French weekly magazines review

Are the ratings agencies tyrants? Is Sarkozy in a blue funk? Are the French waking up to economic reality? Is France's immigration policy racist? And can Rama Yade save her political career?

We begin with Le Canard Enchaîné which takes a swipe at the credit-rating agencies, which have thrown the entire eurozone into panic. By threatening a general downgrade of EU economies the paper says the "tyrants" got it all wrong by 2,000 billion dollars.

The satirical newspaper slams the agencies for trying to keep order when they couldn’t even predict the crisis or even deal with existing ones. As the French government awaits the stripping of the country's triple-A rating, Le Canard says, President Nicolas Sarkozy is plunged into gloom. It argues that, while he now considers a downgrade as just another difficulty, only six weeks ago he openly feared for his political life if France lost the top credit rating.

Le Nouvel Observateur agrees there is panic on board Sarkozy’s ship, pointing out, that repeated “last-chance summits” are depressing the morale of citizens faster that the warnings coming from the credit rating agencies.

L’Express believes Sarkozy deserves a pat on the back for closing ranks with Germany in a new fiscal pact. The right-wing magazine explains Sarkozy has learned to speak German. He quickly understood, like the Germans did, that it was imperative to implement an austerity budget in France and work with German Chancellor Angela Merkel to introduce the budget stability pact, which now constitutes a solid base for the economic governance of the recession-prone eurozone.

Sarkozy the magazine says, is in the camp of the rescuers, not that of the drowning countries.

Le Point believes French citizens are rising from their slumber and coming to terms with the hard facts about their country. The weekly’s managing editor, Claude Imbert, comments in an editorial that France is a nation of strange defeats, the military yesterday, the economy today, the people yearning for more at a time of dwindling resources.

Le Point raises an alarm about the ”big lies” circulated in this election about the debt, the return of the franc, rising protectionism in France, speculation and more austerity measures.

Le Nouvel Observateur unveils the hidden face of the politics of figures, as the government ups its crack down on immigration. It is a passionate account of life of illegal immigrants in detention centres across the country. Reporters assigned by the left-leaning magazine managed to meet with entire Roma families “snatched” from their makeshift homes in the forests of Clermont-Ferrand as the government struggles to meet deportation quotas of 30,000 deportees in 2011.

The magazine says Interior Minister Claude Guéant believes Front National leader Marine Le Pen is right to want to slash the number of foreigners living in France. Guéant has also limited work permits for foreigners graduating from French universities as he targets a 10 per cent reduction of documented foreign nationals living in France, it points out. That represents some 20,000 people.

Le Nouvel Observateur brands the large Mesnil Amelot detention center near Charles de Gaulle international airport, north of Paris, a prison. According to the magazine, interior ministry staff running the facility often use tricks to keep journalists away. Le Nouvel Observateur says conditions are so hard there that all five associations providing legal counsel for the detainees have written a joint report denouncing the obsession about statistics, the detention of children and the abuse of the civic rights of immigrants, awaiting deportation.

L’Express laments the fate of Rama Yade, the young and short-lived face of Sarkozy’s overture to French people of foreign origin who has gone astray. The magazine comments that only five years ago Yade incarnated the political break so precious to Sarkozy.

Today, the paper notes, politics has not been kind to her. since  she broke ranks with the president to join the aborted presidential bid of radical party chief Jean-Louis Borloo. As this maverick prepares to salvge her career by running against all odds for parliament, l’Express believes her courage and confidence could yet again pull her out of a fix.