10 WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 7, <strong>2016</strong> 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 <strong>Tuesday</strong> 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 <strong>Tuesday</strong> 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 <strong>Tuesday</strong>. • 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 <strong>December</strong> 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 <strong>Tuesday</strong> 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. •
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