Julian Jackson, France on Trial

At Amazon, Julian Jackson, France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain.

We Are In a Jacobin Revolution of the Sort That in 1793-94 Nearly Destroyed France

From Victor Davis Hanson, "Our French Revolution."

Entering Sixth Month of War, Ukraine Faces Thorny Dilemmas (VIDEO)

At the Los Angeles Times, "Entering a sixth month of war, Ukraine faces thorny dilemmas":

KYIV, Ukraine — The explosion is invariably spectacular: a gigantic spewing fireball, often followed by a slow-motion airborne cascade of secondary blasts. As soon as such footage finds its way online, exultant Ukrainian commentary erupts: “It’s HIMARS o’clock!” As its war with Russia enters a sixth month, Ukraine has been celebrating recent battlefield successes generated by sophisticated launchers known as High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, or HIMARS. The Pentagon has provided or promised a dozen of the advanced systems, capable of hitting targets up to 50 miles away.

Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of its smaller neighbor on Feb. 24, the conflict has veered from Moscow’s initial failed effort to capture the capital, Kyiv, to substantial Ukrainian territorial losses this summer in the country’s eastern industrial heartland.

Now the combat calculus appears to be shifting yet again, with Ukrainian forces, assisted by their new weaponry, striking dozens of sites, including Russian ammunition dumps, troop concentrations and bridges. That is seen as likely preparation for an offensive to regain Russian-held territory in the country’s south, near the Black Sea coast.

“Ukrainian forces are now using long-range rocket systems to great effect,” U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III said last week during a virtual meeting of 50 countries that are donating equipment to Ukraine. “I think that everyone here understands the difference that they’ve made on the ground.”

That battlefield effect, however, leaves Ukrainian officials treading a fine line.

President Volodymyr Zelensky and other top officials continue to issue forceful pleas for more Western weaponry, declaring bluntly that Ukraine cannot seize the military initiative without far more donated armaments. Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, made an unusual personal appearance Wednesday before Congress, where she graphically invoked civilian suffering at Russian hands while also appealing for additional military materiel.

But at the same time, Zelensky and his lieutenants seek to depict a landscape in which their armed forces already may be poised to gain the upper hand — implicitly promising that the country’s sacrifice of lives, together with Western allies’ growing economic and energy strains stemming from the war, will ultimately prove worthwhile.

“We have a significant potential for the advance of our forces on the front, and for the infliction of significant new losses on the occupiers,” Zelensky said late Thursday in his nightly address to the country.

The two messages aren’t necessarily contradictory. Calibrating them, however, is a difficult task.

Too much triumphalism, while boosting domestic morale, can undercut the urgency of appeals for more Western weaponry. By contrast, any appearance of defeatism could accelerate outside calls for Zelensky to agree to territorial concessions to Moscow and perhaps end the fighting before winter sets in.

The advent of cold weather will mean Ukraine’s European allies face a far more intense Kremlin-inflicted energy crunch. Austin acknowledged as much, citing the challenges in keeping up the pressure on Russia.

“We’re pushing hard to maintain and intensify the momentum of donations,” he said. “There’s no question that this will always be hard work, making sure that we maintain unity.”

On the world stage, Ukraine consistently portrays Russia as a perfidious power that cannot be trusted to honor international agreements — and Moscow’s actions often make that characterization compelling.

On Saturday, Russian missiles struck Ukraine’s southern port of Odesa, the Ukrainian military said, only one day after the sealing of a U.N.- and Turkish-brokered deal to allow grain exports from Black Sea ports meant to ease global food shortfalls caused by the war.

“That’s all you should know about Russians and agreements,” tweeted Anton Gerashchenko, an advisor to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry. He argued that the episode bolstered the case for more and better Western weapons for Ukraine.

With the advent of a sixth month of fighting — a psychological crossing into long-war territory — the Kremlin is saying it will ramp up its military aims, brushing aside an earlier stated focus on the industrial eastern heartland, much of which it has seized...

Russia’s War on Ukraine at 100 Days Has No End in Sight, Threatening Global Costs

Putin sure has some staying power, because this cluster must be causing some inside assessments of his leadership and power. Somebody's gotta cross the Rubicon, breach the Kremlin, and get him out of there.

At the Wall Street Journal, "A war of attrition for Ukraine’s survival—and Putin’s vision of Russia—devours both countries’ resources while hurting the world economy":

After 100 days, Russia’s war on Ukraine is turning into a bloody slog with no end in sight, causing mounting devastation in Ukraine and prolonged costs world-wide.

The biggest conflict between European states since World War II has undergone swings of fortune that offer a reminder of war’s unpredictability. The failure of Russia’s early blitzkrieg fueled Ukrainian confidence that is ebbing as Russia concentrates its firepower on a narrower, grinding advance.

On Friday, Russian forces advanced behind heavy artillery barrages in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, where they have slowly but steadily gained ground, sending tens of thousands of civilians fleeing westward.

Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky marked 100 days of war with a somber but defiant video message. “The armed forces of Ukraine are here,” he said. “Most importantly, our people–the people of our nation– are here. We have been defending our country for 100 days already. Victory will be ours! Glory to Ukraine!”

Many Western governments fear a destructive stalemate looms, with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s defenders locked in a struggle that is viewed as existential by both.

Around 6.9 million Ukrainians have left the country since the war began, according to the United Nations, with Poland alone receiving 3.7 million, although some are returning home. Millions more Ukrainians have been displaced internally by the Russian onslaught. The invasion has devastated cities in Ukraine’s east, including Mariupol, where at least 22,000 residents were killed during the weekslong Russian siege, according to local officials.

Ukrainian and international investigators are gathering evidence of possible war crimes in areas where Russian troops killed and mistreated civilians. Kyiv has accused Moscow of forcibly deporting large numbers of Ukrainians to Russia, including many children.

Mr. Zelensky said Thursday that Russia now controls 20% of his country’s territory. The problem for Kyiv—and for Western European governments proposing a cease-fire—is that Russia has seized much of the industrial heartlands of Ukraine’s east and vast tracts of its fertile agricultural land, while blocking Ukraine’s access to the sea, needed for exports.

That threatens to leave Ukraine as a barely viable state surviving on Western giving. Ukraine needs roughly $5 billion every month to cover essential government services and keep its battered economy functioning, officials in Kyiv have said, in addition to humanitarian aid and armaments.

Russia, meanwhile, faces a deep recession this year from Western sanctions and a long-term erosion of its economic potential. Absent an unexpected collapse by one side, a war of attrition looms that could steadily devour the resources of both countries.

