When just under 75% of eligible voters cast ballots in the deciding round of the French presidential election last month, there was much hand-wringing about rising civic disillusionment and apathy (link in French).
While Emmanuel Macron is still expected to win the French presidential election on Sunday, his victory will be marred by the spectacular rise of extreme right nationalist Marine Le Pen. The National Front (FN) candidate has successfully normalized much of her party’s hardline anti-immigrant nativist agenda while painting herself as a champion of the working Frenchman. If Macron is unable to lead a successful unity government, she is setting herself up to be a favorite in the next election.
Pollsters, and even a few confidantes in his inner circle, are already declaring Emmanuel Macron the next president of France.
Vladimir Putin’s fortunes may be declining in the United States, but he is still well placed to win big in the French presidential election.
Donald Trump groupie and National Front leader Marine Le Pen is confident she will emerge the big winner in the corruption scandal engulfing the French presidential race right now.
French president Francois Hollande announced last week that he would not seek re-election in 2017. His decision says as much about the global decline of center-left parties as it does about the personal leadership flaws of the historically unpopular politician.
Update: François Fillon, as expected, defeated Alain Juppé by a wide margin, 67% to 33%.
The alarming exploitation of the Brussels attacks for political purposes shows how urgent it is to take back the discourse around Islam and Muslims from racists and extremist populists like Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen.
Marine Le Pen has proven she is aligned with the ISIL Islamo-fascists, by promoting the violence and murder they fetishize, and insulting the victims of terrorism.
In the often-hysterical debate over the origins of ISIL-inspired “bottom-up” terrorism seen in the Nov. 2015 Paris attacks, and echoed by the San Bernardino massacre, a leading French intellectual refuses to let either radical Islam or Western elites off the hook.
In the search for answers after the Paris terror attacks, French public intellectuals are responding to the question on everybody’s lips: Why did these people, our young people “made in France” (and Belgium) do it?
In their grief and defiance, Parisians are heading to the bistro, reaching for the Beaujolais nouveau, and immersing themselves in fine literature.
They are more European than the European Union, and by taking full advantage of a continent without borders, and blighted by poor coordination on law enforcement and intelligence, they have created a monster: the Europe of jihadists.
The French have anointed them “Generation Bataclan.”
Greece’s dashing ex-finance minister can’t stop railing against how power really operates in Europe. But when Yanis Varoufakis resigned from his post at the request of prime minister Alexis Tsipras and under pressure from Europe’s assembled finance ministers, he gave his first interview not to The Guardian, The New York Times, Germany’s Die Ziet newspaper, or even his own wildly popular blog.
As birth rates in the US continue to fall, an educated older parent-driven ‘‘baby boom’’ is underway.
One of Africa’s wealthiest ruling dynasties is tearing itself apart over the fortune left by the late dictator Omar Bongo of Gabon.
“And Tim Cook spaketh, and the word of the Apple God was good.”
In Washington, DC, the high was short-lived.
Since 17 people were murdered in the Paris terror attacks that started with a massacre of cartoonists, staff, and police at Charlie Hebdo magazine almost two weeks ago, The New York Times has not deemed fit to print even one caricature by the French satirical weekly, citing Muslim sensitivities.
Last night, when they were needed most, the synagogues of Paris were closed on the Sabbath for the first time since World War II.
The world is rallying around satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the French people today, after masked assassins—uttering the prayer ‘God is Great’ and invoking vengeance for the prophet Mohammed—massacred 12 in central Paris.
Helicopter parenting may be ruining the American marriage, but the same cannot be said for France. The French state simply does not allow hovering mamans and papas hooked on the US-driven religion of parenting—and America would do well to follow suit.
PARIS—France is Europe’s first nation of immigrants, home to a growing black population, and the continent’s largest populations of Jews and Muslims. Yet it remains officially and absurdly “color-blind.”
