French weekly magazines review 13 July 2014

The French weeklies are stunned by new Bygmalion woes for opposition UMP party and Nicolas Sarkozy’s comeback plans.

The Bygmalion bills falsification scandal rocking the opposition UMP party and causing ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy insomnia is everyone’s top story for yet another week. This is in the wake of graphic details leaked to the press about the generalized pillaging of party funds that had been going on in the UMP. 

Le Canard Enchaîné says an audit of the party’s accounts uncovered a sophisticated free-spending system put in place by the disgraced party Chief Jean Francois Copé. The cash-strapped UMP spent a whooping 600,000 euros annually on the wages and allowances of four of Copé’s top aides, according to the satirical weekly.

Despite its financial problems, Le Canard says that the movement still felt obliged to pay the telephone bills of ex-Justice Minister Rachida Dati which stood at 10,000 euros annually, 9,000 euros more for her train tickets, and 4,000 euros of plane tickets.

According to the newspaper, it was in an attempt to cover-up a breach of campaign spending ceilings by ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy’s party that the Bygmalion system was put in place. It’s worth recalling that the PR company originally admitted passing off 10 million euros of work it had done for Sarkozy's election campaign as UMP party expenses.

Le Canard Enchaîné also reports that the electoral financing watchdog which invalidated Sarkozy’s campaign accounts has filed charges of breach of trust case against the ex-President. The body says it was Sarkozy responsibility to pay the 363,000 euros overspent and the 153,000 advance he had received from the state, not the UMP.

Le Point satirizes about the weird vacation Sarkozy must be having, after two years in the political wilderness and two more months to decide whether to stage a political comeback. It claims that the ex-President has become vindictive, pointing to remarks he made during his recent television interview. "What’s driving my enemies," he said, "is not to throw me into jail but to keep the judicial investigations going.”

Le Nouvel Observateur claims that ex-French premier Alain Juppé has been identified by the “Sarkozysts” as their most dangerous enemy. Juppé who sits in the troika heading the UMP was the first official of the party to criticize Sarkozy’s violent attack on the judiciary.
For the journal, the fact that Juppé is also nursing plans to stand in the 2017 presidential elections has sent the Sarko attack dogs behind.

Le Nouvel Observateur points to Henri Guaino, Sarkozy’s former political advisor who advised Juppé to swallow his arrogance and become a model before giving lessons on morals. Guaino is clearly alluding to Juppé’s sentencing to the fictitious jobs affair during his time as cabinet chief to Paris mayor Jacques Chirac.

Victim’s posture taken by Sarkozy is a ploy to attract sympathy while ignoring the blunders, writes Marianne. It accuses him of having claims that Sarkozy is full of bad faith rather than innocence. Victimization it says is a corollary of the conspiracy theory.

Terminator is the nickname L’Express gave Nicolas Sarkozy in the special report it put out this week in the wake of the new twist to his mounting judicial woes. The right-wing magazine described the Bygmalion scandal as the affair that terrifies him the most.

According to the journal, by attacking the judiciary and the state with unbelievable violence, while trying to hold his party hostage, Sarkozy is clearly in a do or die posture. For l’Express, the fact that the UMP is a party ridden with debt and hatred doesn’t stop anyone from fighting to the finish line to become its leader. It believes that Sarkozy’s political comeback now looks increasingly improbable, even if the operation is certain to unleash a spiral of destruction inside the UMP during the political autumn.