World

Wednesday

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Macron has himself to thank for the rise of Jordan Bardella

The mood has taken a dark and intolerant turn in France since the National Rally’s (NR) victory in the first round of voting in the parliamentary elections last weekend. The left and Macron’s centrists have not accepted their reverse with good grace. On Sunday evening there were spontaneous protests in several cities, including Bordeaux, where police had to use tear gas to disperse an angry crowd of 200. In Cherbourg on Monday, a gang of Antifa assaulted Nicolas Conquer, a candidate for the wing of the centre-right Republicans that has allied with NR. He said later that it was another sign of the ‘normalisation of political violence by the extreme left’.

Steerpike Steerpike

Trump campaign lead blasts Labour meetings as ‘fake news’

Oh dear. As election campaigns draw to a close, Sir Keir Starmer has found himself under scrutiny at the eleventh hour. A Telegraph article about his ‘pragmatic’ approach to US relations that states Labour has been talking to Donald Trump’s team on a ‘daily basis’ has been slammed as ‘fake news’ – by none other than top GOP strategist and Trump’s own campaign manager himself. Oo er. The Telegraph piece states that ‘staff working for David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, have been in near-constant talks with Trump’s team for weeks, since he met the former president’s campaign manager Chris LaCivita in Washington in May’.  But Chris LaCivita took to

Jay Mens

How Trump and Starmer could form an unlikely alliance against Iran

The incoming Labour government has pledged a more robust Iran policy than the Conservative party has had over the last decade. The bar is low. Somehow, nothing new came of Iran’s women’s movement, support for Russia, assassination attempts on British soil, and attacks on all our regional partners – or the unprecedented cross-party consensus this all generated. Tehran may never have a better window for building a bomb Labour is apparently planning a pivot that includes proscribing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), cracking down on Iran’s domestic networks, and more robust deployments to the Middle East and Mediterranean. Whether Keir Starmer’s party will implement these plans is another question. The key difference is that

Tuesday

Andrew Tettenborn

How Hungary’s presidency could shake up the EU

Life in the Berlaymont building, the Brussels headquarters of the European Union, just got a bit more surreal. A striking feature of the EU is its rotating presidency, under which the 27 member states take it in turns to do a six-month stint running its technically supreme political body, the European Council. This week, Hungary, the bad boy of Europe, took over the hot seat. It keeps it until the end of this year. The difficulty is that the government of Viktor Orbán in Budapest, albeit still popular at home, is at loggerheads with the EU. Politically, its scepticism over Ukraine’s war effort and its open dislike for liberal social

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Giorgia Meloni will enjoy taking revenge on Macron

The German government has expressed its ‘concern’ at the prospect of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally forming the next government of France. Poland’s PM Donald Tusk – the man who said Brexiteers deserved ‘a special place in hell’ – responded to the result by saying ‘this is all really starting to smell very dangerous’. Not in Italy, where the odour wafting down from France after the first round of the parliamentary election was rather to the liking of Giorgia Meloni. ‘I congratulate the Rassemblement National and its allies for the clear success,’  she said. No EU leader will have enjoyed Macron’s humiliation at the hands of Le Pen more than Meloni As in

Roger Kimball

What the Supreme Court immunity ruling means for Donald Trump

Yesterday, reviewing last week’s Supreme Court decisions, I noted that the court would probably issue its final opinion of the season, on the question of presidential immunity. So it turned out to be. Yesterday, ‘Trump v. United States’ dropped. For the first time, the Court pondered the question, ‘Does a president have immunity from prosecution?’ or, to use the language of the opinion, ‘Whether and if so to what extent does a former president enjoy presidential immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct alleged to involve official acts during his tenure in office.’ The answer was more or less what I predicted. I wrote that, while no one outside the hallowed halls of the Court really knew how the

Edward Howell

Will North Korea send troops to Ukraine?

When dealing with North Korea, it’s important not just to look at what the regime says about its present and future policies. Arguably more important is what the regime doesn’t say. Sometimes we might need to read between the lines.  The two meetings between Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin within the space of a year indicate that the pair’s bromance is more than just for show. Russia’s relations with North Korea look to be on an upward trajectory after the signing of a ‘comprehensive strategic partnership’ between Kim and Putin. The mutual defence pact, where each side agreed to assist the other in the event of any external aggression,

Monday

Freddy Gray Freddy Gray

Can Joe Biden go on?

20 min listen

The dust has settled from the TV debate that was catastrophic for Joe Biden. What are the possible options going forward? Are things changing behind the scenes? Freddy Gray assesses the situation with Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of The National Interest. 

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Starmer’s Europe dilemma

13 min listen

As Europe comes to terms with the fallout from Marine Le Pen’s victory in the first round of their parliamentary elections, Cindy Yu talks to Freddy Gray and Katy Balls about what it all means for Keir Starmer. If he does win the UK’s own election on Thursday, he faces a European landscape that could be harder to navigate. What do the results mean for the UK and what reaction has there been? Produced by Cindy Yu and Patrick Gibbons.

Steerpike Steerpike

Jill Biden revealed as Vogue magazine cover star

Oh dear. Vogue magazine’s August cover dropped this morning and it transpires that its editorial team has decided on a rather curious cover star in the form of, er, Jill Biden. The First Lady has been revealed as the central focus of the summer cover a mere four days after her husband gave a pitiful performance at the presidential candidate debate on Thursday. Talk about bad timing… President Biden stumbled and mumbled his way through his disastrous debate with Donald Trump last week – so much so that media outlets across the world questioned just how the President could remain the Democratic party’s choice for the 2024 US election. Yet

Matthew Lynn

What the markets have wrong about the French election results 

The Paris stock market is soaring. French bonds are rising once again, and the banks are suddenly looking a lot healthier. As the results of the French elections came through overnight, and it looked less likely that Marine Le Pen’s National Rally would have enough votes to form a government by itself, investors started to buy into France. Sure, the result might be messy, but chaos is a lot better than the shambolic mix of protectionism and welfare spending that passes for an economic plan for the NR. But hold on. In reality, the crisis has just been postponed – and the crash when it comes will be far worse.

