France

Tuesday

Gavin Mortimer

Emmanuel Macron’s new third way

Édouard Philippe is the perfect fit to be Emmanuel Macron’s Premier Minister. A one-time Socialist who then switched to the centre-right Les Républicains, the 46-year-old mirrors the ambiguity of his president. Philippe has been the mayor of the northern port town of Le Havre since 2010 and the region’s MP for the last five years. Since his accession to the presidency last week, Macron has rechristened his party, La République en Marche [LRM], and in nominating Philippe as his PM he’s hoping to send a message to the country that he really is a centrist president who ‘is neither left, nor right’. When his party unveiled 428 of its parliamentary candidates

Thursday

Taki

High life | 11 May 2017

Much like the poor, the charity ball has always been with us, but lately it’s turned into a freak. Something is rotten in the state of New York, and the name of it is the Met Gala. Once upon a time, the Metropolitan Museum’s gala ball was fun. Serious social-climbing multimillionaires competed openly for the best tables and for proximity to blue-blooded socialites such as C.Z. Guest and her ilk. Pat Buckley, wife of William F., ran the show with military precision, allotting the best seats to those who had paid a fortune for them, but also to those who were young and handsome and whose pockets were not as

Wednesday

Jonathan Miller

François Hollande has handed his acolyte Emmanuel Macron a poisoned chalice

Every politician in France is on manoeuvres. Vast chasms have opened up in the anti-Le Pen coalition and the country faces another two-round election for the National Assembly in June. It’s likely that a fractured and dysfunctional legislature will emerge, complicating or even making impossible the program proposed by president-elect Emmanuel Macron. Nonetheless, Macron will still be hoping that amidst this electoral entropy he can push his own slate to the forefront. This is a big ask. Possibly only about 20 per cent of voters supported him for the presidency for any reason other than he was not Marine Le Pen. His program is either not understood or not supported by the vast

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

The National Front loses its golden girl

The golden girl of the National Front has gone and with her go the grassroot hopes for an alternative to Marine Le Pen. The decision of Marion Maréchal-Le Pen to withdraw from political life wasn’t entirely unexpected, rumours first emerged earlier in the year, but it is nonetheless a heavy blow for the party rank and file just days after their disappointing presidential election result. And it was a disappointment, no matter how Marine Le Pen tries to dress up her 34 per cent share of the vote in Sunday’s second round against Emmanuel Macron. The truth is that she was trounced by a political novice with a manifesto that

Monday

Melanie McDonagh

It’s time to put ‘Not In My Name’ on the ballot paper

As Jonathan Miller astutely observes, the abstainers and spoilers in the French election are now the real third force in French politics. The number of blank and spoiled votes came to some 12 per cent of the total, a record proportion. And usefully in France you can actually submit a blank ballot paper so you can purposefully vote for no one, without going to the trouble of spoiling your vote. Given a choice between Marine Le Pen, squarely unreformist economically, and a man who has never held elected office, well, you can’t quite blame them, can you? Not In My Name could be the working title of the third political force

Theo Hobson Theo Hobson

Can a liberal Catholic now save France?

France is a muddled nation, n’est-ce pas? And at the root of the muddle is, guess what, religion. Maybe the muddle is a godsend. For if the right were more united on religion, Marine Le Pen would surely have won. The Front National is the strongest far-right party in Western Europe, supported by about a third of the French people. But it is also the most muddled. It has a nostalgic idea of the nation as a traditional organic culture. But it seems utterly ignorant of the gaping problem with such a project. Traditional French culture is split between Catholicism and secularism. Marine Le Pen emphasised secularism, in order to project

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

After Le Pen’s defeat, is the Front National heading for a split?

