Gavin Mortimer

Gavin Mortimer is a British author who has lived in Paris for 12 years. He writes about French politics, terrorism and sport.

Tuesday

27 Sep 2022

Why the European right is gaining ground

Last month the new Prime Minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, shared online a brief video of a Ukrainian woman being raped in Piacenza by an African migrant. The reaction among Italy’s media and political elite was one of outrage; not at the fate of the 55-year-old woman, but at Meloni for having dared posted the footage on Twitter along with the declaration: ‘One cannot remain silent in the face of this atrocious episode of sexual violence against a Ukrainian woman carried out in daytime in Piacenza by an asylum seeker. A hug to this woman. I will do everything I can to restore security to our cities.’ Meloni was accused by one of her political opponents, the centrist Carlo Calenda, of being ‘immoral’ and the writer Igiaba Scego said the video’s only purpose was ‘clickbait voyeurism’, and it epitomised her ‘horrendous’ election campaign.

Saturday

24 Sep 2022

Only Britain can save France from German domination

Are Britain and France at the dawn of a new Entente Cordiale? It’s reported that France will be the destination for the first state visit of King Charles, and in New York this week Liz Truss and Emmanuel Macron took a break from the UN General Assembly for 30 minutes of ‘constructive’ talks. There are many in France who long for a closer relationship with Britain and, at the same time, for a gradual decoupling from Germany. I wrote in April last year of the growing French scepticism towards Germany; of how in the words of one current affairs magazine, France has for decades been ‘fleeced’ by its eastern neighbour economically. Rare were the politicians who pointed this out. One exception, Marine Le Pen, a long-standing critic of Germany, declared in 2021 that were she ever to become president she would seek a ‘divorce’ from the Franco-Germany couple in favour of establishing a closer relationship with Britain.

Tuesday

20 Sep 2022

Marine Le Pen wants France to become the next Sweden

While Emmanuel Macron spent Sunday in London honouring the memory of the late Queen Elizabeth, Marine Le Pen marked her return from a summer break with an address to the party faithful in the south of France. Buoyed by the success of the Swedish right in last week’s election, and anticipating a similar result on Sunday when the Italians go to the polls, Le Pen attributed what she called a ‘patriotic wave’ sweeping the continent to the EU’s failure to tackle mass immigration in the last decade. In the opinion of Le Pen no one embodies this failure more than Macron. Last Thursday the president told an assembly of prefects that a new immigration bill would be tabled by his government in early 2023. He believes it will be a much-needed reformation of the current system, which he described as ‘dilatory’ and one result will be the swifter deportation of undesirable migrants.

Friday

16 Sep 2022

The inconvenient truth about France’s forest fires

Montpellier Last month the Prime Minister of France, Elisabeth Borne, visited the south-west of the country to offer her support to firefighters tackling a series of large forest fires. It was also a good opportunity to broach a subject close to her heart. ‘More than ever,’ she warned, ‘we must continue to fight against climate change and to adapt. A new plan for adapting to climate change will be put out for consultation at the beginning of the autumn’. Borne isn’t alone in connecting the forest fires that have ravaged much of France this summer to climate change. Newspapers such as Liberation have also linked the two. Last week the paper published an article in which it referenced the United Nation’s World Meteorological Organization.

Wednesday

14 Sep 2022

Zemmour is his own worst enemy

Eric Zemmour is back. The bogeyman of French politics spent the summer licking his wounds after his far-right Reconquest party was wiped out in June’s parliamentary elections, but on Sunday he addressed several thousand supporters at a rally in the south of France. It is, hopes Zemmour, an opportunity to relaunch his political career and judging by his recent media appearances he won’t be watering down his right-wing rhetoric. Railing against immigration, environmental extremists and the sanctions on Russia, Zemmour picked up from where he left off in the spring. When it was put to him by one interviewer that he had paid the price electorally for focusing too much on immigration, Zemmour replied: ‘I was wrong electorally, but history will prove me right.

Monday

12 Sep 2022

Why are some French mayors refusing to honour the Queen?

Why, asked a French mayor at the weekend, has he been ordered to fly his town’s flag at half-mast for the Queen until the day of her funeral? In expressing his indignation at Macron's presidential decree, Patrick Proisy, the mayor of Faches-Thumesnil, a suburb of Lille, pointed out that Mikhail Gorbachev was accorded no such honour when he died. Yet he was a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, an instrumental figure in tearing down the Iron Curtain that had divided Europe for half a century. The refusal of Proisy, of the left-wing La France Insoumise, to comply with the order to lower his town’s flag as a mark of respect for the Queen has caused headlines in France. It has also created a backlash on social media.