Monica Porter

How Viktor Orbán plans to ‘Make Europe Great Again’

Hungary has just begun its presidency of the Council of the EU, as part of the member states’ six-monthly rotation process. Unsurprisingly, prime minister Viktor Orbán is all keyed up for the challenge. For years the bureaucrats of Brussels have tried to force the stubbornly contrary PM to change his ways, withholding billions of euros as punishment for his administration’s ‘democratic backsliding’. But sticking to his guns, Orbán has declared that, on the contrary, it is he who will ‘take over Brussels’ and change the EU. Hubris indeed. After all, David Cameron with his emollient charms was unable to get the EU to alter its entrenched culture, which ultimately led to

Steerpike Steerpike

Nigel Farage turns on Marine Le Pen

Ooh la la! After a tricky few weeks for Reform UK, leader Nigel Farage has aimed his sights towards the old enemy. Reform’s polling figures first dipped following that Nick Robinson interview and in recent days Farage has faced serious questions over the behaviour of both candidates and activists. The party’s former candidate in Erewash, Liam Booth-Isherwood, yesterday disowned the outfit and backed his Tory rival instead. Now, as he battles to keep momentum up ahead of 4 July, Farage has distanced himself from fellow Eurosceptic Marine Le Pen. Following yesterday’s Reform rally – with 4,500 attendees in tow – the leader used an interview with Unherd to distance himself

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

France’s political upheaval is bad news for Ukraine

It has been a bad few days for Volodymyr Zelensky. The president of Ukraine must have covered his face with his hands as he watched Joe Biden’s rambling performance against Donald Trump in last week’s televised debate. Trump’s view on Ukraine’s war with Russia are well-known: he wants an end to the conflict Then came the results from the first round of the parliamentary elections in France. There is still a second round to play but one thing is certain: the next government will not be one of Emmanuel Macron’s choice. His political project – what he described as ‘neither left nor right’ – is dead, and so to all

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Why is Putin really trying to interfere in the UK election?

Who says Britain is no longer a Great Power? To those of a declinist cast of mind, it must stand as a rebuke that, even with everything else on his plate, Vladimir Putin still regards our elections as worth interfering in. And, what’s more, those elections are so important that the Aussies are taking enough of an interest in them to consider that Russian interference newsworthy.   Russia may be trying to influence our elections, which as I say is flattering and all, but they aren’t trying very hard At the same time as it’s heartening that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation considers this a big deal it’s also, I suppose,

Ilya Somin

The (selfish) case for immigration

The 2024 general election ‘should be the immigration election’, Nigel Farage has said. The Reform leader’s wish has been granted: the topic of immigration is a major focus of debate. It’s also a big issue in the United States’ presidential election. Much of the debate in both countries depicts immigrants as a burden that receiving countries should accept (if at all) only out of altruism or a sense of obligation. But this is misleading, and ignores the many benefits of migration to Britain and other receiving countries. Open migration is not just charity for migrants Accepting migrants is the right thing to do, in part because it saves many thousands of

John Keiger John Keiger

National Rally brings a political earthquake to France

There is one big winner from the first round of the French legislative elections – and several big losers. The winner is the Rassemblement National (National Rally) with 33 per cent of voters backing its candidates or their allies – on a turnout of 67 per cent, the highest in decades. The RN now has a fighting chance of forming a working government from 7 July.  Marine Le Pen has called on voters to give her party an ‘absolute majority’ in the National Assembly in the next round of elections on Sunday. ‘We need an absolute majority for Jordan Bardella to be named prime minister by Emmanuel Macron in eight

Sunday

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Marine Le Pen’s National Rally is on course to take power

Emmanuel Macron suffered the biggest humiliation of his presidency on Sunday evening as his Renaissance party was beaten into third place in the first round of the parliamentary elections. Exit polls confirmed what the opinion polls predicted last week: that Marine Le Pen’s National Rally is now the dominant force in French politics. It surpassed the 31 per cent score in the European elections on June 9 – a victory that prompted Macron to call a snap election – winning 34 per cent of the vote. The left-wing Popular Front coalition was second with 29 per cent, and Macron’s centrist Renaissance party trailed in third on 22 per cent. The

Jonathan Spyer

Will Hezbollah declare war on Israel?

In Israel currently, people are waiting for a possible escalation in the north. The United States, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Russia and the Netherlands have called on their citizens in Lebanon to leave the country. Western embassies in Lebanon are exploring the coastal area to locate possible points from where an evacuation by sea could be carried out. The German foreign ministry, in a message on its website, drily notes: ‘A further escalation could also lead to a complete suspension of air traffic from Rafiq Hariri Airport. Leaving Lebanon by air would then no longer be possible.’   The USS Wasp amphibious assault ship has arrived via the Strait of Gibraltar to the

Michael Taube

Trudeau must uncover the truth about what happened in Kabul

Barely a week has gone by before Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is back in the news again – and for all the wrong reasons. Trudeau and his Liberal government have been involved in a litany of mistakes, missteps and messes since they took power in 2015. These include previous allegations of the PM wearing blackface, ethics breaches, questionable spending history – and more. And now a new incident this week can be added to the list. This controversy, more than most, seems particularly egregious. The Globe and Mail’s blistering story alleged that then-National Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan instructed Canada’s Armed Forces to focus on rescuing about 225 Sikhs in Afghanistan during the 2021