The stakes are too high for Ukraine or Russia to back down. The war also threatens two long-accepted pillars of global order: The principle that territory can’t be annexed by force, and that the seas are free to all nations’ ships.

The war has made the world poorer. By driving up food and energy prices, it has complicated the troubled global recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic. The disruption of long-established energy and food supply relationships leaves much of the world facing a protracted and costly economic adaptation.

“The time of cheap fossil-fuel energy is over,” German economy minister Robert Habeck said recently.

Russia’s expansionism has brought the world’s advanced countries closer politically. But it has also exposed gaps in interests and outlooks between the West and the poorer global South, which has remained largely neutral, and where Russia’s narrative of anti-Western grievances—echoed by China—has many sympathizers.

With no outright Ukrainian victory in sight, the Biden administration has begun to emphasize that its goal is to increase Kyiv’s leverage for potential negotiations with Moscow...

 Still more.

The First Wave Hits Omaha Beach

On Twitter:

Some units in the first wave that hit Omaha Beach on D-Day suffered a casualty rate north of 90%. We asked young men with their whole lives ahead of them to pay the ultimate price.

Next time you want to complain about how tough you have it, read a history book. #MemorialDay pic.twitter.com/2O5oNPNtZo

— David Hookstead (@dhookstead) May 30, 2022

More Cracks in the Western Front

Following-up, "Cracks Show in Western Front Against Russia's War in Ukraine."

At WSJ, "Ukraine’s Allies Split on Heavy-Weapons Shipments, War Outlook (WSJ Germany correspondent Bojan Pancevski)":

Bojan Pancevski: Hi there.

Luke Vargas: Okay, so tell us about this split that is beginning to emerge now within NATO and how significant a split it is?

Bojan Pancevski: Well, three months after the start of the Russian invasion on Ukraine, cracks are beginning to appear in the Western front against Russia and in the NATO support of Ukraine. Essentially, there are two blocks, two school of thoughts, if you will. On one hand, you have the United States, the UK, and a group of Central and Northern European nations, such as Poland and the Baltic countries who believe that Ukraine can and should win the war. They believe all stops should be pulled in order to provide military assistance to Kiev in order to be able to win. On the other hand, you have a group of Western European nations, which are led by Paris and Berlin, who are not actually outright saying that Ukraine must win the war. They're saying Russia should not be allowed to win, and they're supporting Ukraine financially and militarily, but there have not been sending the kind of quantity and quality of military supply that we've seen coming from this other block. So to put things into a context, if you see Germany is the biggest economy of Europe, it has a population of well over 83 million people, and it has so far sent, according to government estimates, military aid worth of something around 200 million Euros. Whereas Estonia, a tiny little country in the north of Europe that actually borders Russia and it has a population of just over one million, has sent military aid worth well over 220 million Euros, including heavy artillery. That discrepancy just shows that there's different level of commitment. Equally so, that this is true for France. France has only sent, I think, 12 pieces of military equipment, whereas Poland, for example, which is a much poorer country, economically speaking, has sent 240 tanks to Ukraine.

Luke Vargas: And, Bojan, what has brought about this divergence in approach?

Bojan Pancevski: Well, I think when the war started, pretty much everyone was taken aback. There was ample Western, and especially, U.S. and British intelligence about what was going to happen. When it finally happened, governments were taken aback. It was a watershed moment. So I don't think they had preconceived policy for this war of attrition, which we are now seeing. I don't think they had a pre-fabricated policy for this, and I think the policy is kind of crystallizing as we speak. I think policy makers in Berlin and in Paris and elsewhere that I've spoken to seem to think that we are in for the long haul. It's a very challenging situation. There is a looming recession all across Europe. Energy prices are soaring. They're fueling the already existing inflation, and they have huge concerns about the political backlash of that. I think they would like to see the crisis resolve sooner rather than later. The war is comparatively distant from them physically. If you sit in Paris or Berlin, you're not seeing millions and millions of Ukrainian refugees like Poland is seeing. I think every seventh person in Poland now is Ukrainian. Also, historically speaking, Poland and (inaudible) countries and the Czech Republic have been the dominion of the Soviet Union. And they have, historically speaking, a much more tense relationship to Russia. They're not thinking about trade when they think about Moscow. They don't think about gas and oil, they're mainly thinking about a potential aggressor. They see the invasion of Ukraine as a prelude to a possible wider front against the European Union, against NATO, against themselves. I think that is the fundamental difference. There's a difference in perception for someone sitting in Berlin or Paris, this is not an existential threat. For someone sitting in Warsaw or Tallinn in Estonia, this is a war against Europe itself.

Luke Vargas: How is this French and German stance being received within Ukraine, and within NATO, can the Alliance actually reconcile this split that seems to be emerging within its ranks?

Bojan Pancevski: Well, I think Kiev has been on the record without perhaps singling out Germany or France has been quite critical of these type of efforts. I think the noises here from Kiev and from Kiev's diplomats across Europe and the Western world, is that what they need is weapons. They need more and more and more weapons. Now, how will that play out in the coming months? It's very difficult to tell. Of course, it must be said that the reluctance of France, Italy, Germany, Spain, perhaps, or the Netherlands or any other Western European country to send their own weapons to Ukraine doesn't obviously stop the United States or Great Britain or Poland, for that matter, from doing so. The bulk of the Western support has been coming from those countries, and I think it continues to flow into Ukraine. With the caveat that Eastern European nations such as Poland will surely soon reach the limit of what they can actually send to Ukraine without jeopardizing their own security. And, basically, the only country that pretty much has a limitless capacity to support Ukraine at this stage is the United States, and possibly to an extent, Great Britain...

 

Cracks Show in Western Front Against Russia's War in Ukraine

Yeah, I'll bet. 

Problem is Ukraine won't make it without Western help, so if "the West" wants to preserve Ukrainian independence and sovereignty, it'll be the United States that makes it happen. 

Congress just approved $40 billion, against the wishes of just about everyone on Twitter, if that matters. I can't disagree with them. We have so many needs at home, and here we are sending tens of billions of dollars across the pond. For what? How U.S. national security is tied to Western Europe's is not very well defined these days, and I can't for the life of me see how the country will support more "endless wars" via the national checkbook when we just bailed out of Afghanistan most disgracefully and at great risk not only to those we left behind --- Americans and our Afghani allies --- but to international security on the whole. 