Saturday

3 Sep 2022

Macron is blaming Putin for his own net zero folly

France is at war again, or as good as, according to Emmanuel Manuel’s recent rhetoric. This time the enemy is Russia, which at least is a more tangible adversary than Covid, on which the French president declared ‘war’ in March 2020. Most of the Republic believed him and submitted to one of the most draconian lockdowns in Europe. The state of health emergency imposed by Macron ended only at the start of last month, by which time millions of French understood that it had been a phoney war on a virus that wasn’t half as deadly as their president had had them believe. Barely a fortnight after the health emergency was lifted, Macron was once more issuing a warning of doom and gloom, this one about the ‘price’ the French must pay for supporting Ukraine.

Friday

2 Sep 2022

Will Marine Le Pen betray her voters the way Boris did?

How do you solve a problem like Jean-Marie? That is dilemma facing Marine Le Pen as her National Rally party prepares to mark the 50th anniversary of its creation next month. The party has evolved a great deal in that time, especially in the decade since Le Pen succeeded her father, Jean-Marie, as leader of a party that for most of its existence has been known as the National Front. The rebrand to the National Rally occurred in 2018, the most significant action taken by Marine Le Pen in her bid to leave behind the malodorous legacy of her father. The former paratrooper launched the National Front on 5 October 1972 and over the next 40 years gained a reputation as a far-right agitator whose most notorious declaration – among many – was to describe the Holocaust as a ‘detail of history’.

Wednesday

31 Aug 2022

British bobbies have much to learn from French police officers

Priti Patel wants the police to get back to basics and solve crime instead of parading their progressive credentials at every available opportunity. It's about time: recorded crime in England and Wales is at a 20-year-old high. Villains have never had it so good. Just 5.6 per cent of offences reported to police resulted in anyone being charged or summonsed in 2021-22, a drop of ten per cent from 2014-2015. The Home Secretary is said to support a paper by the Policy Exchange think tank that warns that the police’s persistence in espousing social justice causes is ‘hugely damaging’ to public confidence. There is a growing sense among the public that the police have thrown in the towel, at least when it comes to keeping the streets safe.

Thursday

25 Aug 2022

Are the French willing to pay Macron’s price?

The age of abundance is over, declared Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday, which must have come as news to the 14 per cent of French people who live below the poverty line. The president has returned to the office after his summer break seemingly intent on bracing the Republic for a winter of discomfort, caused largely by the effect of western sanctions on Russia after their invasion of Ukraine six months ago. Last Friday he told the French in Churchillian tones to accept that rising energy and food bills were the ‘price of liberty’, and he returned to the theme yesterday when he addressed his ministers. ‘Our system based on freedom in which we have become used to living, sometimes when we need to defend it, it can entail making sacrifices,’ said Macron.

Sunday

21 Aug 2022

Europe’s new migrant crisis

Earlier this month I spent a week in Sicily, driving south from Palermo to Agrigento and then east to Syracuse and Messina. It was my first visit to Sicily in 17 years and, given the media reports, I had expected to find the island crowded with migrants from Africa. In fact, I saw none, other than those I glimpsed in a fenced-off processing centre at the quayside in Agrigento, the first port of call for many migrants who arrive in Sicily. Last week the local paper in Agrigento drew on official government figures to reveal that so far in 2022, 45,664 migrants have landed on Italian territory, an increase of 40 per cent on the same period last year. Just under half that number (46 per cent) were brought ashore by Italian naval vessels or NGO boats, like the Ocean Viking, which I saw at dock in Syracuse.

Friday

19 Aug 2022

The growing extremism of France’s eco warriors

In August 1999 a group of protestors demolished a McDonald’s restaurant under construction in Aveyron, southern France. Their leader was Jose Bové, a middle-class farmer, who whipped up his followers by declaring that ‘McDo is the symbol of the multinational who wants us to eat crap and make the farmers die’. The French regard that summer’s day 23 years ago as the birth of the anti-globalist movement, the progenitor of a multitude of protest groups whose modus operandi has been direct action. Bové subsequently went into politics, representing the Green party in the European parliament between 2009 and 2019. Today he is retired but his example continues to inspire radical environmentalists. This year alone there have been a succession of stunts, or attacks, depending on one’s point of view, carried out by groups claiming to act for the good of the planet.

