Emmanuel macron

Britain and France are heading for an almighty bust-up over Brexit. This morning the French junior minister for European affairs, Clément Beaune, specifically confirmed that if France was unhappy with the final Brexit deal — notably on fishing — it would use its veto. France would carry out ‘her own evaluation’ of the deal and act accordingly, he told radio Europe 1. Whether there is a deal or not, a blame game is about to be unleashed. Given this late stage, if there is a deal then the French cannot possibly get all they want on fishing. The French Prime Minister said so yesterday to French fishermen at France’s largest fishing port, Boulogne.

Can an entire country sue for libel? If so, France would have a strong suit against swathes of the American left. The US progressive movement, including the New York Times and Washington Post, has turned on la Republique over its citizens’ habit of getting themselves murdered by Islamists. Most recently, this has included Samuel Paty, a teacher beheaded in the street for showing his students cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, and three people murdered in a church in Nice. In response, French President Emmanuel Macron has proposed stricter regulations for mosque-financing and an end to home-schooling. And in response to this, much of the American left has lost its mind.

Fresh from sparking protests around the world with his comments on Islam, Emmanuel Macron now has a new adversary to add to the list: the New York Times. 'The president has some bones to pick with the American media,' read a piece by the NYT's media editor Ben Smith, published this week. 'So president Emmanuel Macron of France called me on Thursday afternoon from his gilded office in the Élysée Palace to drive home a complaint'. The interview made it sound as though Macron, infuriated by the hostility of the Gray Lady, had taken it upon himself to suddenly phone Smith up out of the blue to give him a piece of his mind.

It’s easy to see why so few western leaders have come to Emmanuel Macron’s defence: when they scrutinise extremists, they are accused of being ‘Islamophobes’. Since the French President’s speech last month about Islam in the West, he has been accused — by populist Muslim politicians such as Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Imran Khan, as well as publications that should know better, such as the New York Times — of being anti-Muslim. Yes, he was frank about the dangers of Islamism, but his speech was also a defence of what he called the ‘Islam of the Enlightenment’. Rarely for a political leader, he was able to point not just to the problem but to the alternative too. He understands that Muslims have faced these internal enemies before and won.

Just over a week ago, Emanuel Macron said he wanted to end ‘Islamist separatism’ in France because a minority of the country’s estimated six million Muslims risk forming a ‘counter-society’. On Friday, we saw yet another example of this when a  history teacher was decapitated in the street on his way home in a Paris suburb. Samuel Paty had discussed the free speech in the classroom and shown cartoons of Mohammed. Some parents had protested, leading to a wider fuss - and, eventually, his murder. M Paty was murdered, Macron said, ‘because he taught the freedom of expression, the freedom to believe or not believe.’ The president is now positioning himself as the defender of French values, determined to drain the Islamist swamp.

It is just over three years since the election of Emmanuel Macron to the presidency of France. All of Gaul is united against him. All? No! From a village in the foothills of the Pyrenees, in a remote corner of Occitanie, Jean Castex, the irréductible mayor of the tiny commune of Prades (population 6,124), has emerged in a puff of smoke to become the President’s new prime minister. Castex is a previously almost unheard-of regional politician with a name that sounds as if he has leapt directly from an Asterix comic book. Being prime minister of France is probably the most thankless job in European politics. The president takes the credit for whatever goes right, while the premier takes the blame for whatever goes wrong. One wonders why Castex accepted.

Last week, Britain and France were treated to an avalanche of financial statistics jostling with the macabre daily litany of Covid casualty numbers. All are premised on a V-shaped recovery in which the severity and rapidity of the Covid recession is matched by a rapid bounce back. But the French above all should be aware of a historical parallel that suggests caution regarding the V-shaped recovery. But first the size of the problem. In Britain, the Office for Budget Responsibility produced the most pessimistic scenario for the British economy compared to those of KPMG, Morgan Stanley and the OECD. Based on a three-month lockdown it projects a 2020/21 budget deficit of 14 per cent falling back to a 2.

‘At the beginning of a pestilence and when it ends, there’s always a propensity for rhetoric. In the first case, habits have not yet been lost; in the second, they’re returning. It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth – in other words to silence.’ Albert Camus, The Plague. Faced with Covid-19, France has not yet reached that moment of silence when one gets hardened to the truth. Rhetoric still has the upper hand as President Macron’s address to the nation on Monday night revealed.

Saudis woke up last Saturday to find the crown jewel of their oil industry in smoke. The attack on the al-Abqaiq oil processing facility, allegedly conducted by cruise missiles and launched from a staging area inside Iran, resulted in the sharpest single-day increase in crude prices since the 1991 Gulf War. Saudi Arabia’s largest oil installation, however, wasn’t the only thing that went up in smoke last weekend. The volley of missiles screeching into Saudi airspace may have also ruined French president Emmanuel Macron’s attempt to deescalate tensions in the Persian Gulf and save the 2015 Iran nuclear deal from a slow and agonising death.