The Los Angeles Review of Books: French Secularism, Reinvented

 The proposed measures appear to mark a dramatic shift in the purpose of secularism. But despite the different contexts and reversed power relations, there are revealing continuities between the Third Republic’s campaign against Catholicism in the early 20th century and the current campaign against Islamist “separatism.” In fact, 19th-century secularists talked about Catholicism and Islam in such similar ways that some French Catholics even began accepting this comparison, seeing Muslims as allies against the aggressive secularism of the French state. This makes it all the more ironic that conservatives now embrace laïcité as a bludgeon against Muslims. In France, secularism has never been about removing religion entirely from the French public sphere but rather defining it, neutralizing it, and using it for the state’s own purposes.[...]

Many of the common complaints against Jesuit priests were similar to the anti-Muslim tropes of today. They were accused of being an unpatriotic “state within a state,” a communitarian, unassimilated minority; like today’s Muslims, their real loyalty was allegedly to a power outside and beyond that of the French state: their superior in Rome. As John Padberg, Geoffrey Cubitt, and other scholars have detailed, the Jesuits were long accused of being “a political corps” hiding “under the veil of a religious institute.”[...]

And yet, church attendance continued to decline. Despite a brief resurgence in religiosity after the war, some Catholics — such as the famed scholar of Islam Louis Massignon — looked to the religious practices of Muslims in French Algeria as a source of renewed spirituality for an increasingly secular France. Much of what these Catholics admired in Muslims was the all-encompassing nature of religion in their lives, which they believed promoted a deeper and more genuine spirituality. As Talal Asad has pointed out in his critiques of secularism, Catholicism and Islam are both uncomfortable with the relegation of religion to private life; both have aspired to shape society, from public space to education. Opponents of recent European headscarf and burka bans have found allies among Catholics, who argue that states overstep their rights when they seek to regulate personal expressions of faith in the public sphere.

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VICE: How France Became the Muslim World's Most Hated Country in the West

 While 70 percent of French Muslims think Charlie Hebdo was wrong to publish the caricatures of Mohammed, 60 percent of all French people support the publication, and say they don’t understand the offence that the cartoons cause Muslims. [...]

“In 2003-2004, France was the most popular Western country in the Muslim world. Today, it is the least popular Western country. Something went wrong,” says Pascal Boniface, director of the French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs (IRIS). [...]

He argues that – on top of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons – there’s a lot of anti-Islamic rhetoric in the French media. Headlines published in political magazines like “Shameless Islam” or “The Mosque Invasion” are not anti-Islamist, he says – they’re anti-Muslim. [...]

There’s poverty and joblessness, she says. “The absence of prospects – of job prospects, of career prospects – that's what these people, the extremists, that's what they thrive upon.”

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VICE: The Next Generation of the French Far Right

All of the major political parties in France have youth wings, but the National Rally remains particularly concentrated on attracting young people, training them, promoting them to leadership positions, and encouraging them to run for office. It does this with an eye towards expanding its base and recruiting youth like Ferreira and her ambitious, well-educated peers in and around Paris—a population usually thought more likely to sympathize with the students of 1968 or the people who took to the streets to protest systemic racism this summer than with a party best known for anti-Semitism, nationalism, and xenophobia. But the next generation of the French radical right lives outside of the stereotype of National Rally voters as rural, less educated, older, and male. Instead, many of its dedicated organizers and future leaders reside in universities at the center of a city widely associated with protests, strikes, and revolution, antagonizing that centuries-long history from the inside. [...]

Founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine Le Pen’s father, the National Rally has historically attracted men, both very young and very old, and been most notorious for the elder Le Pen’s Holocaust denial, hate crime accusations, and flirtations with Nazism. When Marine Le Pen took control of the party in 2011, she sought to change that image and professionalize the party. With her “de-demonization” strategy, she saw results fairly quickly: In 2014, the party began experiencing gains in municipal, regional, and European Parliament elections. Last year, the National Rally beat Macron’s party in elections for the European Parliament, riding a wave of anti-elite sentiment embodied by the Yellow Vest protest movement that rocked the country for months. The party’s 2018 name change was part of Le Pen’s larger strategy to distance herself from her father, whose reputation is seen as beyond salvageable. The presence of well-groomed students from elite universities, too, fits nicely into that strategy.

