A report by French senators recently lambasted Emmanuel Macron's government over its awarding of contracts worth a total of up to 2.4 billion euros to outside consultancy firms, including the French arm of US firm McKinsey & Company. Now Mediapart can reveal how McKinsey pinned its hopes on Macron when he was France's economy minister, well before he announced he was standing for the presidency in 2017. The consultancy firm's strategy included providing services for the minister for free. Sarah Brethes and Antton Rouget spoke to former consultants at McKinsey who revealed the methods used to try to gain influence with the man who went on to become president of France.

Fighters have been arriving from all corners of the planet to help defend Ukraine itself against the Russian invasion. Mediapart has been told that these foreign fighters include around 150 from France. The authorities in Paris meanwhile worry there could be a repeat of the problems seen during the Syrian war when French fighters went to combat Bashar al-Assad's regime – and came back radicalised. Sébastien Bourdon and Matthieu Suc report.

France’s lower house, the National Assembly, on Wednesday approved a package of adjustments to the 2022 state budget, which centres on emergency measures to ease the growing cost of living crisis. But the adoption of the measures came after a tortuous series of debates for the government which, after recently losing its absolute majority in the Assembly, was forced into compromises. For opposition groups, it demonstrated a newly invigorated parliament, while for the government it confirmed the serious challenges ahead for pushing through its planned reforms. Mathieu Dejean reports.

During World War II a young man called Rino Della Negra played for the prestigious Red Star football club from Saint-Ouen in the northern suburbs of Paris. But as well as playing top-level football he was also secretly a member of a French Resistance group. Della Negra was executed on February 21st 1944 by the Nazis at the age of just 20, but later became an icon of the club's grassroots fans. Now two historians have charted the life of this young working class footballer. As Mickaël Correia reports, Della Negra was also the the son of Italian immigrants and his story makes a mockery of the hazy notion of “national identity” so beloved by the far-right today.

When Emmanuel Macron recently set out his manifesto for next month's presidential election he adopted both the language and the policies of the mainstream Right. As a result the official right-wing candidate, Valérie Pécresse from the Les Républicains party, has seen her own position on the political spectrum squeezed. Her supporters are now wondering how to counter Macron's occupation of the Right's political terrain – and, indeed, whether it can be countered at all. Ilyes Ramdani reports.

Last weekend marked the 60th anniversary of the Évian Accords which brought an end to the bloody Algerian War and paved the way for that country's independence from France. But for many ordinary Algerians their memory of that period is still dominated by the violence perpetrated at the time by the armed French group that was virulently opposed to granting Algeria's independence, the Organisation Armée Secrète or OAS. Nejma Brahim visited Oran on the north-west coast of Algeria where an OAS car bomb killed scores of people on February 28th 1962.

Exiled Russian oligarch Sergei Pugachev, who became dubbed “the Kremlin’s banker”, was once part of Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, until he was eventually cast out by the Russian president and took refuge abroad. In this interview with Mediapart, he details how Putin and his close allies, what he calls “a junta which has captured power, all the money and all the institutions of the state”, function. He denounces a system of corruption on a vast scale, including that of foreign politicians, argues why the decision to wage war on Ukraine marks “the end of Putin’s Russia”, and describes French President Emmanuel Macron’s frequent calls to Putin as “ridiculous”.

For years, Russia led a vast campaign to promote its standing and influence in western Europe, and particularly in France, where the Kremlin’s soft-power strategy had notably, and successfully, targeted political and business circles. In this interview with Mediapart, Marlène Laruelle, director of the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at the George Washington University, details the history and reach of Russia’s drive to gain influence in France, and which was “destroyed in a matter of days, and for several years to come” following its invasion of Ukraine.

French MPs gathered earlier this week to debate a censure motion against the new government tabled by the NUPES leftwing coalition. The motion was defeated, but the rowdy parliamentary session soon centred on the “Uber Files” revelations of how Emmanuel Macron, when economy and finance minister, secretly championed the US company’s project to set up business in France. As Pauline Graulle reports, the Left are determined to hold the French president to account over what one MP called “a state scandal”, and are pushing for a parliamentary committee of inquiry into the affair.

The Russian invasion has caused a stir inside the French Foreign Legion which has around 700 Ukrainians in its ranks. There have been media rumours of desertions by soldiers who want to go and fight in Ukraine, and the commanding officer has gone public with an appeal for troops to honour their oath to the Legion. Mediapart has meanwhile identified several former legionnaires who are already on the front line and has spoken to one there who claims there are 'a hundred' current and former legionnaire already in Ukraine. Sébastien Bourdon reports.