Journaliste et responsable du pôle politique de Mediapart.
En charge de l’animation de la couverture éditoriale sur les extrêmes droites. Pour nous écrire : extremedroite@mediapart.fr
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In the interest of transparency towards its readers, Mediapart’s journalists fill out and make public since 2018 a declaration of interests on the model of the one filled out by members of parliament and senior civil servants with the High Authority for Transparency and Public Life (HATVP), a body created in 2014 after Mediapart’s revelations on the Cahuzac affair.
In a high-profile and highly-unusual speech before both chambers of the French Parliament in the sumptuous surroundings of Versailles on Monday July 3rd, President Emmanuel Macron claimed to be setting the “course” for his presidency. But, says Ellen Salvi, it turned out to be an hour-and-a-half of messages that had already been delivered during his election campaign and he announced little more than a promise of some institutional reforms.
French President Emmanuel Macron’s newly founded centrist party La République En Marche (LREM) is forecast to gain as many as 455 out of parliament’s 577 seats in next Sunday’s second and final round of legislative elections. It emerged from the first round this weekend with massive support across the country, to the backdrop of a record low turnout of less than one in two voters. Macron now appears certain to wield a crushing power to enact his promised major structural reforms, and to be completely untied to his electoral alliance with the centre-right MoDem party. Mathieu Magnaudeix and Ellen Salvi report.
The makeup of French President Emmanuel Macron’s new government is crucial to his chances of obtaining a parliamentary majority in legislative elections in June, when his République En Marche party faces its first electoral test against the traditional parties of the Left and Right. The maverick centrist has succeeded in including renegade conservatives and socialists, along with his centre-right allies, as well as a key figure from the Green camp and others from “civil society”. But, as Ellen Salvi and Mathieu Magnaudeix report, it nevertheless remains a pale exercise of what was promised to be a political “renewal”.
François Fillon, the presidential election candidate for the French conservative party Les Républicains, appeared on French television on Thursday evening in an attempt to contain the scandal caused by press revelations this week that his wife was paid 500,000 euros from MPs’ funds to act as his parliamentary assistant, a role which, it is alleged, she did not fulfil. Fillon, who was just one month ago regarded as the presidential election frontrunner, denounced the "abject nature of these accusations” but failed to provide clear evidence that his wife Penelope carried out the job she was paid for, while he also admitted to having employed two of his children when he was a senator. Ellen Salvi reports.
For a long time Nicolas Sarkozy's former allies avoided personal attacks on the former president, even after they had become his political adversaries in the contest to choose the Right's presidential candidate for 2017. Now, however, the gloves are off and some on the Right are openly talking about the string of political and financial scandals in which the ex-president is currently embroiled. For the first time, report Ellen Salvi and Mathilde Mathieu, Sarkozy now looks politically vulnerable to the sheer weight of the scandals and criticism bearing down on him.
France’s conservative opposition party Les Républicains is readying itself for primary elections in November to decide who will become its candidate in presidential elections next year. In the debates, and speeches at its annual congress earlier this month, the issue of women’s rights has been placed at the fore. But not in the broad context of gender equality, rather as an argument over the issue of Muslim practices in France and the perceptions of a French ‘identity’. Ellen Salvi analyses the rhetoric, and the hypocrisy, of a new-found feminism among a party that remains firmly sexist.
The Bastille Day attack in Nice, when a Tunisian immigrant from the city drove a truck into crowds walking the seafront Promenade des Anglais, killing 84 people, has heightened the already prevalent racial and social tensions in the Riviera capital. Ellen Salvi reports from Nice, where local politicians have long fuelled the fires of division that threaten to engulf the city.
The Panama Papers revelations have rocked the world with disclosures of how Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca mounted offshore financial structures for the rich and powerful that enable tax evasion and money laundering on a staggering scale. Beyond the sensational cases emerging in the leaked documents, Mossack Fonseca is also cited in several judicial investigations into some of the most important corruption scandals in France over recent years. Fabrice Arfi, Karl Laske, Mathilde Mathieu, Yann Philippin and Ellen Salvi report.
The French Senate voted on Thursday in favour of inscribing into the constitution the stripping of French nationality from dual-nationals convicted of terrorist crimes. The text adopted by the Senate is fundamentally different to that adopted last month in the National Assembly, the lower house, which allows for the stripping of French nationality of anyone convicted of terrorism, effectively allowing for individuals to become stateless. As Christophe Gueugneau and Ellen Salvi report, the conflict now appears likely to definitively bury what was one of President François Hollande’s two key and highly controversial constitutional reforms in reaction to the November 13th terrorist massacres in Paris.
This week the knives were sharpening in the battle between rivals to become the 2017 presidential election candidate for the French conservative opposition party Les Républicains, with latest contenders bringing the total to ten. Defying earlier predictions, the current clear favourite, ahead of primaries to be held in the autumn, is Alain Juppé, the 70-year-old former prime minister whose principal rival is his party's leader, Nicolas Sarkozy. Mediapart political correspondent Ellen Salvi examines the striking resemblance of Juppé’s successful campaign to that of French President François Hollande in his bid to wrestle power from Sarkozy four years ago.
Since last Friday, following an attack on firefighters and police by a group of youths on a housing estate in Ajaccio, the capital of the French Mediterranean island of Corsica, vigilante mobs chanting anti-Arab and anti-Muslim slogans have reigned terror on the neighbourhood, seeking out the perpetrators and ransacking a Muslim prayer room where they attempted to burn copies of the Koran. Despite an official ban on public demonstrations until January 4th in an effort to reduce the tensions, several hundred marchers on Sunday again tried to occupy the estate which is home to a large North African population. Rachida El Azzouzi and Ellen Salvi report on the events this weekend and why, as the mayor of Ajaccio admits, they came as no surprise.
The end of the regional elections in France last weekend was the starting gun for another contest – to choose the Right's candidate for the next presidential election. Already, ahead of this primary scheduled for the autumn of 2016, two clear ideological lines have emerged as have a host of competing candidates. Just one factor seems to unite them all and that is hostility towards their own leader, Nicolas Sarkozy, who is widely blamed for assisting the rise of the far-right Front National. Ellen Salvi reports.
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Dans un contexte de plus en plus alarmant, Mediapart renforce encore sa couverture des extrêmes droites et lance une newsletter dédiée dans laquelle vous pourrez retrouver, chaque mois, nos enquêtes, nos reportages, nos analyses, mais aussi des rendez-vous inédits afin de casser la vitrine de la « normalisation ».
L’enquête préliminaire contre X..., ouverte en janvier 2013 à la suite d’une plainte pour « détournement de biens publics », déposée par un militant écologiste contre le député et maire UMP de Nice, a été classée sans suite le jeudi 7 novembre. Le plaignant pointe du doigt « les étonnantes conclusions des enquêteurs ».
