For decades there has been a string of legal and economic initiatives by France aimed at improving the lot of its overseas territories. Yet as the current crisis in French Guiana shows, these measures have failed to have a noticeable impact on the 2.7 million French people who live in those regions. Julien Sartre reports on how an outdated model of development applied to these territories still shows no signs of being updated.
Despite his much-vaunted election promises, President François Hollande’s commitment to end the detention of child refugees and migrants has failed to materialise. In mainland France, 460 minors were detained between 2012-2016 and in the overseas département of Mayotte, in the Indian Ocean, some 20,000 were locked up. The Léonarda scandal – when a Kosovan child on a school trip in France was arrested pending deportation – is just one example of the hardships faced by immigrant minors under the current presidency. Carine Fouteau reports.
Scandal-hit conservative presidential candidate François Fillon, mired in graft scandals and under investigation for fraud and misusing public funds, claimed that his predicament was the work of a secret plot by socialist president François Hollande, who has firmly dismissed the 'untruthful allegations'.
Former prime minister Manuel Valls, who resigned last December to run in the Socialist Party’s primary to choose its presidential candidate, has controversially refused to support the election campaign his leftist rival who won the contest, Benoît Hamon. But he has also refrained from backing maverick centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron, whose ideas are closer to his own. Mediapart political commentator Hubert Huertas argues here why Valls, whose ambition was to transform the French Socialist Party into something resembling the New Labour of Tony Blair, has ended up in a political dead end and left behind him a party in tatters.
In 2012 the Left attracted its biggest shares of votes in the presidential election from the poorest sectors of society. But after François Hollande's presidency that support has dwindled. In the regional elections in 2015 this electorate turned instead towards the far-right Front National, headed by Marine Le Pen. The signs are that large numbers of France's poorest voters will also back Le Pen in the first round of the presidential election in April. Academic and Front National specialist Nonna Mayer analyses the figures.
President François Hollande, speaking at a UNICEF conference in Paris on children caught in conflict, slammed the British government's refusal to take in more migrant minors with family already settled in Britain and who are now stranded in France.
The list of victims of the recent presidential primary elections held by the Left and Right in France is remarkable. Two presidents, two prime ministers and a number of senior former ministers have been rejected after rebellious voters gave their verdicts. The primary process - which ended on Sunday with the unlikely election of Benoît Hamon as the official socialist candidate for the presidential contest – has proved something of an earthquake for the French political establishment, writes Hubert Huertas.
François Hollande, on the second leg of a South American tour and who is the first French president to visit Colombia in 30 years, pledged further support for the country's peace process, which it already partly funds, during a visit to a Farc rebel camp.
Following French President François Hollande's warning that the UK must be given reduced access to the EU single market after leaving the bloc, British foreign minister Boris Johnson accused Hollande of wanting 'to administer punishment beatings to anybody who chooses to escape, rather in the manner of some sort of World War II movie'.
French President François Hollande, reacting after British Prime Minister Theresa May's speech on Tuesday setting out London's intention to seek a clear split from the European single market, said he wanted negotiations on the conditions of Britain's departure from the EU to begin as soon as it invokes the process, due at the end of March.
