Gavin Mortimer

If a week is a long time in politics then eight years is an eternity. Just ask Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron. Back in 2017 the two newly-elected presidents met for the first time in Brussels. They shook hands for the cameras, and kept shaking for several seconds, a game of machismo that tickled the commentariat. ‘That’s how you ensure you are respected,’ declared Macron. ‘You have to show you won’t make small concessions.’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DwijJfVbBg The French president believed he was the future. Little did he know he would be the last of the progressive poster boys. The Guardian reported in 2017 how in Brussels Macron ‘pointedly swerved past Trump to embrace German chancellor Angela Merkel’.

Spain has been receiving some lavish praise of late in the British press. ‘Booming Spain is on track to a new age of prosperity’ was the headline in the Times last week, a response to the news that its GDP is forecast to grow by 2.5 per cent this year. The Financial Times was similarly effusive about Spain’s economy in a piece last October, in which it quoted the country’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez. ‘I can say that Spain is living an extraordinary moment. Our country is experiencing great success.’ The Times explained that Spain is growing at three times the rate of the Eurozone for three reasons: immigration, tourism and lower energy prices.

Britain can’t cope, that was the response of Nigel Farage to last week’s disclosure by the Office for National Statistics that the population will hit 72.5 million in 2032. The leader of Reform said that Britain has already reached saturation point at 67.6 million, adding: ‘Our quality of life for all of us is diminishing directly as a result of the population explosion.’ The French feel the same, and examples abound of the strain being placed on the country as a result of mass immigration. The Friday before last a class of schoolchildren in Paris were having a PE lesson when it came to an abrupt halt. City Council officials arrived and ordered the children to collect their belongings and vacate the sports hall because it was needed to house 200 migrants.

To the great surprise of very few the European Court of Human Rights this week rejected an appeal by Calin Georgescu to overturn last month’s annulment of Romania’s presidential election. The Eurosceptic Georgescu had won the first round of November’s election, but days before the second round Romania’s Constitutional Court cancelled the result because of alleged Russian interference on social media. In its decision, the ECHR said that Georgescu’s appeal fell outside its jurisdiction. That was the bad news for Georgescu. The good news was the publication of a poll this week that puts him firmly in front to win the election when it is re-run in May.

The PM's warm words will count for little. Starmer's pledge is reminiscent of the one made by Theresa May in June 2017 Keir Starmer has pledged to act in light of the revelations about Southport killer Axel Rudakubana. The 17-year-old murdered three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class last year, and it has since emerged that Rudakubana – who also pleaded guilty to owning an online version of an al-Qaeda training manual – had been flagged for his radicalism on three occasions between 2019 and 2021. As the Prime Minister explained: ‘On each of these occasions, a judgment was made that he did not meet the threshold for intervention, a judgment that was clearly wrong and which failed those families.

A poll published last week by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) found that much of the world is relishing the return of Donald Trump to the White House. Eighty-four per cent of Indians think Trump will be good for their country as do 61 per cent of Saudis. In Russia, South Africa, China and Brazil, more citizens have faith in The Donald than don’t. It is in Europe where pessimism reigns. Only 15 per cent of Britons believe Trump will benefit them, a figure that rises to 22 per cent in the EU.

This week nine more charges of sexual abuse were levelled against Abbé Pierre, the late French Roman Catholic priest who for decades was regarded as a modern-day saint. This brings to 33 the number of charges, ranging from sexual assault to the rape of a boy, all alleged to have been committed between the 1960s and shortly before the priest’s death in 2007 at the age of 94. Among the latest complainants are a woman now 58, who detailed how she was assaulted by Abbé Pierre exactly fifty years ago. ‘Several times I’ve wanted to shout to the world that this man isn’t who he says he is,’ the woman said in an interview this week. ‘But who would have believed me? People weren’t ready to hear that about Abbé Pierre.

