France

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the Week: Starmer’s first steps, Biden’s wobble and Australia’s egg shortage

From our UK edition

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, appointed several ministers who are not MPs, but will be created life peers. Most cabinet posts went to MPs who had shadowed the portfolios, but as Attorney General he appointed Richard Hermer KC, a human rights lawyer, instead of Emily Thornberry, who said she was ‘very sorry and surprised’. James Timpson, the shoe-repair businessman and prison reformer, was made prisons minister. Sir Patrick Vallance was made science minister. The former home secretary Jacqui Smith became higher education minister; Ellie Reeves, the sister of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, became minister without portfolio. The government dropped the phrase ‘levelling up’.

Monday

Roger Kimball

Despite defeat, Le Pen’s party has made steady progress

I have been in Paris the last few days and by coincidence am staying cheek by jowl (joue contre joue?) with the Eiffel Tower, site of France’s version of those “mostly peaceful” and of course eminently wonderful protests against “the far right” last week in the aftermath of Marine Le Pen’s strong showing in the first round of voting for seats in the National Assembly. The second round took place yesterday, and there were some of us who hoped that Le Pen’s Rassemblement National Party would sweep the field. France has an excellent law that neither the media nor politicians may comment publicly on an election until the polls close, which last night was at 8 p.m.

marine le pen
Jonathan Miller

Le Pen is still the biggest winner in France’s elections

From our UK edition

Ignore most snap verdicts from last night – the big winner in the French parliamentary election was still Marine Le Pen, whose third-place finish was perfectly placed. True, egged on by polls showing it on the verge of an absolute majority, the Rassemblement National (National Rally) over-promised and underdelivered. But, in the topsy-turvy world of French politics in 2024, to lose was to win. Dirty work is about to be done at the Elysée Le Pen fought a competent campaign and her voters aren’t blaming her for failing to take the top of the podium. She’s demonstrated again that she’s highly resilient. Not achieving a majority has done her a favour because none of what is now unfolding is her fault. The chaos was authored by president Macron. Le Pen will reap the rewards.

Sunday

Gavin Mortimer

How Marine Le Pen rebranded herself

From our UK edition

Marine Le Pen was called a 'bitch' this week and threatened with sexual violence. It’s what passes for rap music these days in France. The threats won’t unduly concern Le Pen. She’s experienced worse. When she was eight, far-left extremists tried to kill her and her family with five kilos of dynamite. The Le Pens survived, but their Paris apartment didn’t. Say what you like about the leader of the National Rally, and many do, but Marine Le Pen is a tough cookie. She was assaulted on the campaign trail during the 2017 presidential election, a minor setback compared to her subsequent disastrous performance in the television debate with Emmanuel Macron. Fundamentally she is still the same Marine Le Pen as the one who became party leader in 2011 She was written off.

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Let’s start the new era with a glass of champagne

From our UK edition

‘I drink champagne when I’m happy and when I’m sad,’ Madame Lily Bollinger (1899-1977) remarked. ‘Sometimes I drink it when I’m alone. When I have company I consider it obligatory.’ As the last constituency results trickle in, we’ll all inevitably find ourselves in some combination of those four states. If you’re sad, I hope at least you have good company – and that you’re as well supplied with the great French spirit-lifter as I have been this week, with a busload of Spectator readers on a tour to Reims, Epernay and Aÿ. But I suspect you’ve also consumed more than enough media comment on the spectacle of second-rate politicians slime-wrestling, dog-whistling and lying about tax plans.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: an election looms, Joe Biden crashes and England wins

From our UK edition

Home A general election shook the nation’s political snowglobe. Sir Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat leader, was able to stop stunts for the camera after making a bungee jump at Eastbourne. Before the election, Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister for the time being, commented on Channel 4 footage of a Reform UK supporter talking of him in racially abusive language: ‘My two daughters have to see and hear Reform people who campaign for Nigel Farage calling me an effing Paki. It hurts and it makes me angry.’ Reform UK made an official complaint against Channel 4 to the Electoral Commission, claiming that the supporter filmed was an actor.

