Macron

There was a time earlier this century when few politicians in France would dare criticise Germany. The country was the powerhouse of Europe and Angela Merkel was the de facto president of the continent. Today there is political mileage to be had in attacking Germany, and the assaults have increased this year as campaigning intensifies ahead of June’s European elections. Relations between the two countries are at their lowest ebb in decades In an interview last week Marion Maréchal, the European candidate for Eric Zemmour’s Reconquest party, said that as far as Germany is concerned, ‘France is looking more and more like a battered wife who can’t manage to leave

Last week Emmanuel Macron inaugurated the Olympic aquatic centre that will host the swimming and diving events at this summer’s Paris games. The President was delighted with what he saw, boasting to the press pack that the centre is ‘exemplary from an environmental point of view’. Macron’s party expect the Republicans to make their move in the coming weeks. Unfortunately, from a financial point of view, the centre is anything but exemplary. The initial estimate in 2017 was that the centre would cost €70 million to construct, a figure that was soon revised to €90 million. the final expenditure was €188 million. It is not just the Olympic aquatic centre

Nearly three quarters of French people think it’s time for President Macron to send in the army to restore order to the towns and cities that have been sacked in recent days. According to a poll published yesterday, 70 per cent of people said they wanted the military to be deployed to areas that have been looted, vandalised and firebombed since police shot dead a 17-year-old in western Paris on Tuesday morning. The teenager, Nahel, was laid to rest on Saturday afternoon but it remains to be seen whether the furious reaction to his death – for which a policeman has been charged with voluntary manslaughter – will abate in

Last Friday, a beautiful 12-year-old Paris girl named Lola failed to come home from middle school. Later that evening, her raped, strangled and mutilated body was found near her home in a suitcase. The police quickly arrested a female suspect, ‘Dahbia B’, aged 24, whom they initially described as mentally ill. It then emerged that she was Algerian and was in an ‘irregular situation’ in France. And then that other Algerian migrants had also been arrested. As far as can be determined, on the day of the killing, ‘Dahbia B’ apparently waited for Lola to return home from school, seized her and took her to her sister’s apartment. The killing

Bof! That useful French word – an older and slightly less irritating version of the American-English ‘meh’ – is how many people feel about the re-election of Emmanuel Macron. The centre holds even as things fall apart – in 21st century France, anyway. It was inevitable and in the end easy. Mainstream commentators, almost unanimously pro-Macron, have spent the last few days trying to inject a sense of drama into the vote by suggesting the threat Le Pen posed was great. But it was painfully obvious that Macron would win. At 44, he will almost certainly still be President in 2027, when the constitution (as currently composed) will compel him

My daughter’s Christmas won’t quite be the same this year. She and I are in England but her French mother has been prevented from making the trip by her president. It’s a funny world when hundreds of people can quite easily cross illegally from France to England in small boats – 1,200 in four days last week – but a mother isn’t allowed to take a train to be with her daughter at Christmas. But that is France for you in what Macron’s opponents call his ‘Covid Dictatorship’. Even so his authoritarian measures are doing him and his country a fat lot of good. Yesterday France recorded 91,000 new cases

French president Emmanuel Macron is reported in this week’s Canard Enchaîné – the French equivalent to Private Eye – to have called Boris Johnson a ‘gougnafier’. Gougnafier is an intriguing term with many linguistic roots. It is a nightmarish word to translate. Can you find one word in English to convey someone both rude and useless? That is what gougnafier means. A gougnafier is a boor. A cock-up artist. Someone vulgar. Someone lacking manners. This wasn’t merely a drive-by insult. It was a carefully judged expression of contempt. What does this presidential insult say about the degradation of the Anglo-French relationship to Cold War? Doubtless British and French journalists will

As the COP26 summit gets underway, a diplomatic Brexit row is escalating on the sidelines of the conference over fish. After France threatened to block British boats from its ports and increase checks on vessels over a disagreement on fishing licences, the UK warned it could retaliate if France goes through with it. Suggestions from the French over the weekend that a solution in the form of ‘practical operational measures’ had been found were quickly shot down by the UK side. With a French election looming, Macron can be expected to do more not less of this This morning, Liz Truss doubled down – using a morning media round to say the UK is

President Emmanuel Macron was in an expansive mood this week as he presented his vision for France 2030 from the Elysée palace before an audience of business leaders and students. Macron is incapable of brevity. In a slick production that must have cost a fortune, presented to a fawning hand-picked audience, he spoke for two hours. His elocution was framed by a slick, Tik-Tokish video recalling the 30 glorious years of French economic growth and grand projects after the war. Macron is nothing if not busy. He’s just been on a series of pre-election grand tours, dispensing billions of euros in promises like confetti. That includes a proposed repair of

It’s hard for tabloid journalists to engage in mad hyperbole when politicians seem all too willing to do it for them. Clément Beaume, France’s Secretary of State for European Affairs, has just desperately threatened to turn off the power supply to Britain. Or as Bloomberg so delicately puts it, ‘to leverage [France’s] electricity supplies to the U.K. in an effort to force Boris Johnson’s government to grant access to British fishing waters.’ ‘The Channel Islands, the U.K. are dependent on us for their energy supply,’ said Beaune in an interview on Europe1 radio. ‘They think they can live on their own and badmouth Europe as well. And because it doesn’t