GERMANY

GERMANY
Frankfurter Allgemeine, Frankfurt, June 18: Glorious victory, modest victors.
France's conservatives will govern the country for the next five years with a comfortable majority in both chambers, but triumphant behavior would be improper.
So says not a left-wing loser but the conservative social affairs minister.
The outcome of France's parliamentary elections has not ended the political and social crisis that France is going through. Over the past two months, French voters have gone to the polls four times, starting with the first round of the presidential election in which they gave their dissatisfaction free rein.
Extremist parties
Six million votes were cast for the presidential candidates of extremist parties, including nearly 5 million for Jean-Marie Le Pen, testifying to a reservoir of dissatisfied voters that every government will need to bear in mind.
The "republican upsurge" that led to Jacques Chirac's reelection did not make this malaise disappear.
In the parliamentary elections, protest voters vanished into the massed ranks of non-voters.
The new conservative government can take no comfort from the fact that only one French voter in six voted for it.
BRITAIN
The Times, London, June 19: The appalling bombing of a bus full of commuters and schoolchildren in Jerusalem yesterday was directed as much at George W. Bush as Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister.
The attack took place a matter of days, possibly just hours, before the president was to make a speech in which he was expected to endorse a plan that would lead to provisional Palestinian statehood. It will now fall to the Bush administration to put together the diplomatic pieces.
The task for the president was difficult enough before an atrocity which will be perceived in Washington as an assault on his authority. He needs to strike a very difficult balance. He will not want the peace process to proceed at a pace and in a direction that is being determined by suicide bombers.
On the other hand, there is not much point in the president investing personal capital in blueprints which no Israeli prime minister could sell to Cabinet and country.
Political bargain
The United States may, even now, be able to persuade Israel that a political bargain is possible if a credible Palestinian leadership can be presented. And there would be no group of people better served by such a development than the genuinely poor and really hopeless in the West Bank and Gaza. They need economic investment, a plausible diplomatic settlement and better leaders more than anybody else in the region.
ITALY
Corriere della Sera, Milan, June 19: The agenda for Friday's European Union summit in Seville covers urgent issues such as a common immigration policy and the reform of European institutions. It would be useful if at the end the leaders besides compiling their customary dream list for a better Europe, would list progress on commitments made at previous summits. European Commission President Romano Prodi should then keep score. Such a report card would be very modest.
In Seville, European leaders will celebrate the euro's recent successes. The European currency has gained over 13 percent against the dollar in one year. But the renewed strength of the euro should in fact be viewed with concern. A strong euro will decrease European exports and thus risks nullifying the small rise in economic growth in Europe. The European Central Bank estimates an increase between 0.9 and 1.5 percent for the current year and a one point raise for 2003.
Flash in the pan
Three days later another meeting -- that of the Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee -- will also be crucial for Europe. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan is expected to reduce interest rates, confirming what most feared, that the strong growth in the United States during the first trimester was only a flash in the pan. That would be a hard blow for both the dollar and Europe.
BRITAIN
The Guardian, London, June 19: Just for the record, let's be clear what Mrs. Blair did say yesterday. Appearing with the queen of Jordan at the launch of a London charity appeal for Medical Aid for Palestinians, she said: "As long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up you are never going to make progress."
In yesterday's circumstances, with 19 dead in the latest suicide bombing in Jerusalem, these remarks were a truthful and appropriate response to a question about terrible news. They were not "comments which appeared to show sympathy with Palestinian suicide bombers," as the London Evening Standard mendaciously claimed yesterday.
Mindless media mob rule
They did not justify the media's own spin that led too many of the herd to rush down the same path. (The controversy is) part of a pattern of abandonment of journalistic reporting standards, of poor judgment and lack of objectivity. Most serious of all, it is beginning to seem like a pattern of mindless media mob rule against an elected government.