Catriona Olding

My nights with the eagle owls

From our UK edition

Provence Summer has arrived. The evenings are warm enough to sit out on the balcony terrace and watch the lights come on in the village below. Each night at ten, the great limestone cliff, into which my little house was built, is floodlit for a couple of hours. On cue two huge baby eagle owls (fully grown wingspan 170cm) begin rehearsing for adulthood and flap clumsily, then majestically, around the rock, calling for their parents and terrorising the smaller nesting birds hidden deep within the crags and crevices. English women wearing broderie anglaise dresses, straw hats and anxious smiles drift about The annual migration of tourists has begun too. On market day the car parks are full by 9.30 a.m. and the queue for Patricia’s cheese stall is 12 deep.

John Keiger

What the National Rally means for France’s foreign policy

From our UK edition

The electoral turmoil in France threatens its status as a world power. Friendly nations are despairing; rivals and enemies are gloating, even circling. France is the world’s seventh-largest economic power, a prominent Nato member, a member of the UN Security Council and the EU’s leader on foreign and defence issues. It has the fifth largest strategic nuclear force and the fifth largest navy, a ‘tier one’ military and one of the highly effective ‘Nine Eyes’ intelligence services. Last year France was the world’s second largest arms exporter. It controls the third largest global undersea cables network and has the second largest coastal economic area, whose confetti territories give it a global strategic toe-hold.

Monday

Cindy Yu

Starmer’s Europe dilemma

From our UK edition

13 min listen

As Europe comes to terms with the fallout from Marine Le Pen's victory in the first round of their parliamentary elections, Cindy Yu talks to Freddy Gray and Katy Balls about what it all means for Keir Starmer. If he does win the UK's own election on Thursday, he faces a European landscape that could be harder to navigate. What do the results mean for the UK and what reaction has there been? Produced by Cindy Yu and Patrick Gibbons.

Saturday

Katy Balls

Katy Balls, Gavin Mortimer, Sean Thomas, Robert Colvile and Melissa Kite

From our UK edition

31 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Katy Balls reflects on the UK general election campaign and wonders how bad things could get for the Tories (1:02); Gavin Mortimer argues that France’s own election is between the ‘somewheres’ and the ‘anywheres’ (7:00); Sean Thomas searches for authentic travel in Colombia (13:16); after reviewing the books Great Britain? by Torsten Bell and Left Behind by Paul Collier, Robert Colvile ponders whether Britain’s problems will ever get solved (20:43); and, Melissa Kite questions if America’s ye olde Ireland really exists (25:44).  Presented by Patrick Gibbons.

John Keiger

Macron’s power in Europe is draining

From our UK edition

In Brussels over the last two days EU heads of state and government have been carving up the ‘top jobs’. France is represented by President Emmanuel Macron, whose party took a lashing in the European elections, diminishing further his international standing. By contrast, Marine Le Pen’s victorious Rassemblement National, now on track to win the 7 July general elections, was not present. When RN forms a government it will have to live with the consequences of the President’s decisions for at least five years. It is no coincidence, therefore, that on Wednesday night Marine Le Pen gave an interview opening the way to a constitutional struggle with the head of state on one of his most important roles: the so-called presidential ‘reserved domain’ of defence and foreign affairs.

Friday

Cockburn

Candace Owens: ‘France is being run by perverts’

After staking her entire career on her claim that French first lady Brigitte Macron was born a man, former Daily Wire host Candace Owens was suddenly ousted from the company. While her criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza is ostensibly what got her the boot, Cockburn is sure claiming perverts run the French government didn’t help her case. Owens, who has always reveled in controversy, does not seemed phased however. “I am finally free,” she rejoiced, including to renew her attacks on Brigitte.  https://twitter.com/realcandaceo/status/1806055079570764216 "France is being run by perverts," she declared, in a sentence that could be considered objectively true in any of the last few centuries.

candace owens perverts

Thursday

Gavin Mortimer

The shooting of Nahel Merzouk still haunts France

From our UK edition

One year ago today, a 17-year-old called Nahel Merzouk was fatally shot by a policeman as he sped away from a vehicle checkpoint in western Paris. What followed shocked France. Days of rioting, looting and burning across the country. Not just in the inner cities but in provincial towns such as Montargis in central France, where a mob vandalised the town hall and pillaged scores of shops. ‘I still have people who almost a year later don't want to come back to the centre because of the riots,’ said one shopkeeper this week. ‘They've been apprehensive ever since, traumatised, even though we're a fairly quiet town.

