Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
There are many more articles in the corresponding French section, reflecting the range of discussions and point of views within the French (radical) Left, in addition to article on current political situation. Of course, these are... in French. To reach the French section, click on the “translation” button in the left column.
The second round of the French local elections, at the end of June, was bad news for president Emmanuel Macron, whose candidates did very poorly. In response, Macron switched prime ministers, replacing high-profile operator Edouard Philippe with an unknown right winger, Jean Castex, whose (...)
On Saturday February 29th, during an emergency meeting of ministers called to discuss the Coronavirus crisis, the French government took the decision to force its bitterly-opposed pension reforms through Parliament without a vote. In adopting the “nuclear option” of invoking Article 49-3 of the (...)
France was paralyzed by strikes on Friday, as workers from train drivers to teachers revolted against Emmanuel Macron’s attack on pensions. While the liberal president fancies himself as a French “Thatcher,” his bid to tear up France’s welfare state now faces its most powerful opposition yet. (...)
France has once again entered a phase of large-scale social confrontation.
A year ago, in November 2018, it was the Yellow Jacket movement that broke out on roundabouts and city streets across the country. Provoked by the government’s decision to introduce a new fuel tax, the movement very (...)
Yesterday morning, French police raided the home of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The leftist leader was quick to point the blame at Emmanuel Macron.
It was an alarming sight. On Tuesday, with the eyes of the French press fixed on ceremonies to mark President Emmanuel Macron’s long-awaited cabinet (...)
The Benalla Affair is not about Alexandre Benalla. It is about the French President, and the brash, self-confident manner with which he has blasted through his first year in office.
To travel abroad as an American in 2018 is to serve as a baffled explicator of scandal. No outsider quite (...)
From 22 March to 26 May, there have been two months of strikes, demonstrations, blockades in the universities and high schools, clashes and police violence. And everything indicates that the coming weeks will see this situation of political and social tension prolonged, but without a (...)
They’re an odd couple, but the French president hopes his trip to the White House will boost his authority within the EU.
Can a 40-year-old French president, who gives sweeping speeches about Europe, singlehandedly save the global liberal order – and western democracy with it – by whispering into (...)
Montpellier, France — On March 29, the ultra-conservative dean of the Montpellier University Law School was summoned to police headquarters, interrogated, hauled into court and held over in jail for arraignment based on the complaints of nine student strikers who were brutally assaulted while (...)
Sit-ins continue in protest at introduction of more selective university entry requirements.
After more than 50 hours manning a barricade at her university faculty building in northern Paris, Camille, 20, said she was tired but determined.
Night and day the humanities student had been keeping (...)
A wave of strikes and a student revolt has shaken France in recent days — but can it provide the first real challenge to Macron’s agenda?
From college campuses to supermarkets and airport terminals, unrest is simmering across France. Against the backdrop of the national public railway strike — a (...)
Macron’s government has, since it won the elections last year, undertaken a forced march, on the one hand implementing step by step a project of fundamental liberal reforms, and on the other reducing taxes for the capitalist class (abolition of the wealth tax, a flat rate of 30 per cent on the (...)
Le Monde Diplomatique’s Serge Halimi dissects the collective suicide of France’s center-left — and how its new far left can pick up the pieces.
The historic collapse of France’s Socialist Party is one of the most spectacular upheavals in recent European politics. To understand the roots of the (...)
The electoral sequence of spring 2017 revealed and accelerated the crisis of the French political system. Emmanuel Macron, an unforeseen candidate without troops or party, won the day and his formation, only just created, has imposed itself. He has moved very quickly to radicalise neoliberal (...)
Surprise, surprise: Emmanuel Macron’s first budget slashes taxes on wealth and guts social spending.
Anyone with lingering doubts about whether the moniker “President of the Rich” fits France’s Emmanuel Macron could safely put them to rest this month, upon publication of his first budget since (...)
‘I’m a Maoist … a good political programme is one that works.’— Emmanuel Macron
The 2017 French presidential elections were historical in many ways. The first crucial aspect is, of course, the fact that the Front National made it to the second round — eliminating the right-wing party (Les (...)
Watching the strange dance of Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron in Paris—the meal at the restaurant in the Eiffel Tower that no Parisian ever goes to, the buddy-buddy press conference in which the fears of Trump’s Parisphobic friend “Jim” were finally laid to rest—the motives of the two men might (...)
The complete electoral sequence in France comprises a principal contest (the presidential election) and a more and more subordinate one (the legislative elections, which determine the composition of the National Assembly). Now that the sequence has been completed, we can draw an overall balance (...)
The dominant class in France and in Europe breathed a collective sigh of relief at the outcome of the French electoral cycle. The system of political representation in France appeared completely in ruins in early spring 2017, now the country has ended up with an ultra-neoliberal president (...)
Abstention, not the divided left, was the main beneficiary of French voters’ pessimism.
Across the West, 2016 was a year of election defeats for the hegemonic liberal order — mostly to the benefit of the far right. Brexit and the Trump victory seemed to portend a collapse of the political (...)
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