As Hollande marks one year in office, would Dominique Strauss-Kahn have been better for France?

Posted on May 15, 2013 by Kevin Lees

Today is the one-year anniversary of François Hollande’s inauguration as the new president of France, having swept to the Elysée Palace with a mandate for a more subdued presidential administration and a leftward turn after the ‘bling bling’ administration of center-right president Nicolas Sarkozy. Hollande won’t face voters again for four more years, and by 2017, [...]

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What Iceland’s election tells us about post-crisis European politics

Posted on April 29, 2013 by Kevin Lees

Iceland was supposed to be different. In allowing its banks to fail, neo-Keynesian economists have argued, Iceland avoided the fate of Ireland, which nationalized its banks and now faces a future with a very large public debt.  By devaluing its currency, the krónur, Iceland avoided the fate of countries like Estonia and others in southern Europe [...]

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Why is the opposition to same-sex marriage so strong in France?

Posted on April 24, 2013 by Kevin Lees

To the rest of the world, France is a virtual billboard for sexual freedom and sophistication. Sex, of course, made an entire generation or two of French and European cinema — from Les enfants terribles to Jules et Jim to Last Tango in Paris.  Paris, for nearly a century, has been the world’s premier city of romance, and its [...]

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Bachelet enters Chilean presidential race as top contender

Posted on March 29, 2013 by Kevin Lees

Michelle Bachelet returned to Chile on Wednesday, wasting no time in declaring her much-awaited candidacy for president, with an air of inevitability that makes former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s hold on the U.S. presidency in 2016 seem tenuous. Bachelet (pictured above), who previously served as president from 2006 to 2010, and more recently [...]

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Gaspar defends Portuguese economic program at Brookings

Posted on March 27, 2013 by Kevin Lees

Portuguese finance minister Vítor Gaspar (pictured above) spoke to a small audience at the Brookings Institution Tuesday, notably less than 36 hours after Cyprus and the ‘troika’ of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund agreed on the terms for a Cypriot bailout — the fifth such eurozone bailout during [...]

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How would Italian politics function under a ‘French’ electoral system?

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Kevin Lees

Former center-right foreign minister Franco Frattini is far from the fray of Italian politics these days — he didn’t run in last week’s Italian elections and he’s currently a candidate to replace Anders Fogh Rasmussen as the secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Nonetheless, Frattini (pictured above) spoke in Washington yesterday to the American Israel Public [...]

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British, French governments poised to pass gay marriage into law

Posted on February 6, 2013 by Kevin Lees

Amid a flurry of parliamentary action in the United Kingdom and France, two of the largest countries in Europe and, indeed, two of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, are set to legalize gay marriage in the coming months. The joint result gives an incredibly burst of global momentum for the [...]

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M. Hollande’s little war — and what it means for French-African politics

Posted on January 15, 2013 by Kevin Lees

Over the weekend, France found itself engaged in a new, if limited, war — and a new theater of Western intervention against radical Islam. French president François Hollande confirmed that French troops had assisted Mali’s army in liberating the city of Konna — in recent weeks, Islamist-backed rebels that control the northern two-thirds of the country [...]

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Four reasons why Cope’s narrow Sunday win of France’s UMP leadership could be ruinous

Posted on November 20, 2012 by Kevin Lees

After a tense Monday during which both candidates declared victory and accused the other of fraud, it appears that Jean-François Copé (pictured above) has emerged as the presumptive leader of the French right. With just a 98-vote margin, Copé won the election for general secretary of the center-right Union pour un mouvement populaire (UMP, Union for [...]

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The French right prepares to choose Sarkozy’s successor (maybe)

Posted on November 16, 2012 by Kevin Lees

France’s center-right Union pour un mouvement populaire (UMP, Union for a popular movement) will vote on Sunday, November 18 to choose its next general secretary in what’s widely seen as a fight to get the upper hand on the UMP’s presidential nomination in 2017.  The UMP will choose between two key figures — former prime minister François [...]

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Final thoughts on French parliamentary runoff results

Posted on June 19, 2012 by Kevin Lees

As noted in the immediate aftermath of Sunday’s parliament elections, the French left looked likely to take a narrow absolute majority of seats in the Assemblée nationale. As it turns out, the Parti socialiste of François Hollande did even better — it and its allies took 314 seats, not including the 17 seats that its electoral partner, France’s Green [...]

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Big weekend for France, Greece and Egypt

Posted on June 16, 2012 by Kevin Lees

It’s another big weekend for elections! Voters in Egypt go to the polls today and tomorrow to choose a president in the final runoff between the Muslim brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi and Ahmed Shafiq, a former Air Force commander and the final prime minister of former president Hosni Mubarak, in what is seen as a Hobson’s choice [...]

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Tweet sets off ‘battle Royal’ between first lady and Hollande’s former partner

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Kevin Lees

At first, everyone thought her Twitter account must have been hacked. But no: here was the new first lady of France, Valérie Trierweiler, the companion of President François Hollande, tweeting her apparent opposition to Hollande’s previous partner and mother of Hollande’s four children, Ségolène Royal, who was also the Parti socialiste‘s 2007 presidential candidate.  Royal is [...]

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Final French parliamentary election results for first round

Posted on June 12, 2012 by Kevin Lees

France has now had a full day since learning the results of Sunday’s first round of the French parliamentary elections (France votes again in the second round this coming Sunday), and there’s really not much surprise in the aggregate result. Much as predicted: the Parti socialiste of newly inaugurated François Hollande narrowly led the first round [...]

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Le Pen and Mélenchon battle in Hénin-Beaumont precinct highlights four-way French campaign

Posted on June 8, 2012 by Kevin Lees

The most interesting contest in Sunday’s first round of the French parliamentary election may well be the most irrelevant to determining whether President François Hollande’s center-left or the center-right will control the Assemblée nationale — but it also showcases that the far-left and far-right are both playing the strongest role in over a decade in any [...]

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