French press review 26 June 2017

Commentators read traits of President Macron's character on the official portrait for the government while it seems that French parents are trapped by dramatic drift in drug consumption.

Is the Socialist party on the verge of disappearing from the political landscape?

That's the view conservative Le Figaro as it analyses the ravages of the electoral debacle suffered by the former ruling party as well as the financial difficulties resulting from the disaster.

It's fair game to see the right-wing publication enjoy a field day counting the Socialist losses their share of public funding is set to drop from 25 million euros to just seven million in 2018.

The dramatic drop in the number of elected officials costs a lot  Le Figaro reads. Yet the publication also goes after the right-wing Republican party which managed to win 137 seats in an election was widely tipped to win and by a landslide.

It describes the movement, as very sick and likely to suffer the same fate as the moribund ex-ruling party, for minimizing young Emmanuel Macron when he launched his Presidential bid.

Macron, "undisputed leader and firmly in charge". That's the image Les Echos says comes across from the official portrait of the new government.

The economic news daily says the teams he has put in place is not just there as a matter of principle, also to serve and protect the boss from taking blows and by removing any mines that may lie buried along his route.

According to Les Echos, while Francois Hollande's tool box was responsible for his self-destruction, and Nicolas Sarkozy exhausted by trying to do everything by himself  Macron is testing a new strategy  which may probably less Gaullist, and far from the Napoleonic ways of French leaders.

The paper says he is less of a protective father of the nation, and not a conquering emperor, served and protected by an imperial guard.

L'Humanité refuses to grant President Emmanuel Macron any moral high ground. It claims he has proven incapable of sweeping aside the old political structure and breaking with the bad habit of Presidents, hand-picking their party's chief whip at the National Assembly.

Richard Ferrand was a junior Minister in the first government of Prime Minister Edouard Philippe and under investigation over allegations of favouring his wife in a lucrative property deal with a public health insurance fund which he headed.

He was elected president of the ruling party's parliamentary group by a show of hands on Saturday. His score stood at 99,35 % of ballots cast, with two abstentions.

For l'Humanité the President's conduct only comes to confirm what it has always felt about the landslide victory of the Republic on the Move party. The sense of renewal it has brought to French politics, it says, is like what marital tunes are to music.

Today's Libération investigates a dramatic drift in drug consumption trends in France, parents confessing their growing addiction over that of their children.

The left-leaning publication says our societies must have become so ill to the point where painkillers are proving to be the main causes of mortality.

According to Libé, this should be an issue of great concern not just to sociologists and philosophers but also to public authorities.

People don't slump into drugs and dependency intentionally says the paper, adding that a single accidental contact with narcotics and then another suffices at times to find one's self in infernal cycle.

Apart from stepping up the figh thetraffickers and mafia networks, Libération calls for urgent action to revise established rules and practices by pharmaceutical laboratories and medics in order to contain a trade that kills without shocking people.