Until recently, France appeared to be on the way out, the Australian-American betrayal on the submarine deal the coup de grace, the ultimate humiliation for what once was known as the grande nation. Grand no longer, a nation at risk, collective psyche in the dumpster: autumn in France. Things...
Angela Merkel has become a symbol of women's success and self-assertion in a political arena still dominated by men, both in Germany and globally. Until a few months ago, the prospect of a female successor seemed very likely. But the initial euphoria, shortly after the Green Party named Annalena...
We live in resentful times. Dare we even utter these words? They sound as trite and cliché as that time-honored opening sentence that has introduced so many articles on populism in recent years, “A specter is haunting Europe.” It can easily apply to Latin America, or the United States or, why...
Across the globe, democracy appears to be in a curious state. One of the main indicators of the health or pathology of democracy is the turnout in elections. Some might claim that the high turnout for the Biden-Trump face-off last year was a sign of health for US democracy. But the aftermath...
In just 12 months, French voters will be invited to judge Emmanuel Macron’s five years in office as president of the Fifth Republic. Most pundits in the media lazily assume it will boil down to a second-round repeat of the 2017 contest: Macron versus the right-wing firebrand, Marine Le Pen....
France appears to be living through a strange transitional period that could be described as the waning of the Fifth Republic. It contains no sense of what a sixth republic might look like or why it might even be necessary. But today’s republic, with its unique electoral system, has achieved a...
If not for the familiar awkwardness of social distancing rules, the scene at the digital party conference of Germany's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) would have been fit for a daytime game show. With the theme from “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” playing in the background and the CDU's...
Americans like to rate their presidents. In fact, presidential rankings have become something of a cottage industry in political science, ever since the eminent Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr. started the tradition in the late 1940s. In Germany, we don’t do that, at least not in a...
Nearly a year since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, its effects on people’s lives, countries’ economies and health care around the world are becoming clearer. In some Central and Eastern European countries, however, this pandemic has had repercussions in another crucial area: democracy....
After watching the video of a street battle raging directly below the Paris apartment I once occupied at a time when François Mitterand was president, I turned to The New York Times’ editorial board’s response to President Emmanuel Macron’s accusation that The Times and other...
In early October, French President Emmanuel Macron, as a preparation for the 2022 election, made the decision to mount a campaign blaming France’s Muslims for their failure to embrace the country’s increasingly dogmatic “Republican culture.” To counter Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigration...
