French weekly magazines review 3 May 2015

Is “money curse” haunting UMP leader and ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy? National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen wants France out of the eurozone but not his euros out off Swiss banks, and the miraculous foiling of a terrorist attack in Paris is too little to push a French bill on intelligence reform.

DR

Le Canard Enchaînéhas an update on police investigations into how the young Algerian student Sid Ahmed Ghlam managed to “arm himself like an aircraft carrier” when he didn’t even know how to handle a gun.

The satirical weekly found out that he was not a lone wolf and knew the Kaouchi brothers who carried out the Charlie Hebdo killings in Paris. According to Le Canard, they were groomed by the same imams in the same Villejuif neighborhood, and it wonders how they slipped out of the glare of intelligence agents who had monitored their activities since 2011.

Marianne is inviting French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, his interior minister and lawmakers reviewing the draft bill on intelligence reform to read the new book on Jihadism, by three French terrorism experts David Bénichou, Farhad Khorsokhavar and Philippe Migaud.

According to the left-leaning magazine, the investigative book traces the evolution of radical Islamic thinking from Paris to Baghdad and proposes concrete solutions about how to deal with the terrorism threat.

Le Monde exposes a French dimension of the problem: an acute shortage of imams because their profession is no longer attractive. According to Le Monde, fewer intellectuals leaving graduate schools are tempted by the job due to the complexity of tasks involved and the long hours to put in, only to earn the minimum wage. It is such disaffection for the spiritual mission which contributes to radicalisation, it says.

The terrorist plot in Paris had been expected to facilitate the passage of a bill reforming French intelligence law. That’s not the case, notes l’Obs. According to the magazine, even though the legislation seeks to legalise existing practices, critics denounce a lack of transparency, calling the draft law a licence to spy on citizens' private lives.

L’Obs says the worries of some privacy advocates go beyond police surveillance. The biggest concern is that the black boxes could fall into the hands of the far-right Front National party, if Marine Le Pen wins the presidential elections in 2017.

And speaking of the Front National, Le Canard Enchaîné satirises about the number of Swiss bank accounts owned by the movement’s founder Jean-Marie Le Pen. This was after Mediapart’s revelation that France’s anti-money laundering agency Tracfin had discovered an account stuffed with 2.2 million euros, 1.7 million in gold bars. The money is reportedly concealed in a trust fund based in the Virgin Islands and managed from Geneva. He is simply applying the National Front’s agenda, jokes the journal, branding Le Pen as a true advocate of an exit of the euro towards Switzerland.

Plans by ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy to change the name of his opposition UMP party to Republicans attract sharp comments from the weeklies. Le Canard Enchaîné wonders why a man like Sarkozy would want to steal a republic that belongs to everyone. Furthermore the satirical weekly ridicules his attempt to enrol people by force in his party when all republicans are not his friends, and after he turned down an offer from the Socialist party to mount a republican front against the populist agenda of the Front National.

The UMP’s name change remains a very divisive issue in the party, notes Le Point. It reports that resistance to the reform is so strong that Senate President Gerard Larcher is backing calls by Sarkozy’s rivals for the issue to be decided by an internal vote.

Nicolas Sarkozy is also the business bait of L’Express this week as the right-wing publication discusses a so-called “curse of money” following the former French president. The conservative magazine reports about the hard times he is facing with prosecutors investigating alleged irregularities in the funding of his two presidential campaigns.

This is at a time his political foes and even some of his friends criticise his habit of charging speaking fees at conferences despite the more than a million euros his law firm has made since he left the Elysée.

L’Express is surprised that he is not even bothered by the controversy this is causing. It claims that Sarkozy’s most pressing concern is to show that he is no longer the “bling-bling” or glamour-fascinated man he was during his time at the Elysée but a “low-cost” leader of the UMP.