Despite the fact that prime minister Michel Barnier’s government was toppled by a vote of no confidence, Emmanuel Macron has no intention of changing course or adopting different political alliances. After much hesitation, he has tasked veteran centrist and key ally François Bayrou with forming a government capable of lasting until the summer. By doing so the head of state is hoping to secure the goodwill of a section of the Left. Mediapart's political correspondent lyes Ramdani reports on the president's thinking behind the choosing of his sixth prime minister.
The 73-year-old former justice minister, who ran for president three times before rallying behind Macron in 2017, is the founder of the centrist Democratic Movement political party (MoDem), and mayor of the southwestern town of Pau.
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.
The Real Madrid player and French captain, one of football's most high-profile stars, was never formally named by Swedish prosecutors or notified by them of being under suspicion of a crime.
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.
Top party chiefs in France met with President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday to discuss a way out of the latest political crisis, after fall of Michel Barnier's government last week.
Christophe Ruggia is accused of sexually assaulting Haenel - star of films including "Portrait of a Lady on Fire" and "120 Beats Per Minute" -- in the early 2000s when she was under 15.
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.
French state nuclear company Orano has announced that Niger's junta - which deposed France's ally, President Mohamed Bazoum, in a coup in July 2023 - had taken operational control of its local mining firm.
