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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

Why aren’t feminists lining up behind Le Pen? I thought women had a moral responsibility to back women standing for office? That’s certainly what they said during the Hillary-Trump clash. Yes, I am voting for Hillary because she’s a woman, because she ‘knows what it’s like to menstruate, be pregnant, give birth’, said one American feminist. So does Le Pen. She has three children. According to the rather crude biologism of feminist identitarianism, that makes her an even better candidate than Hillary, who has one kid. So why the silence, feminists? Aren’t you ‘With Her’? Looking back at the Hillary love-in, its remarkable how much it hinged on ‘Hillary’s a

Since December, when Islamic terrorist Anis Amri drove a truck into a Berlin Christmas market, Germans have been waiting fearfully for the next Islamist attack. However right-wing terrorism is also a growing concern in Germany, and the latest case to come to light shows how this extremist movement may be evolving. Germany’s Military Intelligence is currently investigating 275 cases of right-wing extremism, but surely none of them is quite so disconcerting as the peculiar case of Franco A. The investigation began in January, when a maintenance worker at Vienna Airport opened a toilet ventilation duct and found a pistol hidden inside it. The police attached an alarm to the air

Is Ivanka Trump’s visit to Berlin a triumph for Angela Merkel, or a diplomatic disaster? As always, that depends on which newspapers you read. Germany’s Suddeutsche Zeitung called it a ‘a veritable coup for the chancellor,’ but the headlines in the British press have focused on the boos that greeted Ivanka at yesterday’s W20 Summit, when the President’s daughter described her father as a defender of women’s rights. Sat alongside Ivanka on the conference platform, Merkel looked distinctly awkward – but Ms Trump’s appearance wasn’t entirely met with groans and jeers. Her other comments were greeted with polite applause and, on one occasion, even cheers (she praised Merkel for enforcing

After having given themselves and the rest of us a fright, France’s voters have, by a worryingly small margin, stepped back from the brink. Some polls indicated a possible victory for the two extremists, Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, either of whom would have meant disaster for France. Instead, the next President will almost certainly be the youthful centrist, Emmanuel Macron, the nearest to a viable establishment candidate. Though this is certainly a far lesser evil, it is evident that the political system of Europe’s oldest large democracy has gone spectacularly wrong. The minimum requirement of a functioning democracy is that a manageable range of sensible choices is put

Everybody knows that Marine Le Pen can’t beat Emmanuel Macron, don’t they? What does she have to lose? Nothing, it seems. She has now declared that she will run as an independent candidate, and not stand for the National Front. Marine’s move is surprising and clever in a madcap way. Anything that Macron can do I can do stranger, she is saying. Macron has reinvented himself as an outsider taking on the establishment — even though everyone knows he is a former banker and Hollande economics adviser. Well, Marine is saying, I can pretend that I am an independent too. Macron’s greatest weakness is that he was tarred by association

In the biggest comeback since Lazarus, French president François Hollande has installed Emmanuel Macron as his certain successor, with the collusion of the media, the magistrates and less than 25 per cent of the voters. If Hollande has been a terrible president, the result of the first round of voting confirms that he is a master political technician, with a specialty in dirty tricks. It seems impossible that he will now retire quietly from public life. Whether he will have an official role, or merely be a Svengali-like figure in the shadows of the presidency remains to be seen. One by one, obstacles to Macron’s succession were ruthlessly eliminated and