France

The honeymoon is over for Emmanuel Macron. His first 11 months in office have been something of a breeze — defined by economic growth, international approval and museum openings in the Middle East. But France’s youthful President is gearing up for months of domestic hostility. ‘The war of attrition’ was the headline in Tuesday’s Le Parisien. Alongside this stark declaration was a photograph of one of the President’s enemies, a prominent figure in CGT, the hard-left trade union. Burly, bearded and belligerent, Laurent Brun, head of the union’s railway section, vowed intransigence in the three-month rolling railway strike that started this week. Macron is as determined as the strikers and

France’s socialist party are to be congratulated for pulling off the remarkable feat of selecting as their next leader a man who makes François Hollande look dashing. As one French newspaper said of Olivier Faure, he’s “a man of consensus at the head of a moribund socialist party”. Faure, 49, won’t be officially anointed the first secretary of the socialist party until their congress next month, but the job is his now that his only challenger, Stéphane Le Foll, withdrew from the leadership race on Friday. The word ‘apparatchik’ could have been invented for Faure, a man whose Wikipedia page should be required reading for all insomniacs. It traces his

The news that Marion Maréchal-Le Pen will share a stage this week with US conservatives, addressing the annual Conservative Political Action Conference event shortly after vice-president Mike Pence, has caused much excitement within the French right. The 28-year-old Maréchal-Le Pen, niece of Marine, the leader of the National Front, withdrew from political life in June after her party’s disastrous result in the second round of the presidential election. Allegedly disillusioned with the direction the party had taken in the previous months, focusing more on the economy and the EU, than on social conservative issues that are close to her heart, the departure of the golden girl of the National Front dismayed the

Since Gavin Williamson was appointed as Defence Secretary, the Conservative MP has been in a rush to prove his credentials. From battling the Treasury over proposed military cuts to posing with rescue dogs, Williamson certainly seems a man in a hurry. However, with speed comes mistakes. Today’s Financial Times reports of a diplomatic gaffe committed by Williamson this week. Ahead of Theresa May’s speech this weekend in Germany on a new security relationship with the EU, the Prime Minister has been doing her best to charm European leaders – recently hosting Emmanuel Macron. However, this week Williamson dismissed the importance of one of France in defence matters. Asked about the French President’s

In 2015, millions of French people tuned in to watch French Bashing, a television documentary which sought to explain why those horrible Anglo-Saxons were so consistently mean about France. The whole gamut of historic insults and stereotypes were analysed in the 90-minute film, from popular portrayals of the country as an ungovernable nation of idle protesters to the ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ moniker that dates back to 1995. It struck a chord at a time when the country was near rock-bottom, confused under the presidency of Francois Hollande, hit by terrorism, high unemployment and an unrelenting stream of negative international media coverage. ‘French-bashing had become a sort of buzzword for the