Biden's doing extremely poorly, not just in the polls, but among people in his own party and administration. And to think, we've still got to bear two and a half more years of him. *Grunts.*

At the Wall Street Journal, "Allies are increasingly divided on further heavy-weapons shipments to Kyiv":

Cracks are appearing in the Western front against Moscow, with America’s European allies increasingly split over whether to keep shipping more powerful weapons to Ukraine, which some of them fear could prolong the conflict and increase its economic fallout.

At the center of the disagreement—which is splitting a group of Western European powers from the U.S., U.K. and a group of mostly central and northern European nations—are diverging perceptions of the long-term threat posed by Russia and whether Ukraine can actually prevail on the battlefield.

The first bloc, led by France and Germany, is growing reluctant to provide Ukraine the kinds of offensive, long-range weapons it would need to reclaim ground lost to Russia’s armies in the country’s south and east. They doubt Russia would directly threaten the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

On the other side, Washington, London and a group of mainly central and northern European nations, some of them former Soviet bloc members, see the Russian offensive as a harbinger of further expansion by Moscow, making Ukraine the front line in a broader war pitching Russia against the West.

The differences between the two groups—which European officials said have been building in recent weeks, as Ukraine lost ground in its Donbas area—are getting aired more loudly in public this week, as the European Union’s heads of government hold a summit on Ukraine.

Collectively, European governments have been able to agree on measures to isolate Russia’s economy that once would have been unthinkable, including an embargo on most of the crude oil Russia sells to Europe. But opinion is sharply divided on the stakes of the war and Ukraine’s chances.

Public statements by the leaders of France and Germany and comments by those countries’ officials suggest they are skeptical Kyiv can expel the invaders and they have called for a negotiated cease-fire, triggering complaints from Ukraine that it is being pushed to make territorial concessions.

Leaders in the Baltic States, Poland and elsewhere argue instead that supplying Ukraine with increasingly sophisticated heavy weapons is critical to not just hold the line, but reverse Russian advances and deal Moscow the kind of blow that would deter Russian President Vladimir Putin from any further military action in the future.

“This is an unprecedented attack on Ukraine,” said Latvian Defense Minister Artis Pabriks. “Our understanding, which is based on a long history of interactions with Russia, is that we cannot rely on Russian mercy and we see the Russian attack on Ukraine as simply the prelude for further Russian imperial expansionism.” Some Western European nations are losing appetite for sustaining a war they think is unwinnable and has reached a bloody stalemate that is draining European resources and exacerbating a looming recession. By contrast, Poland and the Baltic countries, who once lived under the Kremlin’s boot, see themselves as next in line for Russian imperialist expansion.

The flow of millions of Ukrainian refugees into those countries has brought the war much closer to citizens’ ordinary lives, while for Germany, Austria and Italy, the conflict is primarily felt through higher energy costs.

“Every phone call, ministers from the north of Europe and central Europe are getting more and more angry,” said a senior Czech official. “This is destroying the unity. It’s precisely what Putin wants and what the French and Germans are giving him.”

Unlike the leaders of Britain, Poland, the Baltic nations and several central European countries, French and German leaders have yet to visit Kyiv. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has repeatedly warned that the conflict could lead to a third World War and nuclear annihilation. The goal of Western engagement, Mr. Scholz has said, was to keep Russia from winning.

Germany hasn’t sent tanks to Ukraine and agreed to ship seven pieces of heavy artillery. So far, Europe’s largest economy, with a population exceeding 83 million, has sent military aid worth about €200 million, according to government estimates—less than Estonia, with a population of just over one million. France has sent 12 howitzer-type cannons to Kyiv and no tanks or aerial defenses.

Poland has delivered more than 240 Soviet-designed T72 tanks to Ukraine, alongside drones, rocket launchers, dozens of infantry fighting vehicles and truckloads of ammunition. The Czech Republic has shipped helicopter gunships, tanks, and parts needed to keep Ukraine’s air force flying. Ordinary citizens in Lithuania and the Czech Republic have donated tens of millions of euros to crowdsourcing campaigns to buy Turkish drones and Soviet-era weapons for Ukraine.

“We’re sending whatever we can, whatever we have, and whenever we’re able to,” said Polish President Andrzej Duda, who has visited Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky twice and speaks to him most days. “Why? Because we believe that this is a war on civilization. This is about a war for the defense of Europe.”

Germany also has yet to replace the Polish and Czech tanks that had been sent to Ukraine with German-made hardware, as it agreed to do as part of a swap. A spokesman for the German government said this was due to lengthy procedures including maintenance, while some Defense Ministry officials decried a lack of political will to act with greater expedience.

“It is very disappointing that neither the federal government nor the Chancellor personally have the courage to speak about a victory for Ukraine and act accordingly in supporting Ukraine with modern, heavy weapons,” said Andrij Melnyk, Ukraine’s ambassador to Berlin...

 

Geoffrey Wawro, The Franco-Prussian War

 At Amazon, Geoffrey Wawro, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of France in 1870-1871.

Emmanuel Macron Wins French Presidential Election, Beats Marine Le Pen (VIDEO)

Big story, at CNN, "Emmanuel Macron wins France’s presidential election."

But maybe a bigger story, here, WSJ, "Even in Defeat, Marine Le Pen Leads France’s Far Right Closer to Power":

Candidate won 41.5% of the vote, showing that her once-fringe party is a political contender.

PARIS—Marine Le Pen fell short of her goal of attaining France’s highest office, but her campaign laid the groundwork for the far right to become an enduring force in French politics.

With 41.5% of the vote, Ms. Le Pen won a greater share of the electorate than any far-right presidential candidate in France’s post-World War II era. In doing so, the 53-year-old politician transformed a party that was once a fringe insurgency into a real contender.

The result, Ms. Le Pen told her supporters Sunday, “represents a striking victory,” adding: “The French have shown tonight their desire for a strong check to the power of Emmanuel Macron.”

Ms. Le Pen’s 17-point loss to Mr. Macron was wider than some polls had estimated but it was a significant improvement on her 32-point loss to him five years ago.

Ms. Le Pen gained ground by hitting on a new strategy that focused on the economic problems of the French working class. She toned down her anti-immigrant rhetoric during the campaign. Ms. Le Pen also shifted her party’s anti-European stance, saying she no longer wants to withdraw from the European Union’s common currency, the euro, a move that has little popular support in France.

