Jospin wades into a flood of post-election troubles

The French Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin, received terrible reviews at the end of a calamitous week yesterday. "Jospin half-deaf", said the headline of the communist daily L'Humanite emblazoned across the photo of a street demonstrator disguised as the French premier with his hand over his ears and a big cigar in his mouth.

Mr Jospin's allies in the Green Party condemned social measures announced on Thursday as vague, and the extremeleft leader, Mr Alain Krivine - part of the constituency that Mr Jospin is trying to win back - called them "a hallucinatory catalogue of pious wishes".

President Jacques Chirac's RPR couldn't resist gloating at Mr Jospin's misfortunes, saying the government had "lost its compass" and that "Lionel Jospin has reached an impasse because of the contradiction between being Prime Minister and a presidential candidate".

A month ago Mr Jospin looked likely to be France's next president. The March 18th municipal elections, when the right won dozens of cities from the left and Mr Jospin's most prominent cabinet ministers were defeated, changed that. But it was not until April 6th, at a meeting with students in Brazil, that Mr Jospin admitted the right "more or less won" the March poll. He thought his trip would help him compete with Mr Chirac in foreign policy. But his Rio de Janeiro speech on the need to regulate globalisation was barely reported. Instead, his comments on the municipal defeat were front-page news in Paris. On the flight home, the Prime Minister lost his temper with journalists whom he accused of inflating the importance of his remarks on domestic politics.

Any politician knows that lecturing journalists on editorial decisions is never wise, especially when one has not been misquoted. Things got worse on April 9th when Mr Jospin tried to appear human by visiting flood victims in Picardie.

Local residents were rude and aggressive because they believed that the waters of the Seine had been channelled into the Somme to spare Paris. Someone stole the wooden planks on which Mr Jospin had entered the flood zone, and he had to wade out in galoshes.

The next blow came from the Green Environment Minister, Ms Dominique Voynet, who at midweek told France-Inter radio that her boss needed "to take a week's vacation". His tantrum with the journalists had been "a symptom showing he needs a rest", Ms Voynet said.

In a three-hour cabinet meeting on Thursday, the government concocted the list derided as Mr Jospin's "spring catalogue". The centre-right UDF leader, Mr Francois Bayrou, called it "sprinkling, patchwork and bottom-of-the-drawer scra pings".

Mr Jospin decided to increase government spending by 0.5 per cent instead of the previously planned 0.3 per cent next year. The young, homeless, unemployed and those sacked by profit-making companies such as the food giant Danone are to be the main beneficiaries of the extra 28.9 billion francs. ( (£3.47 billion). Even the proJospin Le Monde noted that most of the "new" commitments had already been promised or announced in the past.

The root of Mr Jospin's troubles is the loss of la dream team which came to office with him nearly four years ago. Three "heavyweights", Mr Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Mr Jean-Pierre Chevenement and Ms Martine Aubry, resigned over the past 17 months.

"Jospin no longer has a shock-absorber between himself and the public," said Prof Pascal Perrineau of the Institut des Etudes de Sciences Politiques. Mr Jospin had suffered from "a sort of superiority complex" before the municipal elections, then misinterpreted the results.

The presidential election is less than a year away, and Mr Perrineau said Mr Jospin and Mr Chirac had an even chance now.