Europe

Michel Barnier, the OAP appointed yesterday as Prime Minister of France, is a sensible fellow, even if at 73 he should be putting up his feet after decades in the political trenches. And he has plenty of pensions to draw on. He’s not exciting. Scandal free, socially conservative, a master of dossiers – not intrigue, he’s not even a graduate of the École National d’Administration, the finishing school of the French elite. He’s a former choir boy and Scout who seems never to have made a memorable speech in his long career. He’s rather boring, and normal. His two memorable achievements seem to have been as the EU’s Brexit negotiator, in

Michel Barnier is the new prime minister of France. Best known in Britain as the EU’s chief negotiator during the Brexit negotiations, the 73-year-old is the oldest premier in the history of the Fifth Republic and he was unveiled sixty days after the parliamentary elections that threw the Republic into chaos. Le Pen appears satisfied with the choice of Barnier In a statement issued from the Élysée, president Emmanuel Macron said he believed he had found the person to lead a government that ‘meets the conditions to be as stable as possible and give themselves the chances to gather the widest possible support’. The appointment brings to an end a shambolic summer

Who will be the next prime minister of France? Almost two months after the centre lost its majority in the National Assembly, the potential candidates range from the improbable to the ludicrous.   The latest semi-crazed idea is that Emmanuel Macron should call on Ségolene Royal, the former wife of François Hollande, a socialist party machine politician hated in equal measure by both the extreme left and populist right and who generates no enthusiasm from either the moderate Republicans or the residue of the president’s centre.  Admittedly, this idea is floated by Royal herself and has been met with general derision. Or perhaps Bernard Cazeneuve, a moderate socialist who was Hollande’s

The EU’s three largest economies are stuck in a deep structural slump. The budget is a mess, with money running out. And the bloc is rapidly losing competitiveness. Meanwhile, populist parties committed to overthrowing the organisation are coming closer to power all the time. You might think that the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, had enough serious problems to deal with it. Yet somehow she is finding time for something else: aiming for gender parity. There’s just one problem: jobs for the girls won’t rescue the EU. It is hard to see how carving out lucrative jobs for a handful of women is going to fix

‘We are the party of the youth!’ When the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party launched its state election campaign over the summer in the former east Germany, its lead candidate for Brandenburg Christoph Berndt confidently declared that the party would do well thanks to the legions of young voters it had seduced. Today, as the dust settles on the results of Thuringia and Saxony’s state elections, it appears that Berndt’s predictions have come to pass. According to data published by the pollsters Infratest Dimap, 38 per cent of those aged between 18 and 24 voted for the AfD in Thuringia on Sunday. In neighbouring Saxony, 31 per cent did the

The Paralympics begin in Paris tomorrow but the feel-good factor generated in France by the Olympic Games at the start of the month has long since evaporated. Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist mayor of Paris, was perhaps a little premature in declaring on August 7 that the success of the Games had ‘crushed the far-right’s message’. That message, according to Hidalgo, is one of negativity and division, challenging the prevailing progressive view of France as a country of happy multiculturalism. By far-right she meant the ten million plus people who had voted for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in July’s parliamentary elections. ‘Something incredibly positive is happening, and even good news,

Believing that membership of the European Union was undeniably beneficial for the UK economy, many Remainers struggled to understand why the majority had voted against it. One hypothesis was that ‘Leavers’ felt they’d missed out on the benefits – that perhaps people who thought the wealth hadn’t been spread around fairly had voted for Brexit in order to teach the greedy elite a lesson. Here in Spain, it’s tourism that, to the authorities’ surprise, has suddenly proved unpopular. It’s easy to see why they considered tourism to be undeniably beneficial. After all, it accounts for about 13 per cent of GNP and a quarter of the new jobs created in