European press review

The defeat of former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres in his bid for the country's presidency is seen by Europe's papers as a blow to the peace process.

Meanwhile in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez is re-elected president by a wide margin and now faces the challenge of reviving the economy and in Yugoslavia, four Dutchmen are arrested and accused of plotting against President Slobodan Milosevic.

Finally, Belgians are told that the weather this past July was the worst the country has experienced in over 100 years.

Another blow to Middle East peace

The Luxembourg daily Tageblatt turns its attention to developments in Israel, calling the election of Moshe Katsav as the country's first ever right-wing president "a bitter snub" to Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

In a surprise parliamentary vote, the Likud candidate beat the former Labour Party premier and Nobel peace laureate Shimon Peres, seen by the paper as "a victim of the growing opposition in the Knesset to Barak's peace policy".

The paper concludes: "Katsav's election... represents a grave defeat for the Labour Party. And this latest blow makes it possible to gauge the extent to which the coalition government has collapsed".

Germany's Franfurter Rundschau says that the defeat of former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres in his bid to become Israeli president must be seen as a vote against the peace process.

"Camp David appears increasingly to have been the chance for peace that was definitively lost," the paper says gloomily.

It says the result is also a blow to Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

"In the light of threats of resignation and repeated votes of no confidence, this bodes ill for Barak," the paper says, adding that new elections appear unavoidable.

Munich's Sueddeutsche Zeitung also believes that the peace process is the real loser in the defeat of Peres by Moshe Katsav.

It says that Peres has become a victim of Prime Minister Barak's political decline.

However, it places the blame firmly on Israel's fractious parliament.

"Once again it has become evident that small groups and splinter parties dominate the Knesset," it says.

"Fateful questions such as war or peace do not interest them. What matters to them is positions or money, or simply to score points against each other," it says.

Venezuela's Chavez re-elected president

"Chavez sweeps the board and will govern another six years," says Madrid's El Mundo about Hugo Chavez's re-election as president of Venezuela.

However, the paper says that the hardest part still lies ahead of Chavez: "the real economy will not respond automatically to presidential decrees," it says.

The Paris-based International Herald Tribune says the results represent "a resounding victory for 46-year-old Mr. Chavez who was seeking endorsement of the profound political changes he has engineered during a whirlwind 18 months in office".

The changes the paper lists include a new constitution, the demise of a corrupt two-party patronage system, and a vastly more powerful presidency.

The paper notes that Chavez, who took office in February last year, intends to focus on the economy during his first full term, and that so far he has exacerbated class tension by attacks on ''oligarchs',' occasional praise for Cuba and controversial land redistribution proposals.

"Such rhetoric," the paper says, "has mesmerized the poor, who make up about two-thirds of the nation's 23m people, but has alarmed the traditional ruling class."

Strange doings in Yugoslavia

Rotterdam's Algemeen Dagblad reports on the arrest of four Dutchmen on the border between Serbia and Montenegro. According to the Yugoslav authorities, they were planning either to kidnap or kill President Slobodan Milosevic.

The paper quotes an official at the Dutch embassy in Belgrade as saying that the incident had come "out of the blue" and that it still remained to be established whether the Yugoslav allegations were true.

Wish You Were Here?

The British are not alone in complaining about this year's summer weather. As the Brussels-based daily La Libre Belgique tells its readers, July was Belgium's worst since records began in 1887.

"With less than 100 hours of sunshine, there has never been a duller July," the paper says, recalling that July 1888 came a close second with 101 hours.

It also points out that last month also saw unusually high rainfalls, along with temperatures well below the seasonal normal.

As for the possibility that the weather might improve, the Belgian paper is decidedly non-committal.

"The bleak weather of the first month of the summer holidays does not make it possible to predict what the tendency for August might be," it adds.

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