The approach allowed her to cobble together a broader coalition of middle- and working-class voters living outside France’s big cities, in areas where the forces of globalization have closed factories, wages are stagnant and the rising cost of living has hit households hard. Those voters include traditional conservatives and even some on the left drawn by Ms. Le Pen’s attacks on the economic and cultural elite.

“She represents so much for so many French people,” said Jérôme Auvray, a member of Ms. Le Pen’s party who lives in the outskirts of Paris. “She is still young…She should run again in five years.”

Still, Ms. Le Pen’s drive to broaden her party’s appeal faces deep skepticism among many French. Ms. Le Pen’s father, the far-right ideologue Jean-Marie Le Pen, co-founded the party in the 1970s, calling it the National Front and adopting the neofascist tricolor flame as its symbol. Ms. Le Pen changed the name in 2018 to National Rally. She kept the symbol.

“A cat can’t bark,“ said Ludovic Seynaeve de Daussé, a 55-year-old retired military man from northern France who didn’t vote in the runoff after casting a first-round ballot for far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon. ”The National Front will always be the National Front.”

Ms. Le Pen ran on a platform that would impose far-reaching changes long supported by the far right. She wanted to ban wearing the Muslim head scarf in public, claw back powers from the European Union and change the French constitution to give priority to French nationals over immigrants, including documented ones.

Ms. Le Pen said in February that she wouldn’t run again for president if she lost but also that she wouldn’t retire from politics. At the party’s election-night gathering in Paris on Sunday, Ms. Le Pen’s supporters, some in tears, grappled with another election loss. Many wanted Ms. Le Pen to run again.

Would-be successors are waiting in the wings, including Jordan Bardella, the 26-year-old acting president of National Rally, and Marion Maréchal, Ms. Le Pen’s niece. Eric Zemmour, the television pundit turned presidential candidate, made fighting immigration and Islamist influence his signature issues, seeking to wrest control of the far right from Ms. Le Pen. Mr. Zemmour fizzled in the first round of the elections, drawing only 7.1% of the vote.

On Sunday, Mr. Zemmour called on supporters of France’s conservative party, National Rally and other far-right movements to come together.

“We must forget our quarrels and unite our forces,” Mr. Zemmour said.

Sonia Peneloup, a painter and National Rally activist who attended Sunday night’s gathering, said she supported Mr. Bardella as a potential successor but wondered whether a change at the helm was enough to get the party over the hump. “Would it make a difference? Frankly, I don’t think the French are ready,” she said.

Ms. Le Pen’s defeat follows a decadeslong push by France’s far right to win the presidency. When her father founded the party, its strident anti-immigrant stance made it a fringe movement in European politics. Mr. Le Pen was convicted of anti-Semitism in the 1980s for describing Nazi gas chambers as a “detail of World War II history.”

A breakthrough came in 2002, when Mr. Le Pen shocked the world by qualifying for the presidential runoff. More than a million French people took to the streets to denounce Mr. Le Pen’s candidacy. The incumbent, Jacques Chirac, ended up trouncing Mr. Le Pen by a margin of 64 percentage points.

In 2011, Ms. Le Pen inherited the party and set about remaking its image, a process the party called “de-demonization.” She ousted her father from the party in 2015 after he repeated his comment about Nazi gas chambers.

In 2017, Ms. Le Pen reached the presidential runoff for the first time. Her campaign ran aground due to her unpopular push to drop the euro. She lost to Mr. Macron, then a political neophyte, in a 32-point landslide.

Ms. Le Pen focused her 2022 campaign on pocketbook issues such as her fight against inflation. She also zeroed in on the impact that the war in Ukraine was having on France’s economy, particularly the higher fuel prices that affect working-class commuters. She promised to slash taxes on fuel and other essentials if elected.

Ms. Le Pen began opening up about her personal life, softening her reputation as a hard-nosed ideologue. She mused publicly about her love of cats and discussed her childhood as the daughter of Mr. Le Pen. Ms. Le Pen was eight when a bomb targeting her father destroyed their apartment in Paris.

“I was made to pay for my father’s commitment,” she said at a rally in February.

“She is one of us,” said Isabelle Flouret, a 48-year-old widow from Hénin-Beaumont, a town in northern France where Ms. Le Pen cut her teeth on the municipal council. “My children call her Auntie Marine.”

Competition from Mr. Zemmour also softened Ms. Le Pen’s public image, because his fiery anti-immigrant rhetoric at times made her seem tame by comparison for some of the electorate...

 

France's Macron and Far-Right Le Pen Lead in First Round of Presidential Election

It's going to be a nail-biter. Two weeks from today.

At WSJ, "France’s Macron and Far-Right Le Pen Lead in First Round of Presidential Election":

PARIS—President Emmanuel Macron and far-right leader Marine Le Pen led the first round of France’s presidential election, according to exit polls, setting the stage for a closely contested runoff amid fears over high-inflation and immigration.

Mr. Macron won the first round with 28.5% of the vote ahead of Ms. Le Pen with 24.2%, according to polling firm Elabe. The French president now faces an April 24 showdown with Ms. Le Pen that polls say will be much more tightly contested than his landslide victory five years ago.

Today, French politics are more polarized, making it hard for Mr. Macron to rekindle the coalition of disaffected socialists and conservatives rallied behind him in 2017, fueling a 32-point margin of victory. This time, widespread anxiety over the decline of middle- and working-class France—coupled with deep anti-immigrant sentiment in many parts of the country—has brought Ms. Le Pen from the political fringe to the center of national discourse. Polls taken ahead of Sunday’s vote showed Mr. Macron leading Ms. Le Pen in the runoff by just 2 percentage points.

Mr. Macron’s vulnerability reveals the challenges lurking for a European political establishment that has tried to turn the page on populist and nationalist movements, focusing on geopolitical challenges like the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Ms. Le Pen wants to pull France out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s military command, in which French soldiers currently serve under the alliance’s commanders. She also wants European Union nations to claw back powers they have delegated to EU technocrats in Brussels.

A month ago, Mr. Macron was riding high in the polls with a double-digit lead over Ms. Le Pen. His advisers in the Élysée Palace said he was too busy taking calls with President Biden and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, about the war in Ukraine to hit the campaign trail in earnest or participate in debates with his rivals. Polls indicated there was no need, with one survey in March showing that 79% of respondents—regardless of who they supported—expected Mr. Macron to win.

“Macron didn’t even bother campaigning,” said Nathalie Dome, a 50-year-old cleaning lady who said she is voting for Ms. Le Pen. “He’s not the only one who can pick up the phone and call Putin.”

