The “Woerth/Bettencourt affair” is putting the government on the spot: back when current labour minister Eric Woerth was in charge of the budget, did he “turn a blind eye” to irregularities in Liliane Bettencourt’s tax returns? The press and the opposition denounce the minister’s conflict of interest: until she resigned last week, the minister’s wife worked for the company that managed the fortune of the heiress to L’Oréal, the biggest taxpayer in France and a donor to the ruling Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), whose treasurer is none other than…Eric Woerth. In the hot seat, Woerth can count on the support of president Nicolas Sarkozy, who is bent on pushing the controversial pension reform through, come hell or high water, before the autumn. To Libération the scandal reveals “the, at the very least, ambiguous relationship” between “some of the conservative establishment” and money, a connection that “shows a disconnect with workaday France struggling to make ends meet”.
The leader of Greece’s leftist alliance SYRIZA is the new bright hope of Greek politics. Steering a course between pragmatism and the rhetoric of class warfare, he has unsettled Berlin, and not just those who back Angela Merkel's austerity policies. 
Europe’s economic woes have forced us to try to understand the secret Olympian world of global finance. But now that we pay more attention to bond yields and stability mechanisms, isn’t it clear that the experts up on their lofty peaks don’t know what’s going on either? 
This year’s Eurovision Song Contest is hosted by Azerbaijan, a country that is far from being a model democracy. An Estonian journalist takes a critical look at the deferential treatment enjoyed by the regime in Baku.