Any other business: France’s Mr Normal isn’t the big story: keep your eyes on Greece and Spain

An auction of French government ten-year bonds three days before the triumph of François Hollande met strong demand from investors and produced a borrowing cost of 2.96 per cent, a fraction cheaper than a similar issue in April. This fact told those who noticed it that France was not the story to watch last weekend. Markets had already assessed Hollande as a closet moderate who would rapidly be forced to back-pedal on his socialist rhetoric and embrace Angela Merkel. Flag-waving Bastille crowds made good television, but it was the Greek election and the rumblings from Spain — where Bankia, a conglomerate of savings banks, is heading for a multibillion bailout — that really mattered.

It’s hard to know which is a worse outcome for Greece: a fractious hard-left coalition or another election next month with another chaotic ‘anti-austerity’ outcome. ‘Growth’ will be the new mantra for European leaders, as a concession to Hollande, but before they can turn it into an ‘agenda’ they must deal first with urgent Greek demands for an unwinding of the bailout terms. If they concede, the problems of Spain and other depressed, debt-laden euro economies will become far harder to contain. If they refuse, Greece descends into civic collapse and violent exit from the euro.

Hollande has been welcomed onto the world stage as ‘Monsieur Normal’, an aimiable change from his rebarbative predecessor. But normality applies to Europe at large only in the context of that old wartime acronym ‘Snafu’, which I won’t spell out. The continent’s new statesman must already be wondering what he’s taken on.

Eye trouble

The row over the use of alternative drugs, Avastin and Lucentis, to treat age-related macular degeneration — AMD, the condition that is the commonest cause of sight loss in older people — offers a fascinating glimpse of the tension between the interests of patients, taxpayers and ‘big pharma’.