"Although unknown to the Russian public, let alone overseas, the 65-year-old Mr Zubkov is regarded as Mr Putin's mentor from the time when they both worked in the St Petersburg mayoral office in the 1990s", notes the daily. "The rise of Mr Zubkov from obscurity inevitably recalls Boris Yeltsin's elevation of Mr Putin as prime minister and his chosen successor in 1999.That comparison carries a warning. Having gained supreme authority in 2000, Mr Putin then proceeded systematically to undo Mr Yeltsin's legacy, turning Russia into a more efficient, less liberal state.The present incumbent no doubt hopes to wield influence from behind the scenes after he leaves office next year. But he could well find that Mr Zubkov, or another figure he may yet pull from the hat, will become his own man once his hands are on the immense powers of patronage enjoyed by the head of state. That is what makes the transition period so fascinating." (13/09/2007)

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"Putin is obviously fond of presenting the world with enigmas," Frank Nienhuysen writes. "Just when everyone was convinced he would position his favourite Sergei Ivanov as top candidate for the presidential elections, he has conjured up a little-known financial expert called Viktor Zubkov instead... It's impossible to discern a transparent democracy in all this - this is the bitter realisation we must come to in view of Putin's obscure personnel policy just six months before the elections. The Russian people have adopted a stoic stance to the change. They don't expect to be offered a genuine alternative to an authoritarian government system anyway." (13/09/2007)

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The Estonian daily says it was not surprised by the resignation of Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov because Putin will have to announce who he wants as his successor at latest this autumn. "Putin always follows the same pattern when appointing someone to this important post: first he names someone as prime minister, then that person becomes deputy president and the nation knows whom it must elect. But what no one could foresee was the appointment of little-known Viktor Zubkov as new prime minister - rather than Putin's favourite, Ivanov. However, this doesn't necessarily affect the latter's ambitions to the throne because unlike in democratic states, Putin doesn't react to the public mood or elections when appointing politicians." (13/09/2007)

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"Like any good populist - or like any contemporary politician -, Vladamir Putin combines PR with politics. He does not hesitate to wrongfoot the entire Russian establishment and its western peers", stresses Philippe Thureau-Dangin, chief editor of the weekly. "It is nonetheless interesting to see that Russia, considered moribund ten years ago, now succeeding to appear a strategic rival of the United States. An ideological one too, since it is boldly proclaiming its 'slavophile' values set against all westernisers, whether within Russia or elsewhere. This is where globalisation reaches its limits." (13/09/2007)

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"An unlikely posthumous fate: sixty-six years after his death, here is Guy Môquet, the young communist shot dead by the Germans on October 22nd in 1941, promoted to the status of official hero in Sarkozy's Republic", writes the columnist Claude Weil on on the French president Nicolas Sarkozy's decision to make all French high schools read, on October 22nd, the letter Guy Môquet wrote to his parents on the eve of his execution. But for the columnist, though this letter "is heartrending, its historical importance is slender. It mentions nothing of his engagement, of his ideals as a young communist, nothing about the context. It is hard to see what reading it might trigger among today's high school pupils other than a surge of emotion, a moment of patriotic, emotional and a-historic communion. Is this not a manipulative instrumentation of history?" (13/09/2007)

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All available articles from » Claude Weill

The 30th anniversary of the death of opera singer Maria Callas prompts Swiss literary scholar Elisabeth Bronfen to note that there are no more divas nowadays. She points out that today's stars lack the uncompromising attitude of the divas of the past: "A diva relentlessly pursues her goals regardless of the consequences. This kind of forthrightness doesn't fit in well with an atmosphere in which public opinion is all-important. Marketing strategies are omnipresent - everything is calculated in advance. Nowadays a celebrity can only be successful if she's obliging. Even controversies have to be adapted to the public mood. A gifted politician like Hillary Clinton carefully plans her public appearances with the same single-mindedness with which a diva would be willing to risk everything. Any reaction that the senator could provoke with her remarks has already been pre-calculated. This may be a pragmatic attitude in a candidate for the US presidency, but it also provokes accusations of lacking credibility... By contrast a diva must be able to command everyone's unreserved trust." (13/09/2007)

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Timothy Garton Ash considers the grass roots struggle against Islamist terrorism in Europe. "All over our continent, and around its edges, there are hundreds of thousands of young Muslim men who could go either way. They could become tomorrow's bombers ; or they could become good citizens, funders of our faltering state pension schemes, tomorrow's Europeans.The chemistry here can be understood a little better by thinking back to the last wave of youth terrorism, in the 'German autumn' of 30 years ago and Italy's Red Brigades. When I lived in Berlin in the late 1970s I met quite a few people who told me: 'You know, there was a moment when I could have gone either way.' They could have slunk away to join the Red Army Faction ... . Instead, they became journalists, academics or lawyers, and are now pillars of a society under attack from another, potentially more destructive wave of terrorism." (13/09/2007)

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Three terror suspects alleged to have ties to al-Qaida were arrested in Austria on Wednesday. Petra Stuiber examines this in the context of the country's debate on Islam: "Austria still refuses to accept that it's a country to which people emigrate... Austria has preferred to soothe its fears by pointing to the fact that it recognised Islam as a religion back in 1912... The arrests have come at a propitious time for the FPÖ and the BZÖ, which over the last few weeks have been vying with each other in an unseemly race to prove which is more Islamophobic. This is evident in the debate about minarets currently raging in the Austrian province of Carinthia, as well as the dangerous games with the fears of residents living next to a house of prayer which is to be enlarged in Vienna's twentieth district. The ÖVP is jumping for joy while the SPÖ remains silent or tries to play down the issue. But attempts to appease the situation won't put a stop to the radicalisation on either side. They're more likely to have the opposite effect." (13/09/2007)

