e_Paper, Tuesday, December 7, 2016

10
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2016
DT
World
Interior minister named new
French PM as Valls aims higher
• AFP, Paris
French Interior Minister Bernard
Cazeneuve was named the country's
new prime minister on Tuesday
after Manuel Valls resigned to
seek the Socialist nomination in
next year's presidential election.
Cazeneuve, who has overseen
the security forces' reaction to a
string of jihadist attacks that have
killed more than 230 people in
France over the past two years, will
head the Socialist government until
the election in May. The widely-respected
lawyer was named to the
post after President Francois Hollande
accepted Valls' resignation.
The government will work "up
to the end, to its last day, to prepare
the future," Hollande told reporters
on Tuesday during a trip to an industry
fair near Paris.
Cazeneuve, 53, has served in
various government roles, including
budget and Europe minister
before becoming interior minister
in April 2014. Cazeneuve will be
replaced in the interior ministry
by Bruno Le Roux, currently the
leader of the Socialists in the lower
house of parliament.
The mini-reshuffle comes after
Valls, who was Hollande's righthand
man for the past two-anda-half
years, quit to focus on the
presidential race. Valls, a divisive
figure, threw his hat in the ring on
Monday, after Hollande said last
week he would bow out after a single
troubled term.
Appealing to the left to unite behind
him, Valls vowed to take the
fight to election frontrunner, conservative
Republicans candidate
Francois Fillon, as well as far-right
National Front (FN) leader Marine
Le Pen.
Far-right 'at the gates'
"My candidacy is one of reconciliation,"
Valls, whom polls currently
place fifth in the election, said in a
speech in his political base in the
gritty Paris suburb of Evry. The farright,
which was beaten in Austria's
presidential election at the weekend,
was "at the gates of power"
in France with a programme that
would ruin the poor, he warned.
Faced with Donald Trump in the
White House and Vladimir Putin in
the Kremlin, France needed someone
with "strong experience", he
said. He laid into Fillon, a self-declared
Thatcherite, accusing him of
trotting out the "old recipes of the
1980s".
Polls show Le Pen and Fillon far
out in front in the opening round of
the election on April 23, with Fillon
expected to beat Le Pen in May's
second round.
Valls would crash out with 10
percent if he won the Socialist
nomination -- behind former economy
minister Emmanuel Macron
and the Communist-backed Jean-
Luc Melenchon, an Ifop-Fiducial
poll showed Tuesday. •
INSIGHT
Italy's young premier felled by discontented youth
• Reuters, Rome
Twenty-year-old Francesco Incorvaia,
a sociology student from
Rome, was just the kind of voter
Matteo Renzi had spent years trying
to win over.
Italy's youngest ever prime minister
had changed labour laws in a
bid to reduce one of Europe's highest
youth unemployment rates,
handed cash to low earners and
proposed constitutional amendments
to streamline lawmaking
and boost an ailing economy.
But Incorvaia and millions of
other young Italians walked into
voting booths at a referendum on
Sunday and effectively threw him
out of office, handing him a stinging
defeat that left him no choice
but to resign.
According to a survey by research
firm Quorum for SKyTG24,
about 80% of voters aged between
18 and 34 opposed Renzi's proposal
to shrink the upper house Senate
and claw back power from regional
administrations, a tsunami of opposition
from a generation that is
rewriting the political map in Italy.
Despite his youthful vim, Renzi,
who was 39 when he took the
premiership almost three years
ago, came to be seen as part of
the creaking old establishment he
pledged to revamp. With Renzi
pledging to step down, the younger
generation's preferred anti-establishment
5-Star Movement has
called for early elections and said it
is ready to govern.
M5S campaigned hard against
Renzi's constitutional reform proposal,
on the grounds it would
remove democratic checks and
Supporters of the "No" faction for a referendum on constitutional reform hold a banner in front of Chigi palace in Rome on
December 5. The banner reads, " Did you want to change the constitution? See you"
REUTERS
balances, and it was clear many
young people were also expressing
their support for 5-Star in voting it
down.
It rivals Renzi's Democratic
Party as the most popular party in
opinion polls and would be favourite
to win elections under the current
system, which may be changed
as mainstream parties seek to keep
them out of power.
Young voters helped propel
5-Star into power in the municipalities
of Rome and Turin this year.
Overall, voters under 35 years of
age represent about a fifth of the
electorate.
Payback time
Many first-time voters in Sunday's
referendum grabbed the chance
to register their frustration with
mainstream politicians, including
Renzi, who have presided over
what, for them, has been a lifetime
of economic stagnation.
A new law Renzi passed to make
it easier for private companies to
fire workers was meant to encourage
employers to hire. But the law
only applies to new hires, while
changes to the pensionable age by
a previous government mean their
older colleagues now stay in the
workforce longer than before.
Today, Italians under 35 earn
26.5% less than their contemporaries
25 years ago, while income
for the over-65s has risen 24.3%,
according to research firm Censis.
The 'Yes' vote prevailed only in
provinces where youth unemployment
is below the national average
of 36%, according to the Info Data
unit of Il Sole 24 Ore newspaper. •
Merkel rebuffs
populist claim
to German
identity
• AFP, Essen
Chancellor Angela Merkel Tuesday
attacked the rise of right-wing
populists in Germany, hitting out
at opponents of her liberal refugee
policy staking a claim to define
German national identity. However
she told the annual congress of her
Christian Democratic Union that it
was legitimate to expect integration
from newcomers, underlining her
party's bid to ban the full face veil.
"We all get to determine who
'the people' are - not just a few, no
matter how loud they are," Merkel
said in a speech looking ahead to
the 2017 general election. Without
mentioning the upstart Alternative
for Germany (AfD) party by name,
Merkel said Germany must remain
"sceptical about easy answers". "The
world is not black and white," she
said. "Rarely is it the easy answers
that bring progress to our country."
But Merkel also played to the
wing of her conservative party
that has been deeply unsettled by
last year's record influx of asylum
seekers, most of them Muslims
fleeing war zones. She underlined
her support for a proposal in August
by her interior minister, Thomas
de Maiziere, to outlaw the full-face
burqa Islamic veil in public places.
"The full veil must be banned
wherever it is legally possible," she
said. On German Unity Day in early
October, Merkel faced noisy protests
when she arrived at celebrations in
Dresden birthplace of the anti-immigration
Pegida movement. •