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French weekly magazines review

The weeklies are dominated by Le Canard Enchaîné’s story line that French President François Hollande has been handed a 2 year so-called “suspended sentence” by the European Union to meet the community’s golden rules on budget discipline.

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Brussels gave the French leader 24 months to trim the French deficit down to three percent of its Gross Domestic Product. The satirical weekly says that President Hollande’s government won’t meet the deadline if it continues with its current spending trend.  

The EU says that France’s current budget is up by 20 billion euros, 0.9 percent over last year’s figures, meaning that it will amount to 57.2 percent of the GDP by the end of 2013.

That’s an EU record and Le Canard Enchaîné awards France a gold medal for becoming the dunces of the European class, with 3.22 million people out of work, recession looming and President Hollande’s popularity hovering at around 25 percent.

Le Point says he has hit the bottom like the titanic; pointing out that Hollande’s under-achievement has restored confidence in the opposition UMP party just a year after their landslide defeat.

For the right-wing magazine, they now consider a short-listed 25 socialist bastions as winnable in the next French Council elections in 2014. Ex-Interior minister Claude Guéant is placed under renewed scrutiny from the weeklies amid persisting questions about the origin of 500,000 euros discovered in one of his bank accounts.

The former Secretary General at the Elysée during President Nicolas Sarkozy’s rule says the money was the price of two paintings he sold, although experts value the works as worth just 23,000 euros a piece. He is also facing investigation into cash bonuses he received during his time at the interior ministry.

Le Canard Enchaîné publishes a note Guéant allegedly signed when he was interior minister abolishing those cash payments and the weekly says he worsened his case by not coming clean about the money.

Le Point says Guéant’s judicial torments have forced the former “strongman” of the Elysée to “hide his appetite for shady dealings”. It published the names of five men it describes as his “funny friends”.

They include Robert Bourgi, Jacques Chirac’s ex Mister Africa, Alexandre Djouhri a businessman described as Guéant’s wine drinking partner, Ziad Takieddine the close Elysée associate and Karachi affair intermediary, who accuses Sarkozy of taking Moamer Kadhafi’s money as well as late Libyan dictator’s last cabinet chief Bachir Saleh.

Marianne tells the tale of “Guéant, le fric, Afrique” meaning Guéant’s passion for African cash. According to the left-leaning weekly Guéant often bragged about his business ties with rogue African leaders prior to the outbreak of the affair.

The left-leaning magazine claims that bags of cash were flying from police headquarters to members of the interior minister’s cabinet. Guéant was Nicolas Sarkozy’s most-trusted aide, says Le Point adding that it fully understands why the ex-President is so disturbed by the affair.

L’Express delves into the dangerous and dark world of the French mafia which is driving up smuggling, corruption and money laundering in the country. It is not yet like in Italy and the Cosa Nostra with its rites and godfathers says L’Express, but it explains that organized criminal gangs have taken control of neighborhoods in Corsica, Marseille and Paris.

Interior Minister Manuel Valls tells L’Express that the mafia and kingpins are everywhere, in public contracts, the real estate sector and in the car sales industry constituting a threat to law and order in the Republic. He says that the French cartels are making an estimated three billion euros every year from drug sales and vows to attack them through their wallets.

Le Figaro Magazine reports about an easy-going co-habitation taking place in the Vatican since the 2nd of May. That was when Pope Emeritus Josef Ratzinger, who promised to vanish into a life of seclusion after resigning, cut short his stay at the papal residence of Castel Gandolfo to return to the Holy See.

Le Figaro says the two Popes now live just hundreds of meters away from each other. Ratzinger has resettled in a renovated monastery separated from the Pope’s apartment by a magnificent garden where both men love strolling.

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