The man arrested after a thwarted attack on a train last Friday was known to intelligence agencies in several countries, including France. Yet Ayoub El-Khazzani, 25, was still able to board a busy Paris-bound train after acquiring an assault rifle and ammunition. Michel Deléan and Louise Fessard ask if European secret services again let a potential terrorist through the net – or whether surveillance on so many potential suspects is simply impossible.
While many of his opponents and rivals have begun losing ground, frought by party infighting, the horizon towards a re-election as French president in 2017 is now clearing for François Hollande. In a remarkable turnaround from the calamitous situation just 12 months ago, a drubbing for the long-unpopular president is no longer certain, and a new term in office has become plausible, even a certainty for some of his entourage. But, Mediapart editor François Bonnet argues here, that is to underestimate the political boomerang that represents the profound social crisis in France that marks his presidency, and the unprecedented and developing European crises he has failed to address.
The ink on the Iran nuclear deal is barely dry and no one is even yet sure if it will hold. But already France has joined other countries in the hunt for lucrative business deals with the oil-rich state and its market of 80 million inhabitants. But as René Backmann reports, there are potential pitfalls to overcome before French firms can hit the Iranian jackpot.
In return for help in making the Channel Tunnel and the port at Calais more “secure”, France has agreed to monitor Britain's borders on its behalf. On the Italian frontier, meanwhile, French police are searching for migrants who have crossed the Mediterranean. As Carine Fouteau reports, interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve has taken on the mantle of Europe's new gatekeeper, at the risk of breaching European law.
The French utilities group EDF is now officially the sole company overseeing France's nuclear industry. This follows an agreement in principle signed earlier this week between EDF and the ailing French nuclear firm Areva which will create a joint company in charge of designing and building new nuclear reactors. France's economy minister Emmanuel Macron has sought to draw a line under the French nuclear industry's recent financial fiasco, preferring to speak instead of a “new adventure” for the sector. Mediapart's Martine Orange analyses the deal.
Following the European debacle of the Greek crisis, French President François Hollande has called for reforms to the eurozone that include giving it budgetary powers and a parliament, and will soon meet with European Central Bank president Mario Draghi to discuss the issue which he hopes to place on the agenda of a European leaders’ summit in October. Lénaïg Bredoux reports.
The dogmatic intransigence and unprecedented brutality that Germany has directed towards the Greek government now marks a historic break-up of the European project, writes Mediapart editor François Bonnet in this analysis of the five years of high drama surrounding the Greek debt crisis. The camouflage, he writes, has finally dropped: the arrival of an aggressive German superpower in Europe, seated on economic strength but also its influence over a number of central European states, one that is intent on imposing its economic and monetary vision, promises untold divisions and dangers.
The revelations that the United States has been tapping the phones of presidents and others senior figures in the French state have provoked a major controversy. Politicians from all parties queued up on Wednesday morning to denounce the spying, revealed in leaked documents obtained by WikiLeaks and published by Mediapart and Libération. President François Hollande, himself revealed to be the target of phone taps in 2012, called a meeting of the government’s defence committee and met a delegation of 20 Parliamentarians at lunchtime to discuss the spying crisis. The Elysée meanwhile issued a statement describing the reported spying as “unacceptable”. But the spying will have come as no great surprise to the authorities in Paris who have known about or suspected such espionage for years. But France has never previously made a major public fuss about the issue for the simple reason that it, too, is part of a vast network involving exchanges of information between intelligence services around the world. And because it, too, cheerfully snoops on its friends. Moreover, the revelations came on the eve of the final vote on the government’s new and highly-controversial snooping legislation. Lénaïg Bredoux and Mathieu Magnaudeix report.
Last month two police officers who stood trial for failing to prevent the deaths by electrocution of two teenagers in a Paris suburb in 2005 were acquitted. The court case, which took place nearly ten years after the events that sparked widespread rioting across France, highlighted how little has changed in that time to improve the often tense relations between the police and the populations in deprived urban areas, and notably youths from racial minorities. There have been no wide-ranging inquiries in France to identify the root causes of the tensions, while a report on the issue, which offers some practical if modest solutions, has been languishing on the current interior minister's desk for nearly a year. Louise Fessard considers why there has been so startlingly little progress in improving police-community relations over the last, lost decade.
French President François Hollande on Monday became the first French head of state to make an official visit to Cuba, and the first in Europe to make the trip since the rapprochement announced last December between Washington and Havana. The one-day visit – Hollande will leave for Haiti on Tuesday, ending a six-island tour of the Caribbean – is another important step for Cuba’s new-found normalisation on the international stage, but also a key event in France’s efforts to strengthen its presence in Latin America. Lénaïg Bredoux analyses what is at stake and reports on the buildup to the thaw in relations with a regime French foreign minister Laurent Fabius once described as a "loathsome" dictatorship.
