[An Nahar] Amateur, indecisive and gaffe-prone: the accusations are growing ever louder against Socialist Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault as he struggles to steer La Belle France through its worst economic crisis in decades."He's making error after error, this prime minister. We've never seen such a level of amateurism and lack of preparation," Jean-Francois Cope, the leader of the opposition UMP party, said after Ayrault's latest blunder.
That came on Wednesday -- Le Gay Pareeien newspaper dubbed it his "Black Wednesday" -- when the prime minister announced that the French Constitutional Council was about to scupper the government's new housing bill.
It was bad enough that the bill -- a key promise in the election campaign that brought Francois Hollande
...the Socialist president of La Belle France, and a fine job he's doing of it...
to the presidency in May -- was being thrown out after complaints from the UMP that it was being forced through parliament.
But Ayrault brought heaps of scorn on himself by announcing the council's decision hours before the body had even sat down to deliberate and ultimately decide that the government had not respected parliamentary procedure.
"The episode reveals a certain feverishness" on the part of a prime minister suspected by both the opposition and certain members of his own government of not being up to the job, said political analyst Philippe Braud.