In the summer of 2022, France's richest man Bernard Arnault was panicking at the prospect of an MP from the radical-left La France Insoumise (LFI) party taking charge of the Finance Committee at the National Assembly. The boss of the LVMH luxury goods group apparently feared that as chair of the influential committee the politician would be able to get access to his tax details. Representatives for the billionaire then requested that his personal tax records be classified as a state secret. But as Fabrice Arfi, Yann Philippin, Antton Rouget and Ellen Salvi report, the authorities balked at this extraordinary request and ultimately rejected it.
Even though concern about corruption looms large in the very opinion polls that the worlds of politics and journalism hold so dear, no one seems to want to tackle this issue head on. This was shown again recently when a new survey suggested that 63% of people in France think that “most politicians are corrupt”; yet subsequent public discussion of the findings focussed on other matters. To highlight the issue Mediapart has painstakingly compiled daily cases involving corruption from the last few weeks. As Antton Rouget reports, the list speaks for itself.
At the end of last month the authorities in the Senegalese capital of Dakar and in N’Djamena in Chad both announced that they want the French military to pack up and leave their countries. These decisions – which in Chad's case came as a shock - undermine Paris's ongoing plans to restructure its troops' deployment in Africa. More broadly they also challenge a French military presence on the continent that is a hangover from colonial days. Rémi Carayol reports.
Five days after his private funeral, hundreds of admirers turned out on Thursday in homage to the French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen at a ceremony held at the Paris church of Notre-Dame du Val-de-Grâce, including political figures from the hard- and far-right. The event capped numerous homages already paid to Le Pen, who died on January 7th at the age of 96, including from Emannuel Macron and his prime minister François Bayrou, and which have skirted the reality of the ideology behind Le Pen’s hate-filled outbursts, jibes and speeches throughout his long political career. Youmni Kezzouf dresses a list.
The downfall of prime minister Michel Barnier's government on Wednesday night was only the second time under France's Fifth Republic that an administration has been toppled by MPs in a no-confidence vote. In an interview with Mediapart's Fabien Escalona, law professor Bruno Daugeron examines the similarities and differences with the current situation and that of 1962, when prime minister Georges Pompidou's administration was also brought down. According to the academic, France is now paying the price for decades of what he terms “majoritarian presidentialism” that no longer works.
The collapse of Michel Barnier's administration on Wednesday night after a no-confidence vote has repercussions that spread beyond France itself. For example, the political crisis in Paris further complicates the European Union’s efforts to formulate a response to Donald Trump’s imminent return to power in the United States. And it also comes as negotiations on the EU-Mercosur trade agreement – which is deeply unpopular with French farmers – look as if they could be concluded by the end of this week. Mediapart's Brussels correspondent Ludovic Lamant reports.
A vote of no confidence brought down prime minister Michel Barnier’s short-lived administration last night, something that has only happened once before under France' Fifth Republic, and that was in 1962. Yet the vote – backed by 331 French MPs - will not persuade President Emmanuel Macron to change course. On the contrary, says Mediapart's political correspondent Ilyes Ramdani, the head of state is now actively seeking solutions from among his most loyal supporters about how to hold on until the summer when fresh parliamentary elections can be held.
The OCCRP, the largest organised network of investigative media in the world, hid the extent of its links with the US government, this investigation can reveal. Washington supplies half of its budget, has a right to veto its senior staff, and funds investigations focussing on Russia and Venezuela. Yann Philippin and Stefan Candea report.
By hiding the closeness of its relationship with the US government, the world’s largest consortium of investigative journalism, the OCCRP, has played into the hands of the planet’s worst dictators, like Vladimir Putin, who sees a foreign agent behind any journalist who disturbs his regime’s status quo, writes Fabrice Arfi in this op-ed article.
After launching an investigation into the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), and after subsequently inviting Mediapart and three other outlets to join the project, German public broadcaster NDR finally decided to shelve the report after senior editorial managers came under pressure from the OCCRP. Yann Philippin reports.