Ms. Le Pen, meanwhile, crisscrossed the country, holding rallies in small rural towns. Her highly disciplined campaign focused on the economic sting of rising inflation while casting off much of the fiery rhetoric that has defined the Le Pen brand of politics for decades under her father, who has been convicted for anti-Semitic speech.

“It’s hard to make ends meet,” said 30-year-old Estelle Classen, a gas-station employee. “Prices are increasing so fast, it’s abominable.”

If the focus on pocketbook issues softened Ms. Le Pen’s image, so has the competition she faced from Eric Zemmour, another far-right candidate. A former TV pundit with strident anti-immigrant views, Mr. Zemmour trafficked in conspiracy theories that Ms. Le Pen refused to even utter.

Ms. Le Pen has stuck to hard-line positions on the place of Islam in France, calling for a sweeping ban on Muslim headscarves in public spaces. But she has managed to temper that message with humanizing moments, inviting TV cameras into her home to talk about being a cat lover.

“Marine Le Pen has learned from her mistakes. Zemmour is kind of scary,” said 28-year-old social worker Florian Dubois.

Mr. Macron, on the other hand, has kept his distance. Known for his self-proclaimed “Jupiterian” style of governance, the French leader waited until March 3 to officially declare his candidacy. The move initially kept Mr. Macron above the political fray, allowing him to focus on diplomacy and depriving his rivals of the public attention that comes from sparring with an incumbent...

'Fractured' France Heads to the Polls

France votes tomorrow, which is actually right now, after 4:00am there.

I'll be back tomorrow with the results, of course. 

For now, here's the New York Times, "With Macron and Le Pen Leading Election Field, a Fractured France Decides":

In Dijon, magnificence and malaise sit side by side, in the image of a country divided before the presidential vote on Sunday.

DIJON, France — At Le Carillon, a convivial place for a coq au vin as France prepares to vote in a critical election, the heated political debates that always characterized past campaigns have fallen silent, as if the country were anesthetized.

In other election seasons, the restaurant would buzz for months with arguments over candidates and issues. This time, said the owner, Martine Worner-Bablon, “Nobody talks politics. I don’t know, people’s heads are elsewhere. No confidence in politicians. If anything, they talk about the war.”

In this strange atmosphere, overshadowed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, President Emmanuel Macron, a centrist, holds a slight lead over Marine Le Pen, a hard-right nationalist, according to the latest polls. But his comfortable advantage of more than 10 percentage points has evaporated over the past month as his dismissal of debate and failure to engage have irked voters.

“What astonishes me is that the president of the French Republic does not think first about the French,” Ms. Le Pen, whose newfound mild manner masks a harsh anti-immigrant program, said last month. It was a remark that hit home as Mr. Macron spent most of his time pondering how to end a European war.

With the vote spread over two rounds starting on Sunday, many people still undecided and an expected abstention rate of up to 30 percent, the election’s outcome is deeply uncertain. During her last campaign, in 2017, Ms. Le Pen chose to appear at the Kremlin with President Vladimir V. Putin, who said with a smirk that he did not wish “to influence events in any way,” as she vowed to lift sanctions against Russia “quite quickly” if elected.

The possibility of France lurching toward an anti-NATO, pro-Russia, xenophobic and nationalistic position in the event of a Le Pen victory constitutes a potential shock as great as the 2016 British vote for Brexit or the election the same year of Donald J. Trump in the United States.

At what President Biden has repeatedly called an “inflection point” in the global confrontation between autocracy and democracy, a France under Ms. Le Pen would push the needle in the very direction the United States opposes.

All seems tranquil in Dijon, for now. Quiet and immaculate, its center a succession of churches and palaces, the capital of the Burgundy region is as good a symbol as any of “la douce France,” the sweet land of gastronomic delights that finds its way into many people’s hearts. But Dijon, a town of 155,000 inhabitants, has its turbulent underside, in the image of a country where beauty and belligerence and magnificence and malaise are often uneasy bedfellows.

Among regulars at Le Carillon, inquiries as to the whereabouts of nuclear bomb shelters are on the rise. Emmanuel Bichot, a center-right city councilor, does not like the country’s mood. “There’s a lot of frustration, of aggression, of tension,” he said. “People get angry very quickly. This has not been an election about programs. I don’t hear anyone debating them.”

He paused to contemplate this puzzle. “It’s come down to Macron’s Machiavellian manipulations against Le Pen’s resilience.” This is the third time that Ms. Le Pen, the leader of the National Rally, formerly the National Front, has run for president. The two leaders in the first round of voting go through to a runoff on April 24.

One fundamental development contributed to the fractured, incoherent nature of the election. Mr. Macron’s agile occupation of the political center, destroying first the center-left Socialist Party and then the center-right Republicans, effectively wiped out two pillars of postwar French democracy.

What was left was the president against the extremes, whether to the right in the form of Ms. Le Pen or to the left in the form of Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Between them, Ms. Le Pen, the far-right upstart Éric Zemmour and Mr. Mélenchon are set to garner some 50 percent of the vote, the latest poll from the Ifop-Fiducial group showed...

 

Marine Le Pen Upends French Presidential Election

Sunday is France's first round of the presidential election. 

Marine Le Pen, daughter to Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of France's far-right National Front, is posing a serious threat to incumbent Emmanuel Macron. She lost badly in the second round in 2017, but who knows this year. Anything could happen.

At UnHerd, "The resurrection of Marine Le Pen: Macron has enabled her remarkable comeback":

Three months ago, Marine Le Pen’s political future seemed smashed into irrelevance by the rise of Eric Zemmour. She was past it, a tired war horse with no project and a quasi-bankrupt party, watching her closest National Rally associates being shaved off one by one by Zemmour’s seemingly irresistible promise of rebuilding the French Right in his image, a mix of Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz and De Gaulle’s 1950s RPF.

The Rally, the wisdom went, still operated like a family clan, even though Marine had fired her own father, the Front National’s founder, after he made one anti-Semitic joke too many. It looked to the past while Zemmour looked to the future, bringing together Marine’s own niece Marion Maréchal and former Sarkozystas from the hard fringes of Les Républicains, the Centre-Right party descended from the Gaullist movement. Le Pen was a spent name in French politics.

Fast forward to this week, however, the last before the first round of the Presidential election on Sunday, and Marine Le Pen is polling at 23% against Emmanuel Macron’s 26%. She is up two points and he’s down four in ten days — and, incredibly, the same poll credits her with 48.5% against Macron’s 51.5% for the 24 April run-off.

