France on the edge
Where the yellow vests are heading next
Quick! Are there other lives? – Sleep in wealth
is impossible. Wealth has always been public property.
~Arthur Rimbaud
It has been a quiet few months for the gilets jaunes, until recently omnipresent in their fluorescent yellow, roadside emergency vests, protesting on roundabouts throughout France and television sets around the world. After shaking the foundations of the French political establishment as much as any protest movement of the past generation – each Saturday upon the next, long after Very Serious ...
read more "Which way off the roundabout"
read more "Which way off the roundabout"
Burning issues in French politicsA Season in Hell, the masterwork of French poet Arthur Rimbaud, was written amidst the conservative backlash to the revolutionary Paris Commune of 1871. From a farmhouse north of the city, the enfant terrible of French poetry ruminated on the failure of his own radical experiment with freedom, and the confusion, disillusionment and doubt that followed. Nearly 150 years later, contemporary France is roiled by its own Season in Hell, a deeply fractured and unsettled political moment in which dark phantasms grow large and the path to a ...
read more "Introducing a new project"
read more "Introducing a new project"
The ongoing mobilisation of yellow vest adherents is arguably the most enduring and significant social movement in France since May 1968. It will have profound political consequences, though it is still too early to gauge their extent. Today, one of the most pressing questions for understanding what these long-term consequences might be is the political direction taken by the movement.
This article highlights the atypical, even paradoxical political profile of this movement, which is caught in a dilemma between unifying its demands, and...
read more "Ideological divisions in the ‘yellow vest’ movement"
read more "Ideological divisions in the ‘yellow vest’ movement"
The car drivers' uprising?Since November 17th, in response to Macron's announcement of a tax increase on petrol and diesel, France has been experiencing mass blockades of road traffic. Macron wants to use this eco-tax to finance climate protection measures. According to media reports, almost 300,000 people participated in blockades on the first day of protest, and there have already been more than 2,000 protests throughout the country. In addition to several hundred injured, two people have already lost their lives. The following Saturday there were visibly fewer ...
read more "The Yellow Vests in France"
read more "The Yellow Vests in France"
When he came to power, Emmanuel Macron – who claims to be “neither left nor right” and considers “liberalism a leftist value” (1) – pledged to overcome political divisions. This forced his opponents to develop strategies and measures that would enable them to survive on the new political stage. While the socialists, conservatives, and extreme right are struggling to reinvent themselves, the left seems to be gaining a surprising momentum, both on the streets and in parliament – and not just since Macron took office.
While an electoral victory for ...
read more "The left in France under Macron"
read more "The left in France under Macron"
In the debate on Europe, Emmanuel Macron is trying to sell himself as a proponent of deeper EU integration, in particular for its hard core, the eurozone. To this end, he has formulated several concepts, not least ‘European sovereignty’: the need for Europeans to unite to assert their influence on the world. He has also brought to the table several proposals—a eurozone budget, transnational lists—which European partners, especially German chancellor Angela Merkel, have received with caution. Domestically-speaking, Macron, being the good liberal that ...
read more "Macron’s European ambitions dashed"
read more "Macron’s European ambitions dashed"
Outside France, President Emmanuel Macron is probably viewed in a positive light: young, brilliant, a stark contrast to the grievous presidency of the ‘socialist’ François Hollande. After rising to power in France in May 2017, Macron has earned wide appeal beyond his own borders. When on 1 June 2017 Donald Trump withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, Macron retorted with a rousing tweet: ‘Make our planet great again.’ The message was retweeted more than 288,000 times, admittedly well below the record set by Barack Obama in 2012 with ...
read more "Macron: neocapitalist, digital, authoritarian"
read more "Macron: neocapitalist, digital, authoritarian"