French weekly magazines review

Did Mohamed Merah help Sarkozy's reelection prospects? Could security services have prevented his killing spree? Is jihad stalking France's jails? And is the Bettencourt affair a timebomb ticking under the incument president? 

It has been surely President Nicolas Sarkozy’s very own week, if we go by the cover page stories of the weeklies.

“Help, help, Sarkozy is coming back” screams Le Nouvel Observateur.

He is “the man who never gives up”, according to Le Point.

Another left-leaning magazine Marianne has him in the rear mirror as it measures the “shockwaves” unleashed by gunman Mohamed Merah, shot dead by police last week, after a series of cold-blooded shootings in Montauban and Toulouse that left seven dead, including three Jewish children.

Conservative L’Express has put out a special issue on the still-unravelling Merah affair, the Islamist threat allegedly facing France and how it has changed the dynamics of the presidential election. It has put security back on the campaign agenda reviving Sarkozy’s reelection prospects, according to the right-wing magazine.

Some of the weeklies fan the polemics over the handling of the Merah affair.

Left-leaning Marianne points to errors of judgement, intelligence flops that dogged the operation with Le Nouvel Observateur slamming what it termed an intelligence services fiasco. The magazine claims they were tipped off as far back as 2011 about Merah’s training in Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan and also about the potential threat he posed in France.

L’Express suspects they underestimated the clues because Mohamed Merah remains a prototype of the typical French petty criminal, known by police but never for anything big.

L’Express raises the question of allegedly rising Islamic fanaticism in France. The journal says radical Islamists have been recruiting followers in the banlieues, the outskirts of the country's big cities, what Le Point calls the boiling pot of social failure. L’Express also points out that some converts are recruited the country’s prisons, where jihadist agents are taking advantage of the shortage there of officially assigned imams.

The findings are indeed disturbing and in an editorial L’Express proposes the setting up of a parliamentary commission to evaluate the threat posed by religious fundamentalism and deal with it.

In its own editorial, Le Point welcomes “the legitimate obsession of political parties from across the board on how to prevent the Merah affair from hurting France’s large and peace loving Muslim community".

Le Point argues that Sarkozy believes he is heading to victory three weeks from election day But there is a detail that is “worrying the Elysee, the Bettencourt affair".

Eric Woerth, who was treasurer of Sarkozy’s 2007 campaign, has been placed under judicial investigation for suspected conflict of interest and organising illegal campaign funding.  Woerth allegedly collected money from L'Oréal heiress Liliane Bettencourt four days after the first round of the 2007 French presidential election and over a week ahead of the second round on 6 May that Sarkozy went on to win.

The satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné calls the unfolding scandal a “grenade for Sarkozy’s reelection campaign”. Le Canard is relishing news that investigating magistrate Jean-Michel Gentil has traced two dubious withdrawals of 400,000 euros each from Swiss bank accounts managed by Bettencourt's close aide Patrice de Maistre, now placed under extended judicial detention after a 13-hour grilling by the judge.