Four days before the invasion of Ukraine, an eerily prescient documentary aired on France 5. Le monde en face:Wagner, l’armée de l’ombre de Poutine assiduously tracks the activities of the Russian President’s “shadow army”: the Wagner Group, which arranges military …
Putin has secured a Macron victory
Let’s call them “The Three Moscowteers”. Until Russian bombs and rockets fell on Ukraine last week, three of the leading candidates in the French Presidential elections were enthusiastic supporters of Vladimir Putin. Between them, Éric Zemmour, Marine Le Pen and …
Europe must prepare for war
Beregsurány, Hungary
At dusk on Hungary’s Beregsurány border crossing with western Ukraine, a small, but constant flow of displaced people was making its way across the border. They were mostly women, children and old men: Ukraine has reportedly banned men …
The French centre is doomed
Minutes after the end of French presidential hopeful Valérie Pécresse’s Paris rally earlier this month, an uncharitable cartoon started to circulate among the WhatsApp and Telegram groups of the candidate’s own Les Républicains (LR) party. It showed a Titanic-like ocean …
Has Macron already won?
This year’s French presidential election is no sweeping Austerlitz or close-fought Waterloo. With 60 days to go, the battle has degenerated into a series of brasserie brawls inside the dysfunctional political families of the Left, centre-Right and far-Right. And only …
How the EU betrayed Ukraine
Cast your mind back to February 2014 — and the dramatic conclusion to the Euromaidan protests in Kyiv. Given the choice between alignment with Brussels or Moscow, there was no doubt as to where the crowd’s sympathies lay.
On the …
How Macron manipulates Europe
France — in reality, Emmanuel Macron — has taken up the presidency of the EU, or “our Europe”, as he calls it. He set the scene with a typically magniloquent speech to the European parliament, meeting symbolically (as the French …
The impotence of the French Left
The Communist candidate in the French presidential elections is a calm, likeable man called Fabien Roussel. Last week, he made an unremarkable statement: “A good wine, a good piece of meat, a good cheese; that’s what French Gastronomy is all …
The annihilation of Michel Houellebecq
In Michel Houellebecq’s startlingly long new novel, the 735-page Anéantir, our Everyman protagonist Paul Raison is returned by family illness to his childhood bedroom. There, in typical Houellbecqian fashion, he jabs us with a completely heterodox, completely confident provocation: Matrix …