“Chirac heading towards an absolute majority”: that’s the front-page headline with which Le Monde (11/6) salutes the victory of the right in the first round of the French legislative elections which have monopolized the attention of the French dailies. The success of the right, says the article , “is an endorsement of the strategy of Jacques Chirac”. But the other striking fact about the election, suggests the French daily, is the high percentage of abstention: some 15 million French people failed to cast their votes. Le Monde underlines this “historic record of abstention”, never before so high in any first round of legislative elections during the fifth Republic. More strictly political is the ‘reading’ that Hervé Gattegno and Annes-Line Roccati give of the electoral result in the same paper: “Thrown into turmoil on the evening of 21 April they write exhausted on the day after 5 May, the French political landscape is about to retrieve some semblance of coherence. The campaign for the legislative elections now ended heralded, probably, the end of the somewhat irrational parenthesis that had permitted the rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen to the second round of the presidential elections: after the crisis and the sudden waking up, things were beginning to return to order (…). Of this return to the foundations of the fifth Republic, conceived around the presidential supremacy, Jacques Chirac is evidently the main beneficiary if not the only one”. “What purpose is served by our MPs?”: that’s the title of a long and detailed dossier that La Croix (9/6) devoted to the “functioning” of the French political, legislative and electoral machine, on the eve of the last ballot. Among the curiosities to be found in the dossier are also “details” of the salaries of politicians, together with dates, numbers, addresses and other information useful for penetrating what the French Catholic daily calls the “heart of democracy”. The debate on antisemitism continues to focus the attention of the German press. Micha Brumlik of the Frankfurter Rundschau of 7/6, calls the diffusion of “ antisemitic clichés” “intentional and unrepentant“. The professor of educational science at the University of Frankfurt comments: “ With shame and bitterness the fact must be registered that antisemitism has become once again a recognized component of [German] political culture“. Dominik Cziesche and Barbara Schmid in the Spiegel of 10/6 report the declaration of Kenan Kolat, vice-president of the Turkish community in Germany, who considers it “ offensive to suppose that Moslems may be attracted by antisemitic declarations“. The same weekly also publishes a feature with the title “ Goodbye to the cliché?”, written by Karen Andresen and Hans-Ulrich Stoldt. A reversal of trend emerges, they suggest, from a recent survey conducted on the diffusion of anti-Jewish sentiment: “ In comparison with the 1990s, public consensus has sensibly diminished“. Only 49% of those interviewed believe that the German people have “ a particular responsibility towards Jews“; the results of the survey underline the persistence “of antisemitic stereotypes especially among the older electors” and the existence of “ sharp differences between Germans of East and West“: only 17% of East Germans attribute to the Jews an “ excessive influence on world events“, whereas this opinion is shared by 33% of the inhabitants of West Germany. Some 70% of those interviewed consider that “ the Germany may criticize the policy of Israel just like any other country“. “ Europe must believe in itself“, is the title of the article of Angela Merkel, published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of 8/6. With regard to European cooperation, the president of the CDU stresses the need to “ clarify especially what tasks we wish to attribute to Europe” and to establish “ what questions must be resolved at the Community and what at the national level“. Hoping for a reinforcement “ of commitments in security and defence“, Merkel adds that: “ From power in the military field will also derive power in the political field“. She considers it “ imperative that Europe learns to speak with one voice alone on questions of foreign policy“.