There will be two politicians from France in Washington next week to see Donald Trump sworn in as president – and Emmanuel Macron isn’t one of them. The president didn’t get an invite (unlike his European rival, Giorgia Meloni) and nor for that matter did Marine Le Pen. It says much about how Reconquest is viewed by Team Trump that a party with no seats in the National Assembly is invited to his inauguration The two French politicians invited to witness arguably the greatest political resurrection in American political history are Eric Zemmour and Sarah Knafo. The latter was until a few months ago best known as Zemmour’s partner – professionally and privately.

Clara Chappaz is the minister delegate for Artificial Intelligence and the digital economy in the government of Emmanuel Macron. At the weekend she appeared on a television discussion entitled ‘Trump-Musk: Are we ready?’ Chappaz, 35, is very much a Macronist, an entrepreneur who did her MBA at Harvard Business School before launching a successful start-up. French progressives are flexible in their approach to free speech. They’re all for it, as long as they agree with it She expressed her growing concern about the direction certain social media platforms were headed, and the consequences for millions of French people who use them. ‘We have to make sure that wrong opinions are taken off the platforms,’ she declared.

Emmanuel Macron has a problem and its name is not Elon Musk. It is interference of an altogether more dangerous nature, a brazen attempt to destabilise France. On Thursday, while Thierry Breton – until recently France’s commissioner in Brussels – called on the EU ‘to investigate Musk's practices’, a reference to the American’s regular commentary on European politics, the French government expelled an Algerian ‘influencer’ known as Doualemn. He had his residence permit cancelled and was deported after posting messages to his 138,000 followers on social media that were anti-Semitic and an incitement to violence. By Thursday evening, Doualemn was back in France after the Algerians put him on the first flight to Paris.

A poll this week in France found that 78 per cent of respondents are in favour of proscribing the wearing of Muslim headscarves at universities and also for classroom helpers on school outings. The poll was conducted after comments by the Interior Minister, Bruno Retailleau, in a newspaper interview. ‘Helpers [on school trips] don’t have to wear headscarves,’ he said. ‘The headscarf is not just a piece of cloth: it’s a banner for Islamism, and a statement of women’s inferiority in relation to men.’ In the same interview, Retailleau promised to stem immigration into France because it ‘is partly linked to Islamism’.

It was party time in Paris and elsewhere in France on Tuesday evening as hundreds of people celebrated the death of Jean-Marie Le Pen. The figurehead of France’s far-right died earlier in the day aged 96 and within hours a jubilant crowd had assembled in the capital’s Place de la République. Champagne was uncorked, fireworks were sent into the night sky and there were chants of ‘The dirty racist is dead’ and ‘Marine, you are next’. Marine Le Pen assumed leadership of the National Front in 2011, 40 years after her father helped found the party that is now known as the National Rally.

Europe’s leaders rounded on Elon Musk on Monday as the American tech billionaire continued to air his views on the state of the Old Continent. Although Musk – who in a fortnight’s time will be president Donald’s Trump efficiency tsar – has focused most of his ire on Britain, he’s also endorsed Alternative for Germany (AfD) in a newspaper column ahead of next month’s parliamentary election. Norway’s prime minister, Jonas Gahr Store, said in an interview that he finds it ‘worrying that a man with enormous access to social media and large financial resources is so directly involved in the internal affairs of other countries’. According to Store: ‘This is not how it should be between democracies and allies.

A poll in France has named Gisèle Pelicot as the country’s person of the year for the courage and dignity she displayed during the rape trial that transfixed the West in the autumn. The Independent newspaper argued last week that the Frenchwoman deserves to be named the world’s Person of 2024 – not Donald Trump – and Prospect magazine agreed, saying Pelicot has ‘gifted others with hope for change’. Gisèle Pelicot is certainly an inspirational woman, the word used by President Emmanuel Macron to describe her bravery in court as she sat through the three month trial that resulted in the imprisonment of her former husband and 51 men for rape and assault.