Sunday

14 Aug 2022

France’s support of Rushdie puts Britain to shame

If any further evidence was needed of the moral cowardice of the British political class it has been provided in the wake of the appalling attack on Salman Rushdie at the Chautauqua Institution. There were of course messages condemning the atrocity in New York, although notably it took Sir Keir Starmer and Sir Ed Davey the best part of 24 hours to find the time to react. One might have expected the leaders of two of the three main political parties in Britain to consider such a sinister assault on Western values worthy of immediate comment. From Mark Drakeford, the first Minister of Wales, and Nicola Sturgeon there has been only silence, although Scotland’s leader did tweet a photo of herself with Basil Brush on Saturday afternoon.

Friday

12 Aug 2022

Did the SAS inspire Ukraine’s Crimea raid?

If the reports are right and it was Ukrainian special forces who destroyed as many as 20 Russian aircraft at Saki air base in Novofedorivka, Crimea, on Tuesday, president Volodymyr Zelensky might be minded once more to raise a glass to the British. Earlier this year it was widely reported that British special forces were in Ukraine training local troops – but perhaps they also found time to pass on some of the regiment’s illustrious history. It was the Special Air Service (SAS) who pioneered the tactic in North Africa, destroying over 200 Italian and German aircraft in a series of devastating raids 80 years ago. The SAS had been formed in the summer of 1941 as a parachute force, but its inaugural raid in November that year was a costly failure with 34 of the 55 men who jumped into Libya killed or captured.

Saturday

30 Jul 2022

Is France capable of hosting the 2024 Olympics?

Five years ago, Paris was named the host city for the 2024 Olympics. How the country celebrated. No one more than its fresh-faced president Emmanuel Macron. ‘I salute this success and the tremendous opportunity that the Games represent to assist in the transformation of our country,’ he declared. Macron was speaking in a wider context, too. The Olympics was one strand of what he envisioned as a whole-scale transformation of the republic into a start-up nation, a modern, harmonious and prosperous country. How has that worked out, Monsieur Le President? France has never been so divided. The raucous National Assembly – where the left and the right holler and jeer at each other – is representative of the bitter tribalism taking root across the country.

Friday

29 Jul 2022

How dare Macron lecture African leaders about ‘hypocrisy’

What must Africans think when they observe the shameless hypocrisy of Western leaders? In Cameroon this morning incredulity must be the prevailing emotion. Three days ago, dignitaries there were subjected to one of Emmanuel Macron’s insufferable bouts of moralising. Do not do business with Vladimir Putin, warned the French president, speaking shortly after Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov had visited various African countries, some of which are heavily dependent on Russian grain and energy. He alluded to Russia as an ‘authoritarian regime’ and praised Europe for its response to the war in Ukraine. Unfortunately on the African continent, continued Macron: ‘I too often see hypocrisy…in not knowing how to qualify a war.

Monday

25 Jul 2022

Why Macron would prefer Rishi Sunak as PM

France and Britain have been bickering again, this time about the chaos at the ferry ports over the weekend. The ‘clown’, as Emmanuel Macron reportedly dubbed Boris Johnson, may be on his way out, but there seems no end in sight to the circus that Anglo-French relations have become. Might that change with a new ringmaster in No. 10? Maybe, if Rishi Sunak wins the contest to become prime minister. Sunak and Macron are similar in many ways beyond their background in finance; presentable and polished but, so say their detractors, ideologically shallow. In this week’s Spectator Douglas Murray describes Sunak as resembling ‘someone who has floated to the top and rarely had to get his hands dirty with political debate, never mind political warfare’.

Friday

22 Jul 2022

What Nigel Farage can learn from Marine Le Pen

It’s been five weeks since Marine Le Pen’s National Rally won 89 seats in the French parliamentary elections and thus far no one has goosestepped into the National Assembly. This has come a shock to the left who have spent a decade warning that a vote for Marine Le Pen’s party was a vote for fascism. In one unintentionally hilarious op-ed column in Le Monde in 2012, the author compared Le Pen to Adolf Hitler, although he conceded ‘she doesn’t have a moustache’. True, a Nazi salute was seen in the National Assembly this month but it was delivered by one of Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance MPs, Rémy Rebeyrotte, who is now under parliamentary investigation. Rebeyrotte is known for taunting National Rally MPs in the Assembly with references to the Nazis, and he claims the salute was simply a sardonic retort to three ‘fachos’ (fascists) in Le Pen’s party Rebeyrotte is not alone in his puerility.

