Many regional airports in France see the low-cost airline Ryanair as vital, bringing in tourists and introducing a transport link to help open up isolated areas. This gives the Irish carrier a position of strength that it uses to attract subsidies. But when it fails to get its way the airline leaves, as it has just announced it is doing at Clermont-Ferrand airport in central France.
The political future of Marine Le Pen, leader of the French far-right, is currently being played out in a Paris court where she and 11 others are seeking to overturn, on appeal, their convictions in the first instance for misappropriating European Parliament funds in a fake jobs scam. Above all, she is hoping to escape a five-year ban on standing for public office handed down as part of her sentence, preventing her from running in next year’s presidential elections, which she had high hopes of winning. This key moment in French politics stems from an investigation initiated in 2013 by Mediapart journalists, who recount here, as the trial heads towards its third and final week, how the scandal developed.
The reactionary theorists in power in the United States identify themselves with a movement dubbed “the Dark Enlightenment”, an anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic ideology typified by the politics of Donald Trump and his vision of a “Western hemisphere”, which he must vassalize. In this analysis of the tipping point the world is now facing, Mediapart publishing editor Carine Fouteau says that for societies to return the values of equality and democracy to the fore, in a universal manner, requires a reinvention of the real Enlightenment, and an understanding of how and why its ideas became misused.
The film co-produced by Mediapart, now available through VOD.
French industry minister Sébastien Martin this week announced the launch of legal action, in the name of the French state, against British private equity firm Greybull Capital. France is seeking damages of 95 million euros from Greybull for its failure to honour its pledged investment in a group of French steelworks it purchased in 2024, and which were placed in administration just one year later when 531 jobs were lost. Meanwhile, many of the former employees are pursuing separate legal action for damages after they received minimal redundancy payments.
Amid political deadlock in France, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu on Tuesday began the process of forcing through his overdue 2026 budget legislation without a vote by parliament, employing a controversial article of the French constitution, and which he originally pledged not to use. The move will trigger parliamentary motions of no-confidence in the government later in the week, which Lecornu hopes to survive due to the support of the socialists, who obtained concessions in the budget. It represents the second major U-turn in the months-long saga, with socialist leader Olivier Faure having previously insisted that any use of the constitution's Article 49 would be crossing a red line.
The European Union on Saturday signed a major free-trade deal with the South American bloc Mercosur, promoted as creating the world’s largest free-trade zone, with a population of 700 million. The deal was signed despite France’s opposition to the treaty as it stands, in the latest example of the country’s waning influence within the EU. Fabien Escalona and Ilyes Ramdani analyse what is a significant defeat for President Emmanuel Macron, who’s final term in office draws to a close next year, and whose political credibility at home and abroad was already severely dented by the ongoing political paralysis caused by his miscalculated dissolution of parliament in 2024.
The Garden and the Jungle How the West Sees the World
Edwy Plenel’s far-ranging critique of Europe’s betrayal of universal values and equal rights as war and right-wing populism spread worldwide.
In a landmark ruling this week, the highest French appeal court, the Cour de Cassation, threw out a lower court’s finding that a parent has a right by customary law to discipline their children using corporal punishment, which has been banned in France since 2019. It overturned the decision of a court in eastern France last year which annulled the conviction of a police officer for repeated violence against his two sons on the assumption that his behaviour was proportionate, caused no harm, and was within his parenting rights.
In March 2025 Marine Le Pen was convicted at first instance of embezzling European parliamentary funds through a fake jobs scam involving her far-right party the Front National, now called Rassemblement National. She was immediately banned from seeking public office for five years, thus scuppering her chances of contesting the 2027 French presidential election. On Tuesday January 13th a court in Paris will start hearing her appeal, in which her aim is to get that immediate ban lifted.
On Friday a majority of European Union states voted to accept the Mercosur free trade deal despite opposition from France. Yet the climatic and environmental impacts of this agreement with the South American nations involved are profound: an increase in CO2 emissions, deforestation, higher sales of pesticides and chemical fertilisers, and more animal exploitation. All this represents a series of setbacks for the planet's ecology, writes Mediapart's environment editor.
In January 2021 the humanitarian vessel Ocean Viking docked in Italy. On board were 374 migrants who had been rescued while trying to make the perilous trip across the Mediterranean Sea from Libya to Europe. One of those plucked from the sea, Laureine from Cameroon, has lived in France ever since. But her two young daughters had stayed behind with a relative. They later took the huge risk of making the crossing themselves to rejoin their mother. Mediapart spent Christmas with them in their flat in Nice.
