United States

The two-month-long ‘gilets jaunes’, or ‘yellow vest’, movement in France, protesting the fall in living standards for low- and middle-income earners and against the powers of the country’s social and political elite, continues largely unabated. It has attracted worldwide attention, and not least in the United States, where the Left sees it as an echo of the Occupy Wall Street movement, where also supporters of President Donald Trump have hi-jacked it as a new symbol of protest against the liberal establishment, and where the latter interpret it as a devil of populism. Mediapart’s US correspondent Mathieu Magnaudeix reports from New York on the confused reactions across the Atlantic to the largely misunderstood revolt in France.

The very word has been anathema in America for so long. Yet in the wake of Bernie Sanders' strong showing in the Democratic Party primaries ahead of the last presidential election, more and more Americans are calling themselves “socialists”. Some are even winning elections. Mediapart's New York correspondent Mathieu Magnaudeix gives a pen portrait of some of these new candidates on the American Left who are fighting against capitalism as much as they are combating discrimination.

The different ways in which the two countries have reacted to the #MeToo movement has been striking. In the United States there was a strong and powerful response whereas in France there has been a backlash, in some quarters. To find out why France has been slower to embrace this movement, which began a year ago, Mediapart asked women who had supported or led the campaign on this side of the Atlantic. Marine Turchi reports.

In an interview with Mediapart the celebrated Nobel Prize winner for economics, Joseph Stiglitz, says he is worried about the continuing pursuit of austerity policies in the Eurozone. The economist say he is concerned, too, about President Donald Trump's policies and the explosion in inequality since the financial crisis of 2008. More than ever, he tells Mediapart, there is a need for wages to rise, for better regulation of the financial world and for a war on huge “monopolies”. Mathieu Magnaudeix reports.  

French President Emmanuel Macron arrived in the United States on Monday for a three-day state visit, the first of its kind by a foreign head-of-state since the election of Donald Trump as president. Mediapart’s US correspondent Mathieu Magnaudeix analyses American perceptions of the French president as a bulwark against the advance of populist politics and an antidote to Trump, who one US media commentator even ventured to describe as “a beacon for progressives hoping to find their way back to the halls of power across the democratic world”.