European press review

A shipment of spent nuclear fuel sparks protests in Germany and highlights a perceived weakness of the industry.

There are questions about the worth of European Union strategy conclusions adopted at the Stockholm summit, and even more about the mysterious disappearance of newly-minted euros.

In Macedonia, the ethnic Albanian rebels are seen as losers, just as is Austria's far right in this weekend's local elections.

Fuelling protests

With up to 30,000 police officers on duty to prevent protesters blocking a train carrying nuclear waste back to Germany, an editorial in Geneva's Le Temps says: "More so than power stations, power station waste is the focal point of hostility today."

"Nobody accepts the burial of this waste in their immediate vicinity," it adds.

"The nuclear industry's mistake is in not wanting to admit it. Thus in Germany as in Switzerland, the nuclear industry continues to defend the idea of definitively storing waste underground," the paper says.

"Such scenarios go against human reason. Others have to be developed to gain people's confidence," it says.

"The waste convoys are the Achilles heel of this industry," it says, adding: "They are easily disrupted by demonstrators."

"In the absence of a social consensus surrounding the nuclear industry, this constraint is quite simply becoming a latent flaw," it concludes.

Germany is bringing home from France its spent nuclear fuel, the Slovak daily SME tells its readers.

It is good news for Paris and marks the end to the long Franco-German dispute over this issue, the daily says.

Having described the wrangle which preceded the spent fuel repatriation, the daily focuses on the U-turn made by the German environment minister, Juergen Trittin, on this matter and says: "Trittin, who a few years ago staged a protest at the Gorleben spent fuel depository, recently said: 'We have to bring our spent fuel back. We cannot leave it there. The French Greens would never forgive us - and quite rightly so.'".

But the paper wonders where this leaves the German Greens:

"They find themselves in an unpleasant situation. The point is that their aim was to put a total halt to nuclear power production in Germany by the year 2002."

EU summit

Budapest's Nepszabadsag contrasts the formal reception at the Stockholm EU summit with the content of the debate: "warm reception designed in the form of frozen shapes", that is, ice sculptures and "cold refusals wrapped up in a warm reception of every proposal discussed".

The world's first ice hotel was believed to have been constructed about a decade ago in Jukkasjarvi, a seven-hour drive from Stockholm. The paper says the hosts of the EU summit were keen to use this "country image" item at the summit.

Despite these concerns about contrast between form and content, the paper welcomes the EU's effort to turn, as it says, "from the younger Atlantic brother into a global big boy".

Citing a long list of goals, the paper says that the Stockholm summit has managed to draft "a good European strategy which pleases everyone".

The paper has only one concern, that this vision presented in Stockholm might turn out to be made of ice that melts into water.

Euroland out of change

An article on the front page of Paris's Le Figaro looks at the problem of mysteriously disappearing coins in the countries that are preparing to switch over to the euro in January 2002.

"Despite the 50.1 billion newly-minted euros which are about to be brought out there is a risk that there will be a shortage of exchanges," of euros for old coins, the paper says.

It adds that in France "there must be a thief who gets up during the night and steals from the kitty jar or evaporation is greater at our latitude than is thought".

"Otherwise, how the devil can the disappearance of 13 billion French coins which have failed to turn up be explained?" it asks.

It says that 40% of coins due to be exchanged in Germany are also missing, while 4,000 tons of coins in Belgium have disappeared.

"Somewhere, people opposed to the euro must have created a parallel market," it concludes. "They are building up their nest eggs out of these future museum pieces," it adds.

Macedonia's inevitable fate

"If the Albanian rebels in Macedonia thought they could repeat the KLA's feat in Kosovo, they were wrong," says Le Monde in Paris, referring to the Kosovo Liberation Army.

"Perhaps they thought they could get the sympathy of the international community by condemning the discriminations - which are real - to which they are subjected and bring about... an intervention on their behalf", it adds.

"However, the international community, with Nato at its head, was quick to condemn the Albanian 'terrorists' and to run to the aid of the government in Skopje," it says.

The paper says that it certainly has "good reasons" for doing so, but that these have "more to do with the Realpolitik of the traditional relations between states" than any other reason.

It says that the international community "tried to resolve the Kosovo crisis without extending the solution to the 'Albanian question' as a whole so as not to effect fragile Macedonia", but it adds that "all the experts on the region knew that the little republic was the next in line in an inevitable sequence".

Austria's right gets it wrong

Vienna's Die Presse says the poor showing of Austria's far-right Freedom Party in local elections in the capital is a setback for the government coalition.

The paper says the Freedom Party and its ministers will have to review their relationship with the party's former leader, Joerg Haider.

It suspects that Mr Haider will now distance himself more clearly from the government, attack unpopular policies and cause strife in the cabinet.

"Each party," the paper says, "will retreat to its key demands, their willingness to compromise will be reduced, each will blame the other when measures prove unpopular."

Vienna's Der Standard agrees.

The paper says the elections have put a spanner in the works of the government coalition.

It also says that voters are apparently no longer attracted by the party's emphasis on xenophobia.

"Although the Freedom Party's poster campaign in the capital focused on foreigners and crime and Haider played the anti-Semitic card," the paper says, "it was precisely in districts with a high proportion of foreigners... that Freedom Party voters stayed at home in their droves."

Munich's Sueddeutsche Zeitung is not so sure that Austrian voters have really had a change of heart.

The paper concedes that for residents of Vienna who felt international opinion had wrongly branded them racists and fascists, Sunday's election was a day of triumph.

But it points out that the Freedom Party remains the second-strongest party in the regional assembly, and it puts this down to the continued presence of anti-Semitic sentiments.

"After an absolute low a few weeks ago," it says, "the Freedom Party recovered somewhat in the opinion polls, in parallel with Haider's well-calculated anti-Semitic campaign."

The European press review is compiled by BBC Monitoring from internet editions of the main European newspapers and some early printed editions.