French weekly magazines review

The early spring warming hearts and lifting spirits in Paris has brought a heatwave inside the opposition UMP party, which is tipped to becoming a school for scandals. The weeklies carry reports from Crimea as the Ukraine crisis deepens. And how Blackwater is working with China in Africa.

Le Canard Enchaîné keeps UMP chief Jean-François Copé under pressure as he battles a damaging report by Le Point that he had abused his influence to channel party contracts to a PR company run by two friends and political allies. Copé claims this is a witchhunt but Le Canard scorns him for eluding the real questions the overbidding accusations and why he handed out contracts without calls for tender.

For Le Point, by adopting the posture of a victim and denouncing a conspiracy theory Copé only exposed his desperation to save his career. It reports that Copé’s friends have gone as far as suspecting Nicolas Sarkozy of masterminding the plot.

Le Canard Enchaîné is the source of yet another suspected scandal linked to Sarkozy this week.

His top political advisor Patrick Buisson secretly taped hours of private conversations during his five-year term as president. The former president has reportedly launched legal action to stem the “Sarkoleaks” after Le Canard published extracts that have sent shivers down Sarkozy’s spine amid speculation that the tapes could contain a smoking gun about a string of corruption cases that could destroy his chances for a political comeback.

Marianne can’t believe its eyes as it comes to terms with Le Monde’s latest bombshell that Sarkozy allegedly tried to pervert the course of justice after the tapping of his phone by judges investigating the suspected funding of his 2007 campaign by Moamer Kadhafi.

“The tell-all rush has begun!” bellows Marianne, adding that France’s funniest comics

would be full of pity for the characters, who are indecent, vulgar and indifferent to the values of the republic

The weeklies have kept an eye on the dangerous escalation going on in Ukraine.

Le Point has a special report from Simferopol, capital of the semi-autonomous republic of Crimea and epicentre of the crisis. Its reporter says 60 per cent of the peninsula’s population are satisfied with the turn events have taken there, especially the show of forced by masked soldiers.

Le Nouvel Observateur wonders how far Vladmir Putin is ready to go and whether he will dare take control of eastern Ukraine after annexing Crimea.

Le Figaro Magazine holds that Europe erred in the first place by placing Kiev under formal demand to chose between the EU and Russia. Despite the mounting tensions, L’Express doubts that a third world war will break out in Ukraine.

According to the right-wing journal, no one deems it worthwhile anymore to die for Sebastopol, to set up a buffer zone under the Alma Bridge in Paris or even that Russia can dare set the continent ablaze. The weekly gives three major elements of modern geopolitics which explain why apocalypse now is a far-fetched scenario: the nuclear arsenal of the superpower untested over the past 60 years, public opinion and the art of diplomacy which is complex, abstruse but equally efficient even when it is indecipherable.

The controversial American Blackwater security company, notorious for brutal exploits in post-Saddam Iraq, is back in the news after finding a new lucrative market in east Africa.

The Nouvel Observateur reports that Erik Prince, who created the company after retiring

from the elite US Navy Seals, is now a billionaire and China’s key partner in the region, supplying security and logistics and providing air, road and maritime transport for Chinese mining and construction companies there.

Prince, according to the journal, now holds 49 per cent of shares in the Kenyan Kijipwa Aviation Company based in Mombasa. Le Nouvel Observateur reports that he is bidding for mouthwatering contracts in the oilfields of Sudan and South Sudan, and preparing to construct a high-speed railway line from Nairobi to Mombasa and a pipeline to export the country’s newly discovered oil.