“This is well within the margin of error. There are configurations in which she could win,” says the political analyst Stéphane Rozès, who has advised every French President since Mitterrand. Bruno Jeanbart, the vice president of Opinionway, another pollster, concurs. “It’s harder to predict the run-off, mostly because voters don’t yet know how they will decide in reaction to the first-round results. But it’s no longer impossible.”

What explains Marine Le Pen’s extraordinary comeback from the political graveyard? Her platform hasn’t essentially changed: she still wants to reduce all immigration into France by 75%, and to create a legal discrimination between French nationals and foreign residents in their access to public jobs, benefits, and even private sector jobs. But she has softened it. Not only does she no longer advocate France’s exit from the EU, she has given up on leaving the Euro.

She wants to abolish Jus Solis, birthright citizenship, to deny naturalisation to the children of foreign parents born in France, but has given up on banning double nationality. She no longer wants a return to the death penalty, which she advocated as late as 2012. As for gay marriage, voted through during the François Hollande presidency, she prudently suggests “a three-year moratorium”, which means in effect it’s no longer in question. (In all fairness, Marine Le Pen has always been a social liberal; old Front hands used to bemoan her “gay Mafia” of advisers a decade ago.) And while she recommended leaving Nato before the Ukraine-Russian war, she has since rowed this back to merely pulling out France from Nato’s integrated command.

So far, so Souverainiste — and often hard to differentiate from the historic wing of the Gaullist party that defined itself in opposition to the 1992 Maastricht Treaty.

In 2017, Le Pen, a barrister by trade, had miserably crashed and burned during her single debate with Macron between the two rounds. She came unprepared, got names and figures wrong, even had to look at her notes mid-sentence. Facing her, Macron, a former top mandarin at the Ministry of Finance, reeled off his facts and talking points with the condescending smile of a younger man who’s passed all of his exams with flying colours. (He actually didn’t: intimates say his own lasting personal trauma was flunking twice the entry to the elite literary École Normale Supérieure.) Macron, the newcomer, didn’t necessarily come across as sympathique, but he looked a lot more competent than Le Pen. When she realised how badly she’d done, she reportedly spent two days locked at home in a funk before limping back to campaign for the last days.

She always knew she would run again: what else, after all, can someone called Le Pen do? She had been advised, sometimes haphazardly, by a motley group of some 80 senior civil servants, CEOs, Énarques, lawyers and former SpAds who took to calling themselves Les Horaces, from early Roman history, and disagreed as much among themselves as they did with the party faithful. When she started preparing her 2022 campaign, she halved the number of Horaces. She brought in new faces and tightened discipline under her 36-year-old chief of staff, Renaud Labaye, a former Army officer who attended HEC Business school before joining the Ministry of Finance. They are the ones who worked on her current manifesto — as well as drilled her for the probable rerun of the pre-runoff debate, which Le Pen has sworn to herself she will win this time.

Last week Le Monde ran a three-page analysis that tried to “decode” Le Pen’s platform to demonstrate that she was still, in effect, a fascist threat. Its main proof was her promise, if she’s elected, to organise an early referendum on an immigration and national identity bill; a bill passed in this way legally needs not be examined by the Constitutional Council. The constitutional lawyer Dominique Rousseau was quoted calling it “un coup d’état” — even though the recourse to referenda was introduced by Charles de Gaulle in his Fifth Republic Constitution in 1958 (it was used twice by Le Général, and seven times since).

Similarly, her projected measures “against Islamist ideology” differ less from those adopted by Nicolas Sarkozy, François Hollande or Macron (in his recent Bill against Separatism, for instance) than from Zemmour’s blanket claim that “it’s Islam, not just Islamism, that’s against the values of the Republic”. (He tried to walk back on this last week, telling 100,000 Parisian supporters that he had no problem with “assimilated Islam in France”.) Even Valérie Pécresse sounded harder during her ill-fated Paris rally a month ago: “It’s time to stop denying the link between terrorism and immigration.”

“Accusations [like Le Monde’s] help Marine Le Pen more than they hurt her,” says Jean-Yves Camus, France’s leading expert on domestic and international far-Right movements. “Rightly or wrongly, people compare her style — seemingly reasonable, becalmed — to Eric Zemmour’s; as well as her lack of ego to most of her competitors...

Keep reading.

European Union Countries More Reluctant to Cut Off Russian Energy Imports (VIDEO)

Well, deal with the devil, you know?

Look how that's turning out. Under Moscow's thumb.

At Deutsche Welle, "European leaders wary of cutting off Russian oil and gas":

Quickly cutting off energy revenues with oil and gas embargoes would hit Moscow where it hurts. But European leaders have argued for a phased approach, openly admitting their dependency on Russian energy supplies.

The leaders of Germany, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands on Monday said Europe was too dependent on Russian energy supplies to stop imports overnight as part of any eventual sanctions package in response to the invasion of Ukraine. Energy exports are a key source of income for Russia, and there are growing calls for oil and gas embargoes to increase pressure on the Kremlin.

However, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that although Berlin supported tough measures against Moscow, Russian energy supplies remained "essential" for daily life in Europe.

"Europe's supply with energy for heating, for mobility, power supply and for industry cannot at the moment be secured otherwise," Scholz said in a statement.

Russia is the largest supplier of natural gas to Germany, currently accounting for more than half of imports, according to the government. Gas accounts for around a fifth of German power production.

A 'step-by-step' process

On Monday, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said cutting dependency on Russian oil and gas was "the right thing to do," however it must be done in a "step by step" process.

"We have got to make sure we have substitute supply. One of the things we are looking at is the possibility of using more of our own hydrocarbons," Johnson told a press conference following talks with his Dutch and Canadian counterparts in London.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a halt to Russian oil imports last week. However, Canada is the world's fourth-largest oil producer and its imports from Russia were comparatively negligible.

Although the UK relies much less on Russian gas than other countries in Europe, Johnson said it was important that "everyone moves in the same direction."

"There are different dependencies in different countries, and we have to mindful of that," he said. "You can't simply close down the use of oil and gas overnight, even from Russia."

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte told the press conference that weaning Europe off Russian energy would "take time" and it was a "painful reality" that Europeans were still "very much dependent" on Russian gas and oil...

 

Biden's Bad Day

Ooops!

From yesterday, at NYT, "Pentagon Acknowledges Aug. 29 Drone Strike in Afghanistan Was Tragic Mistake."

