Latest from Coffee House

It beggars belief that Mickaël Harpon was employed as a computer expert in the intelligence department at police HQ in Paris. It is also barely credible that when Christophe Castaner, France’s minister of the interior, addressed reporters hours after Harpon had murdered four of his colleagues on Thursday he didn’t know of his background. Castaner said that the perpetrator ‘has never given the slightest cause for concern’, yet on Saturday afternoon France’s anti-terror prosecutor described Harpon’s ‘radical vision of Islam’. The 45-year-old had made no secret of where his allegiance lay. A convert to Islam more than a decade ago, Harpon first came to the attention of the authorities in 2015 when

In December 2015, Donald Trump claimed parts of the French capital were no-go zones for the police. ‘Paris is no longer the same city it was,’ said the then-Republican presidential hopeful. ‘They have sections in Paris that are radicalised… The police refuse to go in there.’ His remarks echoed a similar claim made by Fox News earlier in the year. In response the mayor of the city, Anne Hidalgo, was outraged, and even muttered about pursuing legal action for the ‘honour of Paris’. Trump was wrong. There aren’t any no-go zones in France for the police. There are, however, a growing number of zones that the police enter knowing their

If there’s one politician in Europe as triumphant as Nigel Farage right now it’s Emmanuel Macron. The European election results were not, as many outside France have declared, a humiliation for the French president. On the contrary, they were a success. Publicly the Elysée described the result as “honourable”, but in private the president was reportedly cock-a-hoop. “Basically, we’ve won, it’s a triumph and Macron is jubilant,” said one of his staff. While his LREM party may have trailed Marine Le Pen’s NR by a narrow margin (23.3 per cent to 22.4), Macron’s eyes were on another opponent. Seven years ago the centre-right Les Republicains [LR] were the ruling party in

It was with a mounting sense of disbelief that I counted the votes this evening in my commune in southern France. I’d expected a repudiation of President Emmanuel Macron, but not on this scale. “Catastrophe,” said the centrist deputy mayor as he scanned the voting tallies. At the end of the count, Macron’s list managed an embarrassing 14 per cent, against Le Pen’s, on 36per cent; a result that was repeated in countless other communes from north to south. Macron has his strongholds too, but Le Pen ended uk finishing first across all France with 23.3pc of the vote to his 22.4pc. Did Macron have a ground game, that nobody

As the European parliament elections approach, the continent’s navel-gazing is ever more myopic. Even its two most outward focused states, France and Britain, are consumed by domestic crises. And yet in Europe’s backyard – across the Mediterranean, in Algeria – radical change is taking place with potentially serious ramifications for the European Union and France. Every Friday since February the authoritarian Algerian regime has been the target of tens of thousands of peaceful demonstrators on a scale unknown since the country’s troubled independence from France in 1962. The spark was 82-year-old Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s announcement that he would seek a fifth term as president, despite being chronically debilitated by a stroke

Emmanuel Macron, the once golden boy of European politics, could be about to suffer his first electoral humiliation. A black mood has settled over the president. Ministers have been ordered to campaign and tweet as if their jobs depend on it. Which they might. The president himself, dressed habitually like a funeral director, is on his normal hyper-manic schedule. But he fails to inspire and his electoral traction is barely visible. The spectre haunting the Elysée is that in less than three weeks, Macron’s Napoleonic European project, the so-called EU Renaissance, intended to federalise diplomacy, fiscality and defence, will meet its Waterloo. The president’s luck seems exhausted. Where once nothing

Hundreds of people have been arrested after violent May Day clashes in the centre of Paris. Tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of the French capital to mark the event. Stone-throwing protestors clashed with police, as officers – more than 7,000 of whom were deployed – responded with tear gas. Gilets jaunes, who have held anti-government protests weekly since November, teamed up with May Day marchers. Here are the latest pictures from Paris:

Behind the biggest recent upsets in Western politics lurk two influential advisors: one a scruffy far-right American ideologue who has become a household name; the other a clean-cut Frenchman just over 30 who has always avoided the limelight – until now. Without Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s campaign boss in the final stages of the election, the US president might be promoting golf resorts and picking fights on Twitter full-time now, not running the United States. While in France, Emmanuel Macron’s extraordinary election victory in 2017, six months after Trump’s, would not have been possible without the discreet work of Ismael Emelien. Trump and Macron are often portrayed as the ying

Why aren’t we Brits talking about the revolt just across the English Channel? Our silence on the gilets jaunes and their spectacular, sustained rebellion against the increasingly tyrannical rule of Emmanuel Macron has become pathological. There’s been barely any BBC coverage, no words of solidarity from Corbynistas, not a peep from the trade union movement. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary French people have marched, raged and clashed with the Macron government and Britain looks the other way. It’s bizarre. Our disregard deserves an explanation. This weekend was Act 24 of the gilets jaunes revolt. Named after the yellow vests that all motorists in France must have in their vehicles, the

24 August 2024 At the opening today of the rebuilt Notre Dame Cathedral, after the disastrous fire in April 2019, President Macron defended his decision to retask it with a new mission as a “house for all faiths, and also for those who have no faith.” “Notre Dame is a symbol of France, it has been reconstructed as a symbol of France, and so it is perfectly normal that its magnificence be accessible to everyone,” the president said. The new Notre Dame was even better than the old one, he said. The new Notre Dame is controversial and has divided critics. They have accused it of being little more than

Chinese president Xi Jinping came to France and is taking home 300 Airbus jetliners, a large consignment of frozen chickens and a wind farm. A great triumph for France, declared Emmanuel Macron. And for Macron? Never mind that many of the planes will be built in China. Or that Airbus is no longer a French company but an international one, although headquartered in Toulouse. Or that the hens are unlikely to be free range. It’s hard to argue with a cheque for £30 billion. Or to stop a politician taking credit for a deal that’s been in the works for years. To cement his triumph, Macron hosts Xi today at

Back in December, Emmanuel Macron was a man on edge. His poll numbers were spiralling down the toilet; hundreds of thousands of French who felt alienated from their government were taking to the streets to shout down the French elite in cities and towns across the country; and fires were burning all around Paris. Police officers and protesters-turned-rioters were on the frontlines trading rocks and rubber bullets, resulting in hundreds (if not thousands) of arrests. Macron, the blue-eyed, fresh-faced technocratic politician who marketed himself during the 2017 presidential contest as the Fifth French Republic’s aspiring saviour, was left twiddling his thumbs in the presidential mansion wondering how to address the

Who needs the Comédie-Française when there is Emmanuel Macron in the Élysée? France’s recall last week of its ambassador from Italy for consultation was pure theatre on the part of the president. And it was a decision more for the benefit of his domestic audience than for the coalition government in Rome. In a statement explaining why Christian Masset had been ordered home, the foreign office said that for several months France has been subjected to outrageous statements that have created a ‘serious situation which is raising questions about the Italian government’s intentions towards France.’ France blamed the recall on Luigi Di Maio, the Italian deputy prime minster, who flew to

Emmanuel Macron spoke for three hours, almost without pause, at the first of his grand débats national in Normandy last week, in an attempt to respond to recent protests, while 8,000 policemen kept the gilets jaunes at bay. Yesterday, in the splendour of the Palace of Versailles, Macron hosted scores of international business leaders, many on their way to Davos, to reassure them that France was open for business. They were polite but it is fair to say sceptical, having seen on television the Porsches of bankers burning on the streets of Paris. Today the peripatetic president is with Angela Merkel in the German city of Aachen, known still to

The war of words between the governments of Italy and France escalated last week, after Italy’s deputy Prime Ministers, Luigi Di Maio and Matteo Salvini, gave their support for the gilets jaunes movement against French President Emmanuel Macron. The two sides have repeatedly come to blows over all manner of issues, from immigration to economics, via a whirlwind of thinly veiled insults. But the latest move marks a changing dynamic between the two sides; a once confident and resplendent President Macron now finds himself on the back foot, whilst the Italian leadership, emboldened, have begun to assert themselves across Europe, even to the point of inserting themselves into the affairs