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"The internal fighting in the PNV (Basque Nationalist party) claimed a big victim on September 12th: the chairman of the party, Josu Jon Imaz, who had urged for the modernisation of Basque nationalism, is throwing in the towel facing the more radical sections, giving up being re-elected in the next Basque Assembly, abandoning politics" laments the daily. "There is no doubt that the leader of the PNV has given a lesson in political coherence and probably wishes to draw attention to the progressive radicalisation of Basque nationalism. The repercussions of Imaz's departure do not end with the PNV. They are essential in a national context. ... Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero realises that rather than reinforcing the moderate tendencies of these parties, concessions towards nationalists favour radicals who take advantage of a lack of firmness to ask for more and more." (13/09/2007)

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In a national conference on Climate change, the Minister of the environment Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio announced on Wednesday, September 12th, that the climate is warming-up in Italy four times as fast than in the rest of the world. The economy journalist Mario Deaglio is not surprised. "Behind the label 'environment', it is possible to gather disparate problems, such as pollution from methane, from waste, from global warming and forest fires, from too many jelly-fish to not enough fish ... . All these facets of the same problem can be synthesised in a general concept of 'environmental debt'. Likewise, during the 1970s and 1980s, Italy was not contented to cheerfully accumulate a terrible financial debt, ... it also contributed to deteriorating its own territory, its own air, its own water supplies." (13/09/2007)

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Yesterday the euro reached its highest point against the dollar since its introduction in 1999. Max Arhippainen sees this as an indication of the weakness of the dollar rather than the euro's strength. "The US has had a huge trade deficit for years, and this was bound eventually to have a negative impact on the country's currency. To make matters worse, the mortgage market crisis is intensifying. US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is even warning that this crisis may last longer than previous comparable lows. Everyone is now expecting a cut in the base interest rate over the next few days. This will lower the dollar even further. In the long term it could slow growth in the US (which would have a negative impact on other economies) and this could have the effect of weakening the dollar over a long period. So yesterday's record also has its downside." (13/09/2007)

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Ford has acquired the majority stake in the car plant at Craiva in Romania. Bogdan Cierac notes that this makes Ford the second Western company after Renault to start building cars in Romania. "From 2010, Ford and Renault will be producing over 600,000 vehicles a year in Romania, most of them destined for export. That's around 1,500 cars daily. The problem is that even all these years after the revolution Romania still lacks roads suitable for the trucks that would transport the export cars to the West or the port of Constanta. Ford is therefore contemplating having the cars shipped to the West on the Danube. Moreover, the communist idea that the plant belongs to the people is still prevalent in Romania's automobile industry. Before the arrival of Renault, cars that were ready for the road used to be stolen from the production line at Pitesti. Today the Pitesti plant is the best-guarded plant in the world. No doubt it will also take the Americans a while to figure out why their vehicles are arriving in Frankfurt or Paris without wheels, car radios or car mats even though they were fitted with them at the factory." (13/09/2007)

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Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda's new film "Katyn" is now showing at Polish cinemas. It tells the story of the execution of 22,000 Polish officers at Katyn by agents of the NKWD, the Soviet secret service, during the Second World War. Wajda's father was among the victims. Up until 1990 mentioning the massacre was a taboo in Poland. Krzysztof Masłoń considers the film extremely important: "Andrzej Wajda said that more films about this crime would be made after 'Katyn'. I don't agree. Wajda's film opens and closes the chapter of Katyn in Poland's cinematic history. The shattering final scene leaves nothing to be added. I can't imagine any Pole being left unmoved by this film. I can't imagine there's anyone who won't go to see this film." (13/09/2007)

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The editorialist Sonia Da Silva takes preliminary stock of Luxembourg, 2007 European capital of culture. "2007 will practically have been the golden age of 'cultural decentralisation' with projects that permitted the use of long-deserted industrial sites, adding value to national heritage worth conserving, not out of passiveness, but respect for an identity-forging hotbed of creativity . ... The organisation of this European capital of culture presents a resolutely innovative character through its installation on its boundary-stretching territory ... . A capital that may not have whetted huge cultural appetites beyond our borders, but the participants of which have been drawn considerably closer together, thus beginning a European culture laboratory that many countries may well envy us." (13/09/2007)

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Petra Kipphoff was very impressed with the new stained glass window designed by contemporary artist Gerhard Richter for the Cologne Cathedral. "Even when he no longer owns them, he retains control of his paintings to the extent that they are still within his reach. However the cathedral windows are not only forever beyond his control from a material point of view but also because the changing light maintains them in a state of constant change over which he has no influence... Yet precisely this changing light and the location make this window, despite everything, a paradigmatic work of late twentieth century art. Unlike the earlier images, figures and decorative patterns that previously filled the window frames, Richter's illuminated abstract design is not dominated by the lancet and the rose window... Richter has casually ignored the rules governing the design of church windows, and in doing so he has broken with tradition by outshining it. 'Let there be light' (Genesis 1, 1, 3)." (13/09/2007)

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