So what now for Marine Le Pen and the National Front? On an evening when the party polled a record number of votes in a French election, twice as many as when they reached the second round in 2002, there was little sense of triumph away from the cameras. ‘There’s obviously a bit of disappointment, it would be dishonest to say otherwise’, said Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, niece of Marine. She had said last week that 40 per cent of the vote would represent a significant victory for the National Front but their final share of 34 per cent fell some way short of that figure. ‘We’ve clearly not succeeded to convince the

Sunday

Charles Moore

Le Pen – the female champion of the excluded – trumps Europe’s shouty men

Pierre Poujade was a French shopkeeper who, in the mid-1950s, led quite a powerful right-wing revolt in favour of the little man against the elites. The leader of his party’s youth branch was Jean-Marie Le Pen. The word ‘Poujadiste’ is not usually intended as a compliment in France or here, and the late Christopher Soames did not intend it as such — though he served in her cabinet — when he privately described Mrs Thatcher as ‘Poujade with tits’. But if, as seems quite likely, Marine Le Pen wins 40 per cent of the votes in the French presidential election on Sunday (let alone if she wins a majority), something

Saturday

Jonathan Miller

It’s now time to say: Congratulations President Macron

There is perhaps some remote mathematical chance that France’s new elected monarch will be struck down by a meteorite before he is officially inaugurated in a grand parade on the Champs Elysée on May 14th, amidst a 21-gun salute, helicopters flying overhead, the Garde Républicaine in full-dress uniform on shining horses, generals posed upright in their ceremonial 4x4s, bands playing, bunting flapping. Barring that, Mr President, you appear to have played a blinder, winning the keys to the Elysée in what appears to have been a stunning political insurgency, and you have done so promising to reform an immobilised French economy. Your victory will be hailed as evidence that Europe

Friday

Alice Pfeiffer

L’abstention: the third option for France

This weekend, France will again go to the polls in the final round of voting. The choice is between Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron. And while the polls look very much in Macron’s favour, many fear that Le Pen could still be in with a chance. Not so much because of the votes she will receive, but rather because of the votes Macron may not.   65 percent of disappointed Mélenchon voters are claiming they will abstain, according to a recent survey. This reflects a rising trend in France, called ‘l’abstention’ – the refusal to vote. For many French voters, both options they are presented with are equally unacceptable: having to choose between

Thursday

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 4 May 2017

‘Emmanuel Macron est le plus grand con du monde,’ said the elderly gent taking the vacant seat on my right at the Marine Le Pen rally last week. He had slicked-back white hair, a little hog’s-bristle moustache and broken-down white trainers. Plus grand means ‘biggest’, du monde means ‘in the world’, and con means, well, have a guess. A teenage girl and her pal squeezed past to occupy the spare pair of seats on my left. They flung themselves joyfully into the chanting and singing before they’d even sat down. The Palais Nikaia, a concert venue next to Nice airport, holds 8,000 people. Ten minutes before Marine Le Pen was

Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Emmanuel Macron is the perfect product of Parisian groupthink

As the polls reopen this weekend for the coronation of Emmanuel Macron, the political establishment will congratulate themselves for having once again imposed their Parisian groupthink on the entire country. Without getting too bogged down in the election, which Marine Le Pen will certainly lose, the question poses itself: how does this imposition of ideology work? To see how, and as a small distraction from the great events sweeping the national stage, may I invite you to my own corner of southern France? Specifically, to the city of Béziers, whose 75,000 inhabitants face monumental challenges in the struggle to adapt to globalisation and to escape years of decay presided over

Gavin Mortimer Gavin Mortimer

Slick Macron triumphs over Le Pen in France’s feisty TV debate

There were times during last night’s televised debate between Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron when it resembled more a playground slanging match than a pitch to become president of France. The National Front leader and her En Marche! counterpart traded insults, exchanged stares and did their best to shout each other down during two-and-a-half hours of enthralling but unedifying television. A snap poll taken by French broadcaster BFMTV shortly after the dust settled on the extraordinary encounter showed that 63 per cent of people believed Macron had come out on top, while an online poll in Le Parisien newspaper also has the centrist candidate as the clear winner. There had been