Monday

18 Jul 2022

What a tale of two political ‘scandals’ says about the French elite

Two of Emmanuel Macron’s ministers were rebuked last week for words they had spoken in the past, but only one is fighting for their job: Caroline Cayeux, who is responsible for 'territorial cohesion'. Last Tuesday, she was asked by the public senate if she regretted saying in 2013 that gay marriage ‘goes against nature’. Cayeux, a Catholic, said she stood by her words, though she was keen to stress that she had ‘a lot of friends among these people’. Uproar ensued and two of her fellow ministers, Clément Beaune and Olivier Véran condemned her ‘anachronistic remarks’. On Thursday, a contrite Cayeux offered her sincere apologies if her ‘stupid and clumsy’ use of the phrase ‘these people’ had caused offence. On Wednesday, it was the turn of Macron’s Interior Minister, Gérald Darmanin, to have his knuckles wrapped when two senators published their findings into the chaos at the Stade de France on the evening of May’s Champions League final between Liverpool and Real Madrid.

Thursday

14 Jul 2022

Was the Queen right to give the NHS the George Cross?

During a ceremony at Windsor Castle on Tuesday, Her Majesty the Queen bestowed the George Cross on the National Health Service. The Prince of Wales was in attendance, as were a select group of ‘health leaders and workers’ from England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The honour was announced last year, when the country was still flush with excitement from the successful vaccine rollout and a whiff of the Covid equivalent of the ‘Blitz Spirit’ still remained. Twelve months on and that spirit has evaporated. Boris Johnson, the Glorious Leader, has been overthrown, the NHS is in a ruinous state with a care backlog of 6 million patients and rising. Even the legacy of Captain Tom, the symbol of the plucky defiance, has been tarnished with the Charity Commission investigating how his family managed the millions raised by the old soldier.

Wednesday

13 Jul 2022

Could the Tories suffer the same fate as the French right?

Here are some statistics that ought to send a shudder through Tory MPs. Between 1995 and 2012 the French centre-right was in presidential power, first under Jacques Chirac and then the administration of Nicolas Sarkozy. The month after Sarko was elected president in 2007, his party, Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), won 313 seats in the National Assembly. Today, following a rebrand to become Les Républicans in 2015, they have 62. This is actually better than some expected considering their 2022 presidential candidate, Valérie Pécresse, won just 4.8 per cent of the electorate’s votes, below the 5 per cent threshold required for candidates to be reimbursed their campaign expenses. Pécresse was reduced to publicly grovelling for funds to stave off personal financial ruin.

Sunday

3 Jul 2022

The Tour de France conceals its national turmoil

The 109th edition of the Tour de France is underway although Friday’s first stage, held for the first time in Denmark, was spoiled by heavy rain and numerous crashes. Not that the adverse conditions dampened the spirits of the estimated half a million spectators who gathered in Copenhagen to witness a spot of sporting history.Similar crowds will line the route of cycling’s most famous race when it arrives in France on Tuesday, all hoping to cheer on the first homegrown winner of the Tour since Bernard Hinault was crowned champion in 1985. In an interview in the Guardian in 2009 Hinault was blunt when asked why France was no longer able to produce a winner. ‘The French don’t train,’ he declared. ‘The only way to do it would be to block part of their salary and only let them have it if they win.

Friday

24 Jun 2022

Macron can no longer be a Covid authoritarian

Covid cases are on the increase in France, as they are in most European countries, and the scientists who have been silent for months have once more found their voice. At the weekend professor Jean-François Delfraissy called for everyone in France this autumn to have a fourth vaccination, while Alain Fischer, president of the Scientific Council, believes that masks should once more be obligatory in public transport, six weeks after the regulations requiring this were dropped. But times have changed. Emmanuel Macron is still president but he no longer has an absolute majority in parliament and the days when the National Assembly rubber-stamped every Covid diktat emanating from the Elysée with barely a murmur of dissent are over.

