French weekly magazines review 26 March 2017

French weeklies warn of posible implosion of France's main political parties as numerous scandals still hang over the April 2017 presidential elections. 

DR

Le Canard Enchaîné, which was behind all the revelations about the fake parliamentary jobs candidate Francois Fillon offered his wife and children, and the pricey suits he received from a self -proclaimed baron of Françafrique, dug out more about the candididate's secret life.

The very latest, according to the satirical weekly, is that Monsieur Fillon made 50,000 euros in 2015 for facilitating a meeting between Russian President Vladmir Putin and a a Lebanese billionnaire, which he forgot to declare.

Le Canard also named controversial lawyer Robert Bourgi as the man behind the generous gifts of garments estimated at €48,000.

According to the weekly, Bourgi is a well known acquaintance of right-wing politicians in France since the days of President Valery Giscard d'Estaing.

Le Canard Enchaîné says his job consisted of "transporting brief cases of bank notes from one side of the Mediterranean to the other".

With Decision Day now less than a month away, the New Observer l'Obs says the election is unlike any the French people have seen. The magazine predicts a first round defeat for the two traditional parties, the ruling Socialists of President François Hollande and the Republican party, which only months ago was widely expected to storm back to power in a landslide.

The left-leaning weekly says it can bet that Francois Fillon's judicial woes have forced moderates to abandon the conservative party.

Furthermore l'Obs holds that his failure to win the Elysée, would spark battles of ego and a war of succession and lead to the explosion of the right and centrist alliance.

Marianne has an enlarged portraits of François Fillon, National Front leader Marine Le Pen and axed interior Minister Bruno Le Roux on its cover page this week. The two others are also facing investigation over allegations of fake parliamentary jobs they offered their family members.

The left-leaning magazine accuses them of ruining the Presidential elections campaign. In the face of the corruption scandals, it says, the French people are furious and fed up, having already lost confidence in the political elite for their failure to deal with political and social crisis facing the country.

L'Express says it would have preferred to have fewer candidates running in the election, not the field of 11 with minnows whose presence it finds irritating, as some go moaning about being left out of the debate by the media.

Presidential elections, its says, should be a laboratory of ideas about the future, not an office where people come to weep. The right-wing magazine says it is time to harden the rules and raise the number of endorsements required to qualify from the current 500 signatures to 2000 or even 5000.

This week's Le Point is all about how to resuscitate a country. The right wing publication holds that at a moment when everything has gone wrong with French democracy, none of the candidates standing in the 2017 race for the Elysée Palace seem to understand the gravity of the situation.

Le Point, lays out the so-called theraphies applied in Canada in the 1990s by Prime Ministers Jean Chretien and and Paul Martin, in Sweden by Social Democrat premier Göran Persson and in Germany by the Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, three countries where it claims have succeeded in implementing profound reforms of the welfare state and introduced new social models of government.

According to the conservative publication, what they did was that they first went out searching for the best recipe to sell the reforms to public opinion and then how to convince them to swallow the bitter pill of reform without provoking a revolution.