Lady Patience Jonathan on Friday challenged the state to find the abducted girls. Mrs Jonathan said if the girls are not found by today, she would lead a protest march to Maiduguri, the state capital, to demand information about their whereabouts from the governor.

The All Progressives Congress on Sunday asked President Goodluck Jonathan to stop blaming Kashim Shettima for the abduction.

Speaking during a news conference in Lagos, the interim national chairman of the APC, Chief Bisi Akande, said Jonathan must take full responsibility for the safety of lives and property in the country, especially in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa states, all under emergency rule.

Le Monde gives pride of place to a French growth industry, though the news won't bring any rerlief to the struggling economy. It appears that home-grown cannabis has completely transformed the market, which used to depend on imports from Morocco. If you can spare just 10 square metres of your living space and don't get arrested, you are well on the way to an income of 50,000 euros per year.

Whatever the health risks, which remain the subject of enthusiastic debate, the legal penalties are very clear: The simple use of cannabis, admitted by eight per cent of the French population, will put you behind bars for one year and leave you 3,750 euros poorer. If you're convicted of selling the stuff - and you could hardly claim that the entire 10 square metres worth was for personal use - you could end up serving life in prison and owing the state seven and a half million euros.

And then there's communist L'Humanité, which has been looking back on how the French contingent voted on several key issues in the outgoing European parliament.

For example, French conservatives of the UMP voted against proposals for a minimum European wage and the same UMP was against a law which would have increased to 20 weeks the amount of maternity leave granted to women.

But the Socialists and UMP voted together nearly half the time in Europe - at least according to the very partial L'Humanité survey - notably to reject a law on cheap foreign employees and to send the European budget back to the drawing board.