And posted here yesterday, "The Masking of the Servant Class," and from Thursday, "Why Australia Bet the House on Lasting American Power in Asia" and "In Submarine Deal With Australia, U.S. Counters China but Enrages France."

And today, at A.P, "One stunning afternoon: Setbacks imperil Biden’s reset":

WASHINGTON (AP) — It was an hour President Joe Biden would no doubt like to forget.

On Friday, the Pentagon acknowledged that a drone strike in Afghanistan killed 10 civilians, including seven children, not terrorists. A panel advising the Food and Drug Administration voted to not recommend COVID-19 booster shots for all Americans over age 16, dashing an administration hope. And France announced it was recalling its ambassador to the United States out of anger for being cut out of a secret nuclear submarine deal Biden had struck with the United Kingdom and Australia.

The headlines, all within an hour, underscored the perils for any president from situations that can define a term in office.

Already, Biden has seen public approval numbers trend downward as the pandemic has deepened and Americans cast blame for the flawed U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The administration had hoped to roll out tougher vaccine guidelines, a new international alliance to thwart China and a recommitment to what Biden has done best: drawing on his years on Capitol Hill and knowledge of the legislative process to cajole fellow Democrats to pass the two far-reaching spending bills that make up the heart of his agenda.

Those ambitions are now more difficult to achieve.

Biden has proclaimed defeating the pandemic to be the central mission of his presidency. But the United States is now averaging more than 145,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases per day, compared with a low of about 8,500 per day three months ago.

The president has tried to shift the blame for the resurgence of cases to the more than 70 million Americans who have not gotten a vaccine and the GOP lawmakers who have opposed his increasingly forceful efforts to push people to get a shot. Aides had hoped for full FDA approval for the boosters, yet the advisory panel only recommended them for those over age 65 or with underlying health conditions or special circumstances.

Biden aides in recent days had quietly expressed relief that the Afghanistan withdrawal — like the war itself for much of its nearly two decades — has receded from headlines. That feeling was shattered Friday afternoon when the Pentagon revealed the errant target for what was believed to be the final American drone strike of the war...

The Sharp U.S. Pivot to Asia Is Throwing Europe Off Balance

Following-up.

At the New York Times, "In Submarine Deal With Australia, U.S. Counters China but Enrages France":

BRUSSELS — Until this week, the so-called “pivot to Asia” by the United States had been more of a threat than a reality for Europe. But that changed when the Biden administration announced a new defense alliance against China that has left Europe facing an implicit question:

Which side are you on?

It is a question that European leaders have studiously sought to avoid since former President Barack Obama first articulated that America should “pivot” resources and attention to Asia as part of its rivalry with China. European leaders hoped that the relationship between the two superpowers could remain stable and that Europe could balance its interests between the two.

Then the Trump administration sharply raised the temperature with China with tariffs and other trade barriers. And now the Biden administration on Wednesday announced an alliance between the United States, Britain and Australia that would help Australia deploy nuclear-powered submarines in the Pacific — and, in doing so, also tore up a $66 billion deal for Australia to buy a French fleet of diesel-powered subs.

“Europeans want to defer the moment of truth, to not make a choice between the two,” said Thomas Gomart, director of the French Institute of International Relations, or IFRI. “The Biden administration, like the Trump one, is provoking the moment of choice.”

France was enraged. Yet if it was a humiliation — as well as the cancellation of a lucrative defense deal — it possibly did have a silver lining for France’s broader goals. President Emmanuel Macron of France has been Europe’s loudest proponent of “strategic autonomy,” the idea that Europe needs to retain a balanced approach to the United States and China.

“We must survive on our own, as others do,” said Josep Borrell Fontelles, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, echoing the French line.

The French embarrassment — the Americans also announced the submarine deal with little if any warning — came after the disastrous fall of Afghanistan. European allies were furious with the Biden administration, blaming the Americans for acting with little or no consultation and feeding Mr. Macron’s argument that the United States is no longer an entirely reliable security partner.

“The submarines and Afghanistan, it reinforces the French narrative that you can’t trust the Americans,” said Ulrich Speck of the German Marshall Fund in Berlin.

But whether France will succeed in turning this bilateral defeat into a way to promote strategic autonomy is doubtful, analysts suggest. “Many Europeans will see this as a transparent way for the French to leverage their own interests,” said Robin Niblett, director of Chatham House, the London-based research institution.

Even so, there seems little doubt that Europe’s balancing act is becoming trickier to maintain.

“Europe needs to think hard about where it sits and what it does,” said Rosa Balfour, director of Carnegie Europe. A Europe that spends more on defense is to be desired, but it also needs allies — including Britain and the United States, she said. And a Europe that does more to build its own security capacity “is the best way to be listened to more by its partners,” she added...

 

In Submarine Deal With Australia, U.S. Counters China but Enrages France

Following-up, "Why Australia Bet the House on Lasting American Power in Asia."

At NYT, "In Submarine Deal With Australia, U.S. Counters China but Enrages France":

PARIS — President Biden’s announcement this week of a deal to help Australia deploy nuclear-powered submarines has strained the Western alliance, infuriating France and foreshadowing how the conflicting American and European responses to confrontation with China may redraw the global strategic map.

In announcing the deal on Wednesday, Mr. Biden said it was meant to reinforce alliances and update them as strategic priorities shift. But in drawing a Pacific ally closer to meet the China challenge, he appears to have alienated an important European one and aggravated already tense relations with Beijing.

France has reacted with outrage to news that the United States and Britain would help Australia develop submarines, and that Australia would withdraw from a $66 billion 2016 deal to buy French-built submarines. At its heart, the diplomatic storm is also a business matter — a loss of revenue for France’s military industry, and a gain for American companies.

Jean-Yves Le Drian, France’s foreign minister, told Franceinfo radio that the submarine deal was a “unilateral, brutal, unpredictable decision” by the United States, and he compared the American move to the rash and sudden policy shifts common during the Trump administration.

France canceled a gala scheduled for Friday at its embassy in Washington to mark the 240th anniversary of a Revolutionary War battle.

“This looks like a new geopolitical order without binding alliances,” said Nicole Bacharan, a researcher at Sciences Po in Paris. “To confront China, the United States appears to have chosen a different alliance, with the Anglo-Saxon world separate from France.” She predicted a “very hard” period in the old friendship between Paris and Washington.

The deal also seemed to be a pivot point in relations with China, which reacted angrily. The Biden administration appears to be upping the ante with Beijing by providing a Pacific ally with submarines that are much harder to detect than conventional ones, much as medium-range Pershing II missiles were deployed in Europe in the 1980s to deter the Soviet Union.