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Masonic bodge

Left-wing groupie Paul Mason has written a costume drama about the suppression of the Paris commune in 1871. We meet Louise Michel and her all-female gang of arsonists as they’re carted off to jail for setting fire to the Tuileries. After a harsh stint in the cells, they’re shipped out to the French colony of New Caledonia, in the eastern Pacific, where they live in an open prison. Things aren’t too bad. They mingle with the natives, enjoy the local hooch, and sing comradely songs about ‘spilling the blood impure’. Escape is on the agenda. A committee of anarchists is said to be making swift progress across the ocean in

Theodore Dalrymple

Liberté, egalité, supériorité

The French election, of unprecedented interest, hazard and potential for violence, has been largely about who is to blame. Blame for what, exactly? For the country’s chronic malaise. But is it the fault of the bankers, the bosses, the bureaucracy, or the immigrants? Quite often the British press gives the impression that France is in some kind of deplorable condition that we must at all costs avoid, a hybrid, perhaps, of economic Guinea-Bissau and ideological North Korea. In part, this is because the French themselves so strongly lament the state of their country; I have a whole shelf of books (by no means exhaustive) in which French authors predict its

Douglas Murray

Is Le Pen really ‘far-right’?

What is ‘far-right’? With the progress of Marine Le Pen to France’s presidential run-off, the term has been liberally used — as it has been over recent years across the West. Golden Dawn in Greece, Jobbik in Hungary, and the Sweden Democrats are all said to be far-right, to name but three. The fact that the first two of those groups engage in intimidation, racism and overt displays of political violence would ordinarily distinguish them from a peaceful democratic party opposed to mass immigration like the Sweden Democrats. Yet everywhere there is the same name creep. The website Breitbart is frequently called far-right, as is the administration of Donald Trump.

Ariane Bankes

A husband to die for

What will we do when there are no longer caches of letters to piece together and decipher; only vague memories of myriad emails? We will be like butterfly hunters flailing around with our nets, hoping to catch some rare specimen with glittering wings among the detritus of daily exchanges. The letters of Ida Nettleship, first wife of the arch-bohemian Augustus John, are a case in point: gathered together here from diverse sources by her granddaughter Rebecca John and expertly introduced by John’s biographer Michael Holroyd, they constitute a rare epistolary treasure trove. Spanning some 15 years, from Ida’s late teens to her early death from puerperal fever at 30, following

Wednesday

David Patrikarakos

Could the French far left propel Marine Le Pen to victory?

The French philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye’s career has encompassed everything from fiction to prose poetry, but he will best be remembered for his contribution to political science: Horseshoe Theory. This maxim holds that the far left and far right, rather than being at opposite ends of a linear political spectrum, in fact closely resemble each other. This is because the political spectrum is not linear but instead curves like a horseshoe, the right and left extremes of which almost meet. Faye’s theory has often been derided for being simplistic, so he could be forgiven for feeling a quiet sense of vindication after a recent survey of supporters of the defeated far

Tuesday

Gavin Mortimer

France’s burkini row returns

Bad weather swept across southern France over the May Day holiday but summer is just around the corner and with it will come the burkini. Last week, a call was issued to burkini-wearers to gather at the Cannes film festival later this month, with the organiser saying it will be the perfect moment ‘to celebrate together this freedom in the town that was the first to ban the burkini’. The burkini brouhaha of last August made headlines around the world but it soon blew over like a summer storm. A handful of beaches on the Cote d’Azur banned young women from wearing the Islamic swimsuit, citing concerns over public disorder,

Sunday

Charles Moore

Does Emmanuel Macron represent the ‘Uber-isation’ of politics?

A French friend tells me that Emmanuel Macron represents the ‘Uber-isation’ of politics. I suppose that makes Le Pen the spokesman for the black cab interest. I want to live in a country which manages a modus vivendi between these two schools of thought. If life is all Uber, it will be freer and cheaper, but also more ignorant and grotty. If life is all black cabs, prices will be too high and cabbies will revert to the surlier service they used to give in the 20th century. Perhaps such peaceful coexistence is an impossible dream. This is an extract from Charles Moore’s Notes, which appears in this week’s Spectator