Louis Sarkozy

Today

Louis Sarkozy

Abdul El-Sayed and the dawn of American sectarianism

Donald Trump’s Republicans have suffered a monumental defeat. Deep-red states such as Texas and South Carolina sent Democrats to the Senate. The war in Iran, the price of groceries and petrol, and a breathtaking array of ragtag candidates help explain this stunning reversal of Trump’s 2024 mandate. But one race, the Senate contest in Michigan, speaks to something more: something we Europeans have grown all too accustomed to, and which is only now dawning on the United States. The United States has had its first taste of the blight that has been eating at European democracies for five decades Abdul El-Sayed is an epidemiologist from Michigan, a Rhodes scholar and a Columbia-trained physician. He is young, sly and deftly talented.

Friday

Louis Sarkozy

Could France’s crisis come to Britain? with Louis Sarkozy & Loyd Grossman

45 min listen

For this week’s Edition, Lara Prendergast is joined by the Spectator’s economics editor Michael Simmons, writer Louis Sarkozy and broadcaster Sir Loyd Grossman. This week: is France heading for revolution? As protests and unrest grip the country, Louis argues that France faces overlapping political, economic, demographic and security crises – and warns that the turmoil is likely to have consequences for next year’s presidential election. Is Macron losing control? Could Marine Le Pen finally take power? And to what extent are the violent riots uniquely French, or part of a wider European unrest? Also: why does Napoleon still loom so large over French politics and culture?

Could France’s crisis come to Britain? with Louis Sarkozy & Loyd Grossman

Wednesday

Louis Sarkozy

Who’s who in Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s revolutionary guard

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the riots’ chief instigator and leader of the far-left La France Insoumise (LFI), is currently ranked second in most presidential polls. Marine Le Pen remains the favourite despite her continuing legal problems. But the polls do not reveal Mélenchon’s strategy, his organisation, his coherence or his ruthlessness. It has become fashionable to dismiss his chances. He is too radical, they say, too inflammatory. As if that has not benefited other modern underdogs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z44ZraRn35w Born in Tangier in 1951, the former socialist schoolteacher became a senator at 35 and briefly served as a minister under the former PM Lionel Jospin. Mélenchon has spent the past 18 years building a party in his own image.

Sunday

Louis Sarkozy

France is paying for its indulgence of the young

France is ablaze (again). Limoges’s nineteenth-century town hall was set on fire and declared largely lost. The prefect’s residence in Bordeaux was ransacked. The Galeries Lafayette were looted and, in the words of the mayor of Paris, entire streets ‘methodically wrecked’. This is what happens when a society treats the lycéen – a creature of dubious pilosity who cannot legally buy a beer – as an oracle We could expend many words analysing why: a failing justice system, a lack of political courage, the left’s insurrectionist tendencies. But one underestimated reason is the rise of the Child King. This, in essence, is what happens when a society treats the lycéen (the student) – a creature of dubious pilosity who cannot legally buy a beer – as an oracle.

Wednesday

Louis Sarkozy

We cannot trust our AI overlords

It is no longer an exaggeration to say that the digital apocalypse is at our door. The advance of artificial intelligence is outstripping our fears and expectations. The machinery of the state, slow and predictable by nature, is so thoroughly outpaced in its capacity to control and regulate that it does not even realise it. Our politicians, running on antiquated software, cling to problems that are pressing but dated (such as the retirement age and the number of civil servants) and barely speak of the cataclysm on the horizon. Édouard Philippe, who is currently the frontrunner of the traditional right-wing constellation in France, recently remarked that he used LLMs (large language models) to write his emails. Such is the abyss of our backwardness.