Wednesday

22 Jun 2022

Boris is falling into the Macron trap

You can’t blame Boris Johnson for jetting off to Kyiv last week for another meet-and-greet session with Volodymyr Zelensky. He got a warmer reception from the Ukrainian President than he would have in Doncaster, the town he snubbed in order to grandstand on the international stage. Johnson was scheduled to have made an appearance at the conference of northern Conservatives, where organisers had hoped he would woo Red Wall voters by explaining how, two and a half years after they loaned him their vote, he intends to ‘level up’ their town. But to the consternation of many MPs, Johnson decided he had more important issues on the other side of Europe with his ‘great friend’ Zelensky. It’s not just the President who can’t get enough of the British PM; he’s also captured the hearts of Ukraine’s Cossack community who have officially made him one of their own, bestowing on Johnson the name ‘Boris Chuprina’, which means ‘a long lock of hair’.

Monday

20 Jun 2022

How Marine Le Pen silenced her critics

‘Stillborn’ is how Le Figaro describes Emmanuel Macron’s presidency after his Renaissance party failed to win an absolute majority in the National Assembly. On a wretched day for Macron, his coalition party won 245 seats in the lower house, dozens short of the number needed to secure the majority that would have allowed him to push through his reforms in his second term. Jean-Luc Melenchon’s left-wing NUPEs took 131 seats. But the biggest surprise of the night was the success of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. They won 89 seats, a result beyond the wildest dreams of Le Pen, whose party had only eight MPs in the last parliament. ‘We have achieved our three objectives,’ declared a triumphant Le Pen, who had been predicted to win around 25 to 50 seats.

Monday

13 Jun 2022

France’s Socialists have been punished for their intolerance

One of the more significant results from the first round of the French parliamentary elections on Sunday was in the Corrèze. There, in the rural south of the country, Sandrine Deveaud of the Nouvelle union populaire écologiste et sociale (Nupes) came top with 25.4 per cent of the vote. This is the left-wing alliance assembled by Jean-Luc Melenchon in the wake of April’s presidential election result, bringing together his far-left France insoumise, the Greens, the Communists and the Socialist party. The Socialists were the last to come on board. And even then many within the party refused to submit to Melenchon and declared they would stand against Nupes’ candidates in the parliamentary election. Annick Taysse did just that in the Corrèze, and she received the enthusiastic endorsement of François Hollande.

Friday

3 Jun 2022

The Queen is one Brit Macron can warm to

He may not have much respect for the ‘Clown’, but when it comes to the Queen Emmanuel Macron is as smitten as his compatriots. With political relations between France and Britain at their coldest for decades, and Macron reportedly regarding Prime Minister Boris Johnson as more suitable for the circus, the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee has provided the French president with an opportunity to warm up his rhetoric. In a video address to Her Majesty published on Thursday, Macron praised the constancy of the Queen’s Francophilia throughout her 70 years on the throne. ‘Times have changed, Europe has evolved, our continent is again experiencing war,’ said Macron. ‘Through these transformations, your devotion to our alliance and to our friendship has remained, and has helped build the trust that brought freedom and prosperity to our continent.

Wednesday

1 Jun 2022

Were Liverpool fans sexually assaulted at the Stade de France?

The shambles at the Stade de France on Saturday night took a sinister turn on Wednesday as allegations emerged of incidents of sexual assault committed against supporters by gangs of local youths. What unfolded outside France’s national stadium on Saturday evening as Liverpool and Real Madrid met inside in the final of the Champions League has dominated the news in France ever since. Most of the criticism for what is seen as a national humiliation is directed at Gérald Darmanin, the Minister of the Interior, who since Saturday evening has insisted that Liverpool supporters were predominantly to blame for the trouble. On Wednesday he received the indirect support of his boss, Emmanuel Macron, via his official spokeswoman, Olivia Grégoire, who assured reporters the president is ‘totally’ behind his beleaguered minister.

Monday

30 May 2022

Marine Le Pen is right to defend Liverpool fans

It may not be much consolation to those Liverpool fans who were caught up in the chaos at the Stade de France on Saturday evening, but Marine Le Pen is on their side. In a television interview on Sunday the leader of the National Rally described events at the Champions League final between Liverpool and Real Madrid as a ‘humiliation’ for France, and she scoffed at the suggestion that English fans were to blame.That was the claim made on Saturday evening by France’s Interior Minister, Gérald Darmanin, who, as tear gas still hung in the air around the country’s national stadium, tweeted his praise for the police and his condemnation of the ‘English supporters’.Emmanuel Macron’s government has acquired a reputation for Anglophobia but this was a new low, a crass and ill-informed comment by a minister, and a deeply insensitive one.