John Keiger is a former Research Director at the University of Cambridge and author of the biography of French president Raymond Poincaré
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On Friday President Emmanuel Macron welcomed Volodymyr Zelensky to the Elysée with great fanfare. The Ukrainian president was in Paris to sign a ten-year bilateral military agreement for France to supply and finance Kiev’s war effort and reconstruction, having already signed similar agreements with Britain and Germany. But behind Macron’s window dressing is France’s acute
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President Emmanuel Macron and his freshly installed Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, appointed a new French cabinet this week. It is little more than a reshuffle – and unlikely to lead to sunlit uplands for Macron’s beleaguered presidency. Of particular significance are the two centre-right ministers whose appointment testifies to the continuing rightward drift of the Macronist
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France’s Emmanuel Macron, the Fifth Republic’s youngest president, has just appointed its youngest prime minister, 34-year-old Gabriel Attal. The former socialist turned 2017 Macronista campaigner has had a meteoric rise through government ranks to education minister only six months ago. Attal’s remarkable communication skills, ability to think on his feet and interpret what voters wish to hear
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A French member of the board of Airbus – the giant European aircraft and aerospace group – once told me that the French thought of it as their company while the Germans thought it theirs. In reality, both countries own it: the French state owns 11 per cent of Airbus capital, Germany 10.9 per cent and
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You can tell that French elections are in the air because legal proceedings are being taken against a leading figure of the French right. So it was with François Fillon of the Républicain party, a key contender in the 2017 presidential elections, whose hopes of winning were dashed during the campaign by legal investigation into
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Armistice Day is an appropriate moment to reflect on why democracies triumphed in the two world wars that blighted the twentieth century. The simple answer is because – however much they hesitated – they believed in what they stood for and were able to will their victory. As the French philosopher, future Resistance member and
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As King Charles’ state visit to France begins, it is clear that France is not as republican as it claims. The death of Queen Elizabeth II in September 2022 gave way to an outpouring of French national grief. Speaking for his people, President Emmanuel Macron tweeted: ‘Her death leaves us with a sense of emptiness’.
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On Wednesday last week, a new Gabonese military junta installed itself, having ousted President Ali Bongo, whose family have ruled the country since 1967. Just two days earlier, the French President Emmanuel Macron gave a speech to his ambassadors in which he spoke of an ‘epidemic of putschs’ in what was formerly France’s greatest sphere
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In January this year, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak outlined his five priorities for Britain against a hazy timetable. Meanwhile in France, after months of parliamentary opposition, strikes and demonstrations against his pension reforms, President Macron’s legislation gained assent by a constitutional sleight of hand. To appease the country’s heightened state of tension in May, Macron
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How dangerous are riots to the very existence of the French state? Most commentators avoid the question and concentrate on causes. The more whimsical attribute cause to that clichéd French historical reflex of insurrection; the sociologists to poverty and discrimination in the banlieues (suburbs); the far-left to French institutional racism and right-wing policies; conservative politicians to
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The inevitable is at last beginning to dawn on Emmanuel Macron. The extravagant spending spree initiated after the violent and year-long 2018 ‘gilets jaunes’ protests will have to be reversed. With the coffers empty, France is not only at the mercy of international finance, she is now highly vulnerable to the next social or political
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As the First Ashes Test begins at Edgbaston it is fitting to recall England’s oldest cricket adversary: France. The Marylebone Cricket Club’s (MCC) first ever international tour was scheduled for France in the summer of 1789. Owing to local difficulties the tour did not go ahead. The match was eventually rescheduled for the bicentennial of
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Sir Keir Starmer and the Labour front bench are increasingly candid about their plans to ‘recalibrate’ Britain’s relationship with the EU within 18 months of entering Downing Street. Trade barriers with the EU would be lowered, regular EU-UK summits would be held at permanent official and ministerial level, a return to the Dublin Agreement on
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Even the French reports of President Macron’s state visit to China last week were unflattering. The highly choreographed ceremonies with Xi Jinping – redolent of foreign emissaries paying homage to Chinese emperors – produced nothing on Ukraine, nothing on Taiwan. The only tangible outcome was Beijing graciously extending for another four years the loan of two
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France is confronted by a serious social crisis, morphing into a grave political crisis, which could become a regime crisis. To be fair, political instability did not begin with Emmanuel Macron. It has been growing since 2000 when the presidential mandate was cut from seven to five years, rendering it coterminous with parliamentary elections and reducing
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Is Emmanuel Macron reaching his Liz Truss moment when financial markets finally determine his future? On 20 March Moody’s ratings agency strode into France’s explosive pensions reform turmoil. While keeping France’s rating at Aa2 ‘stable’ it nevertheless warned that President Macron’s constitutional sleight of hand denying the National Assembly a vote on the bill risked undermining
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When silhouetted against the symbolism – as French media proudly insist – of King Charles choosing France for his first state visit at month’s end, this weekend is very much an Anglo-French affair. On Friday, Rishi Sunak and seven ministers visited Paris – a first for five frosty years – for a Franco-British summit with
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On 22 March 1968 the slow burn that would eventually flare into France’s ‘May ‘68’ began. The radical student movement known as ‘22 March’, with Daniel Cohn-Bendit (Dany le Rouge) at its heart, was unaware its actions on this day would lead to riots and the eventual paralysis of the French state after workers joined
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On 2 March in Gabon, West Africa, President Macron declared that ‘the days of France-Afrique are over’. Since the early nineteenth century the African continent has emblazoned France’s aspiration to international power status. Like any empire it provided natural resources. It also provided manpower. Unlike other imperial powers with surplus domestic populations to deploy, France’s demography was stagnant
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The President of the United States of America flies into Poland this month. Not to Germany or France or even the UK. There is great symbolism in this gesture, which goes further than Washington merely showing solidarity to the front-line states in Russia’s war against Ukraine. It is emblematic of a trend which has seen
