French weekly magazines review

France's weekly magazines concentrate on President François Hollande’s agenda for Europe and a birthday party for the Congo Brazzaville president's wife in France which is treated as a state secret back in her country.

Le Canard Enchaîné reports that Congolese First Lady jetted 150 guests from Brazzaville to the French riviera to celebrate her 70^th birthday.

The satirical weekly, which exposed the well-kept secret, says Antoinette Sassou’s friends landed in Paris on 12 May for a day of relaxation and shopping, before taking off to Nice, where they boarded a luxury yacht for a cruise to Saint Tropez. Each of the guests received up to 10,000 euros as gifts, according to Le Canard.

Some sources in the French riviera told the weekly that Antoinette Sassou’s stay in the city was marked by a “spectacular ballet of Rolls Royces”. Le Canard expresses shock at all that lavish spending by the First Lady of a country where people live on less than two euros a day.

Le Point takes a snipe at France’s “eurosceptic” press, which failed to see the bright side of Hollande's trip to Berlin this weeK. During his talks with German Chancellor Merkel Hollande laid out his idea of an economic government for the eurozone, working under a full time EU president with a five-year mandate.

Hollande is also calling for a European minimum wage and a mechanism for the harmonisation of social welfare funding, the introduction of common tax levies for citizens and companies in all 17 EU countries and a mechanism for fighting money-laundering and fiscal fraud in the eurozone.

Le Canard Enchaîné is delighted that the Franco-German leaders spent two days together despite a Socialist Party position paper’s outburst about the “selfish intransigence” of Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Le Canard satirises the trouble which the “marriage for all” law is causing within the opposition UMP movement where party chief Jean Francois Copé and ex-prime minister François Fillon are throwing political plates at each other.

The paper says the domestic violence was sparked by Copé’s attempt to turn Sunday’s anti-gay marriage demonstration into a broader protest against Hollande’s presidency. Fillon opposes the idea and warns that a constitutional crisis could break out in the country if power is handed to street-roaming anarchists.

L’Express delves into the world of a new generation of “antis” who are promising another show down with the government this Sunday. The right-wing magazine isn’t sure what the protesters hope to gain from the demonstration since the gay marriage law has been promulgated. One of the right-wing activists tells the paper they feel they have a duty to break the law, which they consider as illegitimate.

Le Nouvel Observateur takes up the Bernard Tapie affair and the naming of IMF chief Christine Lagarde as an assisted witness after two days of questioning by prosecutors sitting in Court of Justice of the Republic. She is called on to explain a 400 million-euro  payout by Crédit Lyonnais bank to the disgraced tycoon in 2007, when she was finance minister.

The two parties had been locked in dispute over the 1993 sale of sports group Adidas. Tapie had accused Crédit Lyonnais of defrauding him by consciously undervaluing Adidas at the time of the sale and argued that the state, as the former principal shareholder in the bank, should compensate him.

Le Nouvel Observateur recalls that his arguments were upheld by the arbitration panel on Lagarde’s recommendations. According to the left-leaning journal, critics claimed the state should not have taken the risk of being forced to pay compensation to a convicted criminal who, as he was bankrupt at the time, would not have been able to pursue the case through the courts.

Prosecutors suspect that Bernard Tapie received favourable treatment in return for supporting Nicolas Sarkozy in the 2007 presidential election. Those allegations are backed by Marianne, which claims that the debt-ridden businessman was often seen in desperate mood at the finance ministry after Sarkozy’s election.

Marianne wonders if there is anyone left who the French people can trust, following the unprecedented discrediting of the country's political and economic elite. A Harris interactive survey for Marianne showed that citizens are now putting their faith on people close to them, such as family members, their medics and their children’s teachers.