A statement from Mr. Le Drian and Florence Parly, France’s Armed Forces minister, called “the American choice to exclude a European ally and partner such as France” a regrettable decision that “shows a lack of coherence.”

The Australian vessels would have nuclear reactors for propulsion, but not nuclear weapons.

France and the rest of the European Union are intent on avoiding a direct confrontation with China, as they underscored on Thursday in a policy paper titled the “E.U. Strategy for Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific,” whose release was planned before the fracas.

It said the bloc would pursue “multifaceted engagement with China,” cooperating on issues of common interest while “pushing back where fundamental disagreement exists with China, such as on human rights.”

The degree of French anger recalled the acrimonious rift in 2003 between Paris and Washington over the Iraq war and involved language not heard since then.

“This is not done between allies,” Mr. Le Drian said. His comparison of Mr. Biden to Mr. Trump appeared certain to be taken in the White House as a serious insult.

And France said it had not been consulted on the deal. “We heard about it yesterday,” Ms. Parly told RFI radio.

The Biden administration said it had not told French leaders beforehand, because it was clear that they would be unhappy with the deal.

The administration decided that it was up to Australia to choose whether to tell Paris, said a U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to address the matter publicly. But he allowed that the French had a right to be annoyed, and that the decision was likely to fuel France’s desire for a European Union military capability independent of the United States...

 

Why Australia Bet the House on Lasting American Power in Asia

So you would think.

I'm surprised the U.S. has waited this long to bring the Aussies into the nuclear loop.

At NYT, "Less than three years ago, Australia’s leader said his country need not choose between the U.S. and China. A nuclear submarine deal shows that much has changed since then":

SYDNEY, Australia — When Scott Morrison became Australia’s prime minister three years ago, he insisted that the country could maintain close ties with China, its largest trading partner, while working with the United States, its main security ally.

“Australia doesn’t have to choose,” he said in one of his first foreign policy speeches.

On Thursday, Australia effectively chose. Following years of sharply deteriorating relations with Beijing, Australia announced a new defense agreement in which the United States and Britain would help it deploy nuclear-powered submarines, a major advance in Australian military strength.

With its move to acquire heavy weaponry and top-secret technology, Australia has thrown in its lot with the United States for generations to come — a “forever partnership,” in Mr. Morrison’s words. The agreement will open the way to deeper military ties and higher expectations that Australia would join any military conflict with Beijing.

It’s a big strategic bet that America will prevail in its great-power competition with China and continue to be a dominant and stabilizing force in the Pacific even as the costs increase.

“It really is a watershed moment — a defining moment for Australia and the way it thinks about its future in the Indo-Pacific region,” said Richard Maude, a former Australian security official who is now a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute.

“It does represent really quite sharp concerns now in the Morrison government about a deteriorating security environment in the region, about China’s military buildup and about China’s willingness to use coercive power to pursue national interests,” he said.

“This is utterly irresponsible conduct,” Mr. Zhao said.

For the United States, the decision to bolster a close Asia-Pacific ally represents a tangible escalation of its efforts to answer China’s rapid military growth. The Defense Department said in its most recent report to Congress that China now had the largest navy in the world, measured in numbers of vessels, having built a fleet of approximately 350 ships by 2019, including a dozen nuclear submarines.

By comparison, the U.S. Navy has around 293 ships. While American vessels tend to be larger, China is also catching up with aircraft carriers while surpassing the United States with smaller, agile ships.

At the same time, China has moved aggressively to secure locations for outposts and missiles, building up its presence on islands that it constructed in the South China Sea. Security analysts believe that Australia would be likely to use nuclear-powered submarines to patrol the important shipping lanes there, in waters also claimed by Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia. The choice of vessel, they said, sends an unmistakable message.

“Nothing is more provocative to China than nuke stuff and submarine stuff,” said Oriana Skylar Mastro, who is a fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and at the American Enterprise Institute. “China’s so weak in anti-submarine warfare in comparison to other capabilities.”

“To me,” said Ms. Mastro, a regular visitor to Australia, “it suggests that Australia is willing to take some real risks in its relationship to stand up to China.”

American and Australian officials, seeking to douse proliferation concerns, emphasized that the submarines were nuclear-powered but had nothing to do with nuclear weapons. The promise of eight American vessels coincided with Australia’s cancellation of a contract for 12 conventional French-designed submarines that had been delayed and running over budget. French officials reacted angrily, calling the abandonment of the deal a betrayal of trust...

The French are the biggest fucking babies. *Eye-roll.*

Still more.

 

Large Protests in France Over Covid Restrictions (VIDEO)

This is the second weekend in a row for these protests.

At NYT, "Large Covid-related protests hit France, Italy and Australia":

Over 160,000 demonstrators took to the streets in France on Saturday to protest the government’s Covid-19 health pass policy, with brief clashes between largely unmasked protesters and police officers in Paris followed by wafts of tear gas that were reminiscent of the Yellow Vest turmoil of several years ago....

In France, presenting the health pass — paper or digital proof of being fully vaccinated, a recent negative test or recent Covid-19 recovery — is mandatory to attend large events in stadiums and concert halls, and to enter the country’s cultural venues, including cinemas, museums and theaters...

Health passes?

Gawd, what a nightmare.

Still more.

Thousands Upon Thousands Protect Strict New Coronavirus Restrictions in France (VIDEO)

This should be happening here! Covid protests, hehe. 

It's da bomb, lol.

At the New York Times, "In France, angry protests, rising infections and record vaccinations":

More than 100,000 people took to the streets across France over the weekend to protest against President Emmanuel Macron’s tough new vaccination strategy, which will restrict access to restaurants, cafes, movie theaters, long-distance trains and more for the unvaccinated.

Demonstrators in Paris and elsewhere vented against what some called Mr. Macron’s “dictatorship” after he announced that a “health pass” — official proof of vaccination, a recent negative test, or recent Covid-19 recovery — would be required for many to attend or enter most public events and venues.

At the same time, however, his policy seemed to have the desired effect: Record numbers of people flocked to vaccination centers in advance of the new rules coming into effect next month.

It made for a striking split-screen image as millions lined up for vaccines — so desperately sought in much of the world suffering outbreaks but with little access to doses — as an increasingly strident group from both the far left and far right decried Mr. Macron’s policies as government overreach...

Keep reading.

Julian Jackson, De Gaulle

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Julian Jackson, De Gaulle.