France

The Colonnas in Corsica are a bit like the Smiths in Britain. We are numerous. But in smart Parisian circles, the mention of this name sends a chill through the room. Yvan Colonna, a member of my extended clan (though not a known relative), was the most notorious Corsican nationalist of his time. He was convicted of the 1998 killing of a Préfét of Corsica, the highest republican official on the island. Last month, Yvan was himself murdered in a mainland French prison.  He was attacked by a fellow prisoner, an Islamist who had been arrested and brought over from Afghanistan. It was an especially gruesome affair. Colonna was beaten and then strangled

It has been a torrid few days in France. In the early hours of Saturday morning, a former Argentine rugby international, Federico Aramburú, was shot dead on a chic Paris street after an altercation in a bar. The suspect is a notorious far-right activist who allegedly told Aramburú that he didn’t belong in France. On Monday Corsican nationalist Yvan Colonna died, three weeks after he was beaten into a coma by fellow prisoner and infamous extremist, Franck Elong Abé, an Islamist who was captured fighting for the Taliban a decade ago. It is alleged that Abé justified his attack on the grounds that Colonna ‘had bad-mouthed the Prophet’. Even among battle-hardened Jihadists, Abé was

Emmanuel Macron unveiled his campaign manifesto in a carefully orchestrated press conference on Thursday and his pledges to cut taxes and reform the welfare system dominated the headlines on Friday morning. But the president also touched on defence, promising that spending – €32.3 billion when he came to power in 2017 – will rise to €50 billion by 2025. Some of that money will be invested in cyber warfare technology, as well, presumably, on ammunition; if reports are to be believed the French army would run out of ordnance after four days of a major war. It’s a favourite pastime of Anglophones to mock the French military, though only those

With just 24 days to go before the first round of French presidential voting, the political landscape has become borderline surreal, a dream state of self-induced hallucinations. The war in Ukraine has utterly overshadowed the vote. Any resemblance to an actual democratic contest might now be regarded as coincidental. If the current polls are right, Macron will enter the second round with Marine Le Pen in a straight replay of 2017, with the same inevitable result. I have my doubts about these polls. But it might not matter much who faces Macron: unloved yet unbeatable. Macron isn’t even campaigning. He’s at 30 per cent in polls for the first round, campaigning through a

At the time it probably felt like a good idea for Marine Le Pen’s campaign team. A photo of her shaking hands with Vladimir Putin, taken when she met the Russian president in Moscow in 2017, would emphasise to the electorate that she was a serious player on the world stage. The photo was included in Le Pen’s campaign manifesto, over one million of which have been distributed the length and breadth of France. Now they are being hastily withdrawn by party members as Le Pen does her best to distance herself from the most despised man in the West. Le Pen is not the only presidential candidate to have

Since Russia invaded Ukraine last week the western media has focused on little else. In Britain this concentration is understandable: the country has finally come out of Covid and there is a large gap to be filled on the airwaves and in the newspapers. Not so in France, still encumbered by Covid restrictions, where in just over five weeks voters go to the polls in the first round of the presidential election. As much as the French are troubled by events in Ukraine – a recent poll reported that 88 per cent of those canvassed were ‘shocked’ by the Russian invasion – they will vote on issues closer to home:

It is bordering on tasteless amidst the horror of war in Europe to question the political impact of the conflict on the first round of the French presidential election in 44 days. But it’s naïve to imagine that such thoughts are not occurring to the politicians themselves, not least Emmanuel Macron. As I write this on Friday, Macron has still to declare his candidacy for the presidency. He’s been letting his opponents on the right and left fight it out amongst themselves for as long as possible. He could declare tomorrow at the Salon d’Agriculture, where he is scheduled to make the customary presidential appearance. Or maybe not. Macron has

Just two months from the presidential elections, Emmanuel Macron’s self-belief and risk-taking — not to mention setbacks — seem to know few bounds. And no more so than in foreign affairs. Following the French President’s telephone conversation with Vladimir Putin over Ukraine on 20 February, the Elysée triumphantly announced that a Biden-Putin summit was agreed in principle, only for the Kremlin to pour cold water on the idea the next morning. Washington then followed suit, before Putin announced the recognition of the two breakaway Ukrainian republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. This humiliation comes after Macron’s Moscow visit on 7 February, which concluded with a live press conference in which Putin

While the world is focused on Ukraine, Emmanuel Macron has withdrawn all French forces from Mali. Last weekend, thousands of soldiers were flown out of the former French colony after nine years of fighting Islamist insurgents in the Sahel. Malian protesters bid the French soldiers farewell by shouting ‘Shit to France’ at the departing planes. Following a military coup in May, Mali’s ‘interim President’ Colonel Assimi Goïta began to tire of the French and their calls for free elections. There were also lingering doubts over France’s motivation, stoked by a Russian disinformation campaign. So Goïta began looking for allies who could provide him with muscle to fight the Islamist insurgency

President Emmanuel Macron may or may not have imagined that his mission to Moscow would head off armed conflict in Ukraine. He will nevertheless have calculated that while his mission was an abject diplomatic failure, it was a modest political success. The French pro-Macron media (most of it) bigged up the visit as a triumph of French diplomacy and an affirmation of Macron’s global stature. Plus, all the jetting back and forth gave the President an excuse to further delay announcing his candidacy for the presidential election, the first round of which is in just 47 days. He might have failed to stop Putin’s aggression, but at least he was

Vladimir Putin does not think in the way the West does. Of course sanctions will hurt. But so what? He may be wrong in his strategic calculations, but he is not, as Boris Johnson claimed over the weekend, irrational. Putin is an old-school strategist. This is one of the reasons that sanctions will not have the desired impact. An import ban on Russian gas would definitely hurt the Russian economy, but that seems highly unlikely. Italian President Mario Draghi said on Friday that we should not touch gas. It is now the guy who sits in Moscow, rather than Draghi, who is willing to do ‘whatever it takes’. An import

In February 1995, Jacques Chirac was at 12 per cent in the polls. Two months later he was president. Two months is precisely the time remaining before the first round of voting in the 2022 presidential election. At the moment, President Macron’s advantage looks unassailable: the Economist’s tracker puts his chances of being re-elected at over 80 per cent. But just how unpredictable might this election be? After a few weeks of relative inertia, there are signs that the traditionally volatile French electorate are beginning to rumble. Last weekend, the campaigns shifted into a higher gear, and not necessarily to the advantage of the incumbent. In a phenomenon I think

There are just 59 days to go until voters turn out for the first round of the French presidential election and it is not even clear who will make the starting gate. For now, all the pundits and the bookies are predicting the re-election of President Emmanuel Macron. But the real story is about how French democracy operates. General de Gaulle designed the Fifth Republic to keep extremists out of the Elysée. So, to get into the presidential election, a candidate must present the Conseil Constitutionnelle with 500 sponsorships (parrainages) from geographically dispersed senior elected officials. The real story is about how French democracy operates Previously this was not a problem.