On Monday, Europe crossed yet another red line in its ever-escalating, no-longer-so-proxy war against Russia. In a hastily arranged meeting of European leaders in Paris — a response to significant Russian breakthroughs on the Ukrainian frontline over the past few …
Has Macron promoted his own assassins?
This week’s French government reshuffle started in the usual endogamous Macron style, more like parthenogenesis than politics, with the nomination of the president’s “mini-me”, the 34-year-old Gabriel Attal, as his fourth PM in seven years. It ended with a dead …
Does France have a Napoleon complex?
L’Année Napoléon in Emmanuel Macron’s commemoration-hungry France, was a bit of a damp squib. In 2021, two centuries after the death of l’Empereur on St Helena’s Island, there was enough noise from the anti-colonialist crowd on his reintroduction of slavery …
The Gilets Jaunes achieved nothing
Five years ago today, Paris was liberated. Or, if you were a Parisian, the streets of the capital were blocked by tens of thousands of ploucs (yokels) in high-vis jackets. Right from the start, the Gilets Jaunes rebellion defied the …
Keir Starmer still doesn’t get Brexit
France has been swept up in a mood of cross-Channel rapprochement. As the country hosts the Rugby World Cup, its minister of sport has shown a special solicitude towards English visitors, hoping to atone for the mistreatment of English football …
The emptiness of Macron’s grand strategy
In the latest battle for strategic autonomy, Emmanuel Macron has notched up a small victory. Last month, under French pressure, American Fiona Scott Morton resigned from her post as chief economist of the EU’s Directorate-General for Competition. Starting from this …
In France, money is dirtier than sex
Almost anywhere in the world, you would have confidently expected people to celebrate their country overtaking Japan, the UK and Germany, to clock more millionaires than everywhere else except the United States and China.
Not in France, though. Accusations flew, …
The French need a revolution
You have to wonder what Indian PM Narendra Modi, guest of honour at the Champs-Elysées military parade today, will be making of the political fever in France. The tremulous mood was captured well in his counterpart Elisabeth Borne’s recent interview …
Communism has deserted the banlieues
It is grimly appropriate that the riots across France started when the police shot a young man in Nanterre. Nowhere epitomises France’s last few decades of social and political change better than this suburb of western Paris. The English word …
As France burns, the far-Right rises
What the street barricade was to France in the 19th century, the burning car has become in the 21st: a preferred means of violent protest, and a key theatrical symbol of political defiance. In 2005, after two boys named Zyed …
Boomer Europe is dying
Born in 1945, from the wreckage of its decades-long civil war, our mother continent Europe is a boomer, prone as many boomers are to comforting and self-aggrandising myths as it slouches towards death. Unlike the generation which led Europe through …
How America weaponised the West
In the month that has passed since Emmanuel Macron issued his call for greater European strategic autonomy, two rival camps have gone to battle over its legacy. The first is populated by Atlanticists such as European Commission president Ursula von …
We need to resurrect Eastern Europe
The states of the former Soviet sphere have been trying to shrug off the “Eastern Europe” label for years. The term brings to mind tired stereotypes about an impoverished, illiberal post-communist East, which are for the most part tired and …
Does Europe need to split?
Emmanuel Macron’s call for Europe to reduce its dependency on the United States and develop its own “strategic autonomy” caused a transatlantic tantrum. The Atlanticist establishment, in the US as much as in Europe, responded in a typically unrestrained fashion …
Macron’s extreme centre will not fall
The French have taken to the streets, and some foreign commentators are having the vapours. Last week, Foreign Policy suggested that President Emmanuel Macron’s pension reform “has sparked one of the most serious crises in French history”. Nicholas Vinocur wrote …