Under President Nicolas Sarkozy France launched a military intervention that plunged Libya into chaos. Now under President François Hollande Paris is conducting two parallel and very different policies; one official, one secret. In Tripoli France supports the government that is recognised by the international community. But at the same time it is also discreetly providing military aid to the official Libyan government's main adversary, General Khalifa Haftar, whose power base is in the east of the country. René Backmann and Lénaïg Bredoux investigate.
At a European Council meeting in Brussels, François Hollande said negotiations over Britain's future relationship with the European Union 'will be hard' if London adopts a 'hard Brexit' approach, while European Parliament president Martin Schulz said restrictions on immigration would mean an economic cost for the UK.
The French president, hosting an international conference in Paris to debate stabilisation of the Iraqi city once it is freed from control by the Islamic State (IS) group, said 'we can't afford mistakes' in the pursuit of IS members fleeing Mosul for the group's stronghold of Raqa in Syria.
Just when President François Hollande’s chances for re-election next year appeared as low as they could ever get, they fell even lower still after the publication last week of a book of interviews in which he launches a series of scathing attacks on a wide number of people ranging from the judiciary to footballers, his political opponents to his allies, and the rebels on the Left of his Socialist Party. Amid the outrage caused by his comments, Hollande’s remaining allies in the party view the book as the last straw in a long-running series of blunders that now make him, in the words of one socialist senator, “indefensible”. Lénaïg Bredoux and Christophe Gueugneau report on the fury and dismay of socialist MPs and members of government.
A book published in France this week presents a long series of ‘fireside’ conversations over several years between President François Hollande and two journalists from French daily Le Monde . The book, Un président ne devrait pas dire ça (“A president shouldn’t say that…”), has caused a storm of controversy, notably over Hollande’s attacks on the “cowardly” higher ranks of the French judiciary and which prompted an embarrassed admission of "regret" by the president on Friday over his comments. But, Mediapart investigative journalists Fabrice Arfi and Mathilde Mathieu argue here, the book is especially revelatory of Hollande’s surprising approach to the catalogue of corruption scams which have shaken the French political establishment over recent years. For he evidently regards them more in terms of their electoral consequences or the negative fallout upon himself than scandals that raise grave concern over the absence of probity in French politics.
In a book of conversations with journalists to be published Thursday, the French president claimed his former partner Valérie Trierweiler betrayed him by misconstruing his description of the poor as 'toothless', but on Wednesday she revealed what she said was a text message from him using the term in a derogatory manner.
The Russian president was due to visit the French capital on October 19th when he planned to open a Russian religious and cultural centre, but cancelled the trip amid a developing row with France which accuses Russia of war crimes in Syria.
