European press review

Most European dailies lead with reports of the increase of anthrax cases in the USA and the strikes on Afghanistan.

The Berlin elections and Sweden warming to the euro also draw attention.

Afghanistan and anthrax

"Two postmen in Washington die from a possible anthrax infection," says Madrid's El Pais on its front page.

"Two die in Washington, anthrax scare," says Milan's Corriere Della Sera.

"The death toll war is raging in Afghanistan", headlines the Belgian daily Le Soir on its front page. "Washington denies the number of victims put forward by the Taleban," it says.

The French Liberation seems to share this opinion. In an editorial, the paper looks at what it called the "Boomerang effect".

"The call for patience regularly issued by the US leaders will not change anything: by dint of wanting to keep information under strict control, the USA is soon going to be faced with a serious problem of credibility," it writes.

"The Gulf War and the air strikes against Serb forces taught us that civilians were killed in such operations and that this will come back like a boomerang to undermine the cause claimed by the heterogeneous coalition set up by Washington, namely the fight against terrorism," it says.

A commentary in the conservative Budapest daily Magyar Nemzet - sent by a Hungarian journalist from Boston - disagrees with suggestions in the European press that President George W Bush's foreign policy has fundamentally changed as a result of the 11 September events.

"The truth is that it is Europe which sees the unchanged president through different lenses since the terrorist attacks", the paper says.

"The US president is not in favour of foreign policy using either unilateral steps or multilateral coordination. These categories are the synonyms of the Good and the Bad only in the eyes of the European political elite, but either of them are only means of asserting American interests", it says.

The paper believes this change in the opinion of the European foreign policy elite is because European and US interests now coincide, perhaps for the first time since the Gulf War, and that US interests can now be better asserted through the multilateral coordination so close to the heart of Europeans.

Berlin at the polls

Madrid's El Pais says two winners have emerged from the elections in Berlin this weekend: Germany's Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, and the Liberals of the Free Democratic Party, who staged a comeback from political obscurity.

Chancellor Schroeder's Social Democrats gained the highest percentage of votes, it says, while the opposition Christian Democrats fared badly.

It says the Social Democrats' victory has more to do with the party's policies at national level than with the government of their mayor in Berlin.

"Schroeder wins back votes, snatching them from the Christian Democratic opposition, and the gains of the Liberals means he can choose between them and the Greens," it says.

Copenhagen's Information points out that the former communists, the Party of Democratic Socialism or PDS, received almost half the votes (48%) in the former east Berlin, "not because every other citizen is a communist or longs for the wall, air pollution and shortages of goods, but because the east Berliners feel they are politically superfluous.

"If there had been another East German people's party a large group of east Berliners would probably have avoided the PDS, but there is no such party and therefore the PDS must be included in the democratic process," it says.

Germany's Die Welt says that "nothing good" can come out of the victory of the Social Democrats and the poor showing of the Christian Democrats in the Berlin elections.

The result, it says, shows that mainstream voters are dying out.

"Two world wars, two dictatorships, two monetary reforms have destroyed, driven out or decimated the social strata which once held the middle ground," it writes.

The CDU has suffered most from this erosion of the centre. "They are being replaced by all sorts of things - the left, the new or the alternative centre - everything but the trend-setting, opinion-forming strata with whose help the CDU became the most successful party in the post-war era."

Sweden and the euro

Stockholm's Svenska Dagbladet describes the Swedish people's change of opinion regarding the euro as "remarkable".

A recent opinion poll shows the 'yes' side on 42%, just one point behind those against monetary union. A year ago the 'no' side led by 52% to 30.

"This is a remarkable shift in opinion in such a short time," the paper says.

"Perhaps the EU is not so frightening after the half-year presidency, perhaps more and more people are accepting the thought that we should use the European currency, the euro, rather than the sinking krona," it adds.

"However, this does of course depend on the introduction of the euro working properly, which remains to be seen," Svenska Dagbladet concludes.

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