Gavin Mortimer

France’s ‘Somewheres’ want revenge

From our UK edition

The builder who has been working on my house in Burgundy will be voting for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally on Sunday in the first round of the French parliamentary election. So will the electrician. I haven’t asked the plumber, but I suspect I know where his vote will go, given that his assistant is voting for Le Pen. My neighbour, a farmer, is voting Le Pen, as is a teacher acquaintance. The local policeman is also voting Le Pen. ‘What do I think of Macron?’ retorted the electrician. ‘Put it this way, he’s not my friend’ It’s not that surprising in this neck of the woods. The National Rally romped to victory in the Yonne department in the recent European elections, winning 41.4 per cent of the vote.

Friday

Gavin Mortimer

France under Macron keeps getting worse

From our UK edition

The warnings continue to come thick and fast in France about the disaster that could befall the Republic on 7 July if Emmanuel Macron and his government are not returned to power. From the celebrity world to the corporate world – including American investment bank Goldman Sachs – the belief is that France is doomed if either Marine Le Pen’s ‘union of the right’ or Jean-Luc Melenchon’s left-wing coalition is elected to government. Several former senior French politicians have joined the fear-mongering, among them Dominique de Villepin, who was Jacques Chirac’s centre-right prime minister in the 2000s before leaving politics for a lucrative career working with Qatar.

Thursday

Digby Warde-Aldam

Meet the musicians trying to revive French-language pop 

From our UK edition

The other day, I went to see a nouveau riot-girl band called Claire Dance play in a disused factory in Bagnolet on the edge of Paris. They were great: the kind of sonic kick in the nuts I’d been waiting more than a decade for an all-female band to deliver. I half-wondered whether it was just my own imperfect command of French that left me clueless as to their message. ‘C’était tout een eenglish,’ came the response from the guitarist afterwards. How come they never considered accompanying such emotionally charged music with lyrics in their mother tongue? ‘It’s considered cringe,’ she replied. ‘We only like English music.

The Spectator

Starmer and Le Pen’s similarities

From our UK edition

Emmanuel Macron’s decision to call a snap election in France is turning out to be a blunder of Sunakian proportions. His second term as president lasts until 2027 and he could have struggled on with a hung parliament in which his was the largest single party. But when Marine Le Pen’s National Rally won 31 per cent of the vote in the European Parliament elections, to his party’s 15 per cent, he decided to call French voters’ bluff. In a parliamentary election, would they really back Le Pen and put in Jordan Bardella, her new 28-year-old party frontman, as prime minister? It is becoming clear that they may well do that. Macron’s Renaissance party, which won 39 per cent of the vote in the last legislative elections two years ago, is now polling at about half that.

Monday

Calla Jones Corner

How to make the perfect clafoutis

Clafoutis. Difficult to pronounce. But oh-so divine and easy to make. Originating in the Limousin region in south-central France, its name comes from the Provençal clafir, “to fill.” So popular was it “to fill” a dish with fruit and batter, that by the nineteenth century, the renown of clafoutis had spread from the Limousin to other regions of France and bordering countries. This classic and elegant summer dessert is usually made with cherries, among the first fruits to ripen, but also with other stone fruit as they appear — apricots, plums, berries and on into the fall with pears.

clafoutis

Sunday

John Keiger

Is France’s left-wing coalition more dangerous than Le Pen?

From our UK edition

French and international media cannot break their fixation with the ‘extreme right’. They continue to target the Rassemblement National (RN) as the ultimate menace for the 7 July legislative elections. But as of Friday, a more potent threat to French political and financial stability has raised its head: the radical left-wing ‘New Popular Front’ (NPF). This coalition of greens, communists, socialists and Trotskyists dominated by the radical-left La France Insoumise party (LFI), surprised many by their agreement to field common constituency candidates and a common manifesto.   Following the bitter breakup two years ago of the radical left-wing NUPES coalition, prospects for a new agreement were slim.

Thursday

William Moore

Macron’s game: can he still outplay Le Pen?

From our UK edition

45 min listen

This week: Macron’s game. Our cover piece looks at the big news following the European elections at the weekend, President Macron’s decision to call early parliamentary elections in France. Madness or genius, either way the decision comes with huge risk. And can he still outplay Le Pen, asks writer Jonathan Miller. Jonathan joins the podcast to analyse Macron’s decision alongside Professor Alberto Alemanno, who explains how the decision is realigning French politics, and argues it must be seen in its wider European context. (01:58) Then: Will and Gus take us through some of their favourite pieces from the magazine, including Catriona Olding’s Life column and Sam McPhail’s notes on Madri.  Also on the podcast: who decides how we see the past?