French press review 24 September 2011

Saturday’s French newspapers are dominated by the Karachi affair, a scandal involving arms contracts, kickbacks and terror attacks and now apparently causing a certain concern in the French presidential palace.

President Nicolas Sarkozy's allies are responding to the graft scandal that threatens to derail his reelection bid with panic. Sarkozy’s close friend and ex-interior minister Brice Hortefeux is facing investigation for violating the secrecy of judicial procedure. Le Monde runs the full background to the story.

The paper reports that investigators intercepted warning phone calls by Hortefeux to Sarkozy’s best man Nicolas Bazire and another Sarkozy friend Thierry Gaubert, both arrested and charged of collecting kickbacks from a submarines contract with Pakistan to fund the 1995 presidential campaign of then-prime minister Edouard Balladur.

Le Figaro explains that police have been investigating whether the suspension of the payments to middlemen by President Jacques Chirac caused the terrible bomb blast in Karachi which killed 11 French engineers mounting the war vessels.

Libération recalls that Sarkozy was spokesperson for the Balladur campaign and budget minister at the time of the alleged payments. But he angrily insists he had nothing to do with funding.

Le Monde also noted that the leaked call is evidence that Hortefeux, who is slated to run Sarkozy's reelection campaign, had access to the records of a supposedly independent investigation.According to La Nouvelle République du Centre Ouest, Brice Hortefeux’s entry into the fray is a clear indication that Sarkozy is at the heart of the scandal.

Some regional newspapers like L’Alsace, regret that the “irreproachable presidency” promised by Sarkozy is now in “dire straits”. Le Journal de la Haute-Marne also wonders what a “foolish attempt” they made to cover up a scandal. La Voix du Nord ridicules Hortefeux for pretending that he got news of the investigation from Le Monde.

It underlines that the incriminating article only came out six days after his telephone conversations. Southern regional daily Le Midi libre says Sarkoland is at a boiling point, with the smell of “burning” all over the castle. The Elysée’s strategy to “distance” Sarkozy from the affair has “backfired”, notes La Voix du Nord. The question now, the northern French paper says, is not whether he is at the heart of the scandal but about the exact role he played in it.

La République du Centre points to a tension-packed weekend awaiting Sarkozy. The regional newspaper underlines that he won’t just be dealing with the embarrassing revelations in the Karachi affair following Hortefeux’s “stupid” phone call, but possible destabilisation by the victory, predicted by the polls, of the Socialists in Sunday’s senatorial elections.

La Montagne says cold sweat is running down the spine of the centre-right coalition as the Upper House could swing to the left for the first time in half a century.

Saturday’s French papers also run comments about the emotional effort by Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas to win UN support for their yearning for a homeland.

Another regional newspaper, Le Républicain Lorrain, sees Abbas’s expedition to New York as a dignifying initiative which places the Unites States before its responsibilities. The paper argues that, by forcing Barak Obama to declare his hostility to Palestinian statehood, Abbas took away the little credit Obama had in the eyes of the Arab peoples.

La Marseillaise says Abbas's peaceful initiative deserves the sympathy and utmost respect of nations the world over, as it symbolises at the highest degree, the yearning of a people to have the right to a homeland in which they can build a future in “capital letters”.

Sud-Ouest holds that while the Palestinians’ UN application may starve them of vital Isreli and American funds, the real danger facing Abbas lies elsewhere – the risk of disappointing the millions of people who look up to him, hoping he can “give them a future”.