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French weekly magazines review 11 October 2015

Air France is to pay the price for the near lynching of company official by unionists. Is Vladimir Putin’s Middle East crusade the start of WW3? And, does Pope Francis, the most influential man in the world, have the shoulders to stay the course?

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First let’s review the reactions to this week’s shocking attack on two Air France executives by a mob of striking workers infuriated by the shedding of 2,900 jobs.

The airline has been struggling to come to grips with competition from low cost carriers and rich Gulf state airlines. Photographs and video clips of the company’s human resources chief with his shirt ripped off and climbing a fence to escape lynching shocked many, not just in France but around the world.

The workers went on a rampage after learning that their CEO was hiding a plan to lay off 5,000 additional workers after the 2017 presidential elections. The staff affected by the retrenchments includes 300 pilots, 700 flight attendants and 1,900 ground personnel, according to unions. The plan comes a few years after the company has shed more than 6,000 jobs.

Le Canard Enchaîné, which leaked the hidden redundancy plan, reports that the bad news fell at the worst possible time for the unions which have become too weak to call a strike. Not a single flight was cancelled during the industrial action, according to the journal. That, it says, probably explains why the radicalised unionists tried to compensate their incapacity with violence.

Marianne undertook an analysis of what the violence says about France’s current condition. According to the left-wing weekly, while this is not the only shirt torn in France, those who often agitate the spectre of the 30s have placed the historic cursor on the wrong period. Marianne concludes by painting a pitiful picture of the French car with no political and social shock absorbers speeding on a road full of potholes.

The new observer L’Obs also comments about what it labels as the "Crash at Air France". It claims that the attack on the company’s managers could to some degree be compared with the despair of the 2,900 breadwinners out of work, at a time of low economic growth.

The left-leaning publication regrets that the culture of confrontation continues to prevail in France, despite years of sustained efforts by legislators to strengthen dialogue between corporate chiefs and the unions.

Le Figaro Magazine slams the attack of the Air France chiefs as the last kicks of a dying horse   an outdated system where public funded organisations guarantee lifetime jobs for workers and where competition and productivity are considered swear words.

The publication sees no future for the unions. As it warns, they will be wiped off of the map if they keep defending their privileged lives and refuse to board the train of modernisation.

In Syria, the game of alliances and confrontation by two camps   one led by the Americans, the other by the Russians   will erupt into a general conflagration and spark a Third World War.

That's according to L’Obs, which consecrates this week’s cover page story with that question. The left-leaning publication marks Wednesday, 30 September, as likely to go down in the history books as the day when the War began.

That is the date when Russia’s air force launched its first airstrikes on rebel targets in Syria   not on positions held by the Islamic State armed group, but on Western-backed rebels fighting to topple the Basher al-Assad regime in Damascus.

This is the first time since 1979 that the Kremlin has openly launched its forces beyond the borders of its traditional empire, notwithstanding its military incursions in the ex-Soviet republics of Georgia and Ukraine.

Le Point says that through the Syrian expedition, the “tsar of the warm seas” is bent on preserving access to the Mediterranean after annexing Crimea.

And for L’Express there is one single factor that explains Putin’s crusade in Syria: his hatred of chaos, it contends, is deeply entrenched in his personal and political experience first as a KGB agent in East Germany during the fall of the Berlin Wall, and then as president .

The right-wing magazine says Putin is surfing on a favourable public opinion back home after the Western allies failed to stop him from annexing Crimea. It believes that Putin no longer trusts the United States and their Western allies after they tricked the United Nations into giving them the mandate to implement their medieval crusade of overthrowing Libyan President Moamer Kadhafi.

And how far is Pope Francis, the world’s most influential man, ready to go? Le Point makes a spirited attempt to answer the question with an exciting new look at the impact he has made on the church and also on world leaders in shaping policy on pressing issues such as the migrants crisis, capitalism, social justice and the protection of Planet Earth. That is despite being in the Vatican for just more than two years.

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