Né en 1980 à Périgueux (Dordogne). A Mediapart, j'ai suivi l'actualité économique et sociale, la révolution tunisienne, le quinquennat de François Hollande, raconté l'OPA d'Emmanuel Macron sur la présidence de la République, couvert le mandat Trump depuis les Etats-Unis.
Désormais responsable et animateur d'A l'air libre, l'émission en accès libre de Mediapart.
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.
Despite a low-key start to the campaign to elect councils for France's départements or counties later this month, new rules for these elections do herald genuine changes in French local politics. For the first time there will be strict male-female parity among those elected, the new councillors will be noticeably younger and the age-old tradition of combining both a local and a parliamentary post is starting to fade. But as Mathieu Magnaudeix reports, this welcome progress risks being largely undermined by the fact that the départements themselves, which date from the time of the French Revolution, are increasingly being marginalised by the ascendancy of regions and metropolitan areas. Indeed, voters will go to the polls not even knowing what powers the councillors they elect will have in the future.
A mini-reshuffle has taken place involving President François Hollande's senior advisor on the European Union. First the advisor was shunted to the prime minister's office, then it was confirmed he would remain as the head of state's 'sherpa' in charge of summit meetings in Brussels. As Ludovic Lamant and Mathieu Magnaudeix explain, this rearranging of advisors on the deck of state is symbolic of how, nearly three years after his election, President Hollande has shown himself incapable of presenting a clear, coherent and strong policy on Europe that would enable France to punch its full weight in Brussels. The result, fear some observers, is that France has lost considerable clout in the corridors of European power.
The government, the Left and most leaders on the Right have joined calls for “national unity” or a form of national union as the French nation collectively mourned those killed in Wednesday's murderous attack on the magazine Charlie Hebdo. Senior figures across the political spectrum will also take part in Sunday's 'Republican march' in Paris as an act of solidarity. But already some politicians on the hard right, and notably those in the far-right Front National (FN), have raised doubts about the national consensus. In particular the FN's president Marine Le Pen has reacted angrily to the fact that so far she has not been invited to the weekend march. As Mathieu Magnaudeix and Marine Turchi report, the far-right has in fact already started to play on the fears of French citizens in the wake of the massacre.
Since its introduction by a socialist government in 2000, France’s 35-hour working week is the subject of political controversy at home and myth abroad. While it has long been the bugbear of the French Right, now the current socialist government’s economy minister Emmanuel Macron has called for its application to be eased, supposedly to increase business competitiveness. Outside of France, it is often misunderstood as the illustration of a laid-back workforce – but who, according to Federal Reserve Economic Data, in reality work more hours annually than their German counterparts. This month, a French parliamentary commission of enquiry into ‘the relative societal, economic and financial impact of the reduction in working hours’, prompted by centre-right MPs, published its findings. To the surprise of many, and the ire of some, it broadly concludes that the measure, arguably the last most significant socialist reform, has proved a positive one. In this report by Mathieu Magnaudeix, the parliamentary commission’s rapporteur Barbara Romagnan argues why the 35-hour week has been positive for employees and employers alike, and why introducing a further reduction in basic working hours should not be excluded.
The French Minister for War Veterans, Kader Arif, a close ally of President François Hollande, on Friday became the third member of the country’s socialist government to resign amid a corruption scandal. His resignation was announced 24 hours after Mediapart revealed his offices had been searched by police investigating allegations of favouritism and fraud in the awarding of contracts worth several million euros to companies run by Arif’s relatives by a socialist-run regional council in his fiefdom in south-west France. The junior minister’s resignation is another severe blow for Hollande who, after making transparency in public office a key theme of his term in office, has already been embarrassed by the forced resignation of budget minister Jérôme Cahuzac for tax evasion and that of overseas trade minister Thomas Thévenoud for failing to pay income tax. Mathieu Magnaudeix and Michel Deléan report.
The fallout from a private lunch between President François Hollande’s chief of staff Jean-Pierre Jouyet and former President Nicolas Sarkozy's prime minister François Fillon last summer is threatening to develop into a full-blown scandal. At the meeting on June 24th Fillon is said to have asked the socialist administration to speed up legal investigations into his former boss and now political rival Sarkozy. Jouyet, who served in Fillon's right-wing government but who is a close personal friend of Hollande, later told two journalists of the conversation. When the reporters published the story in a book last week Jouyet at first denied the claim then backtracked and insisted that Fillon had indeed asked him to intervene in the affair. Fillon, however, who like Sarkozy wants to be the Right's 2017 presidential candidate, has angrily accused Jouyet of “lies” and says he is suing for defamation. Once more, say Stéphane Alliès, Ellen Salvi and Mathieu Magnaudeix, the Elysée finds itself at the centre of an embarrassing affair, this time with the president’s right-hand man in the firing line.
For the last three years France's upper chamber of parliament, the Senate, has been under the political control of the Left, a rarity in the history of the Fifth Republic. On Sunday that brief interlude ended when, as expected, the Right regained control of the chamber during partial elections, with the centre-right faring especially well. And for the first time the far-right Front National gained entry to the Senate, picking up two seats. Meanwhile the ruling Socialist Party took comfort from the fact that a number of its candidates fared better than expected, though there were some symbolic defeats for key allies of President François Hollande. Mathieu Magnaudeix analyses the significance of the weekend's elections.
Debts of nearly 80 million euros, a party leader who had to step down over an election funding scandal, warring factions, public attacks, leaked allegations that senior party figures and their relatives have been milking its finances for their own benefit and continuing scandals surrounding its talismanic figure Nicolas Sarkozy... France's main opposition party the UMP seems on the brink of a political abyss. Indeed, one senior figure in it has claimed that the right-wing party is “already dead”. Mathilde Mathieu, Ellen Salvi and Marine Turchi report on a party crisis that shows no sign of abating and could end in its destruction.
President François Hollande this month announced the broad outline of sweeping territorial reforms that will see the number of official regions in mainland France reduced from 22 to just 14. The move is designed to give them greater political power and efficiency in the coordination of local resources and economies. Some among Hollande’s camp claim this major plank of a decentralisation programme will prove to be the most significant reform of his presidency. But Hollande, whose political legitimacy is questioned after recent election debacles for his ruling Socialist Party, has met with sharp criticism from both Left and Right for the monarchic manner in which he has redrawn the map of France. Lénaïg Bredoux and Mathieu Magnaudeix report.
The blank vote, also known as a white vote, will be partially recognised as a legitimate vote in France following the adoption of a bill of law to that effect during its final passage before the French parliament’s upper house last week. However, it will not be considered as an effective part of election results, in which only ballot papers with named candidates will be included. For the new legislation simply distinguishes the blank vote from invalid, spoiled, votes with which it was previously included. While the law’s supporters argue that this partial recognition of the blank vote will reduce abstentions and protest votes for extremist parties, a number of political analysts dismiss that view as naive. Mathieu Magnaudeix reports.
Last Friday a minister insisted that the government's bill on the family was going ahead as planned. Then on Sunday a pro-family march by right-wingers attracted around 100,000 protesters and was hailed a success. By Monday morning the government had announced it would oppose any controversial amendments to the new bill – and in the afternoon it declared it was dropping the entire measure for at least a year. Lénaïg Bredoux and Mathieu Magnaudeix report on a retreat by the government in the face of protests.
The Ariège département in southern France has a long history as a bastion of the Socialist Party. Over several decades, it has been the fiefdom of a clan of local politicians who are accused by opponents of ruling with a surprisingly monarchic set of practices: cronyism, the hoarding by a few of multiple posts of public office, political functions handed down to groomed successors, and intimidation of opponents. In this, his third and final report from one of the poorest and least inhabited départements in France, Mathieu Magnaudeix investigates the inside workings of what might be likened to a socialist ‘principality’.
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Donald Trump vient de menacer de taxer les importations mexicaines d'ici le 10 juin « si le problème de l'immigration illégale n'est pas résolue ». Le président mexicain, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a répondu avec ironie. Et en lui rappelant les règles élémentaires de la « non-violence » et de la diplomatie. Voici sa lettre, traduite en français.
Jeudi, Emmanuel Macron m'a sermonné. Publiquement, devant des centaines de journalistes et tous ses soutiens réunis. Il m’a donné du « cher ami », cette expression qui suggère la condescendance avec politesse. M’a reproché de « faire le lit du Front national ».
Le soir, il est rare que je rentre chez moi en tremblant. C'est pourtant arrivé mercredi soir. Je ne revenais pas d'un terrain de guerre. Je n'avais pas passé ma journée à parler à des rescapés de la tuerie de vendredi. Ce soir-là, je rentrais juste de l'Assemblée nationale.