Everyone I interviewed differentiated Marine Le Pen’s party from the party of Jean-Marie Le Pen, accepting the National Rally’s former iteration as racist and anti-Semitic. Nevertheless, they also expressed blatantly nationalistic and Islamophobic views, remnants of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s party that remain hallmarks of the National Rally today. Just two years ago, the youth wing marked International Women’s Day by tweeting a meme that read, “Defending women’s rights is fighting against Islamism: The French woman is neither veiled nor submissive!” And last month, the National Rally launched a new campaign titled, “French, wake up!,” calling for security and justice in the face of “savagery” and promising to, among other things, increase prison capacity, apply zero tolerance, end “mass immigration,” reinstate mandatory minimums, and end social services for families of repeat juvenile offenders. [...]

But Rooduijn sees radical right parties gaining broader acceptance, gradually chipping away at the stigma surrounding them. “I think that the National Rally is a good example because you can really see when Marine Le Pen took over the leadership, she really changed the image of the party, trying to present the party as a party that you could vote for, a party that's there for everyone,” he explained. “At the same time, when it comes to policy positions, to the actual ideas and the ideological base of the National Rally, nothing really changed. The party is still very radical when it comes to immigration. It's still very radical on the European Union. It's still very strict on law and order. It's still very populist, meaning that it's still very negative about all kinds of elites, most importantly the political elites.... So these parties have become more generally accepted. However, they have not really become less radical.”

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UnHerd: The failure of France’s Greens

Meanwhile several of the Green mayors have opposed government plans for a rapid roll-out of a fifth generation, super-fast internet network in France. Eric Piolle, the second-term mayor of Grenoble — rumoured to be considering a Green run for the presidency in 2022 — described 5G in July as “useful only for watching porn movies in high definition on your mobile phone in a lift.”

The Greens’ criticism may, or may not, be justified. The Tour de France, for instance, is indeed a carbon-generating carnival of plastic largesse with a terrible doping record; it is also a much-loved symbol of French unity and variety — an international sporting event which literally comes “down your way”. Either way, these are scarcely the kind of pressing local issues which French voters expect their mayors to address. [...]

It seems that the French people agree with him. Green support in the polls has dropped rapidly, and according to an Odoxa poll, positive opinions of the EELV party have fallen by 14 points to 43%. Over 70% of French people say they disapprove of Green attacks on Christmas trees; 68% dislike Green attacks on the Tour de France. [...]

And yet it’s worth remembering that the Green Wave was only made possible by a collapse in nationwide turn-out. The surge occurred only in big and medium towns, in economically thriving places with a large population of young, professional and educated voters. They have many local problems but they have been sheltered from the difficulties facing rural and outer suburban France, which generated the Yellow Vest movement in 2018. In these struggling areas, the Greens scarcely exist as an electoral force.

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TLDR News: Why Missiles Are Being Fired: Armenia & Azerbaijan Conflict Explained (Nagorno-Karabakh)

 Over the last few weeks, tensions have been rising between Armenia and Azerbaijan with both sides firing missiles at one another. This is all over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh and it's an issue which goes back decades. In this video we explain the history of the dispute, the current situation and if a ceasefire can really work.

Jacobin Magazine: The Pandemic Is Making the European Union More Integrated — And More Unequal

 During the last ten years, this vision has suffered some major challenges. Instead of continuous uninterrupted progress, the modern European Union has had to follow the path of crisis management. The Great Recession led to the sovereign debt crisis, then the Portuguese crisis, the Spanish crisis, the Irish crisis, and, of course, most drastically, the Greek crisis. The talk of a “Grexit” — the possibility of the other countries booting Greece from the Union — smoothly transferred to talk on the crisis over Brexit, as the British right actually split their country from the union. This, at the same time as the mounting environmental crisis, the so-called refugee crisis, the crisis of democracy caused by right-wing populism in countries like Hungary and Poland. But from crisis to crisis, the Union lurches forward, and the solution is always the same — more integration. [...]

The knights don’t go into the lair alone, of course. Another thing the press likes to do is to divide Europe into convenient blocs. Populations of countries like Finland are, time and again, led to believe that the problem with the European Union is that there are too many Mediterranean countries in it, that everything would be okay if the EU could just somehow drop or at least ignore the Southern countries for their profligacy. The name of choice for the Northern nations for the negotiations was the “frugal four,” part of the former “New Hanseatic League.” This group set out to oppose the package, eventually getting some concessions, but in the end having little effect on the basic forms of the package itself. [...]

This isn’t really a matter of the so-called political families within the European sphere. In the “Northern” group, the Austrian conservative Sebastian Kurz joined the Dutch liberal Mark Rutte and the social democrats in Nordic countries, such as Finland’s Marin, to oppose the social democrat Pedro Sánchez in Spain, the conservative Angela Merkel in Germany, and