France

The orca killer whale is known for playing with its prey before killing it, always with a smile. An image that came to mind on Monday when French President Emmanuel Macron arrived at the White House to plead the cause of Ukraine to a grinning President Donald Trump. The French media is dutifully repeating the Elysée line that Macron had rekindled a bromance with the American president, but this is disconnected from reality. Macron returns to Paris today with, as far as I can tell, nothing but platitudes.  This was nothing like Macron’s visits to Washington during the Biden administration, when the French president used to deal with Biden’s sympathetic secretary of state Antony Blinken and flirt with Karine Jean-Pierre, Biden’s francophone press secretary.

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.

Emmanuel Macron will this afternoon host the leaders of France’s political parties as he searches for his fourth prime minister of the year. The last one, Michel Barnier, fell last week after just three months in office. Not everyone, however, has received an invitation to the Elysée Palace. Marine Le Pen is persona non grata after her National Rally party joined the left-wing coalition in last Wednesday’s vote of no confidence in Barnier’s government. Macron hasn’t forgiven Le Pen, although he is more conciliatory towards the left-wing parties that conspired to bring down his government. The Communists, the Greens and the Socialists will all enjoy the president’s hospitality this afternoon.

Paris prosecutors last week recommended that Marine Le Pen be jailed and banned from public office for five years. The court also wants similar sentences for 24 members of the party who, along with Le Pen, are accused of misusing public funds. The prosecutor accuses Le Pen of using money intended for EU parliamentary aides to instead pay staff who worked for the party between 2009 and 2016. The defence’s argument is that it’s hard to differentiate between what constitutes EU work and party work as the two often overlap. The judges will study the evidence and a verdict is expected in early 2025.

There has always been a touch of snobbery in the way the French elite regard American politics. The word one reads and hears most often in the mainstream media is ‘vulgarity’. This is particularly true of Donald Trump, who is abhorred as much by the right-wing press as by the left. ‘Trump, vulgarity on the loose,’ was the headline in a recent article in the centre-right Le Figaro. This snootiness is long-standing, but it became more acute two decades ago during the war in Iraq. France’s refusal – correct, as it turned out – to join George W. Bush’s ‘coalition of the willing’ led to a torrent of abuse in Washington. The French were labelled ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ and in some restaurants French fries were rechristened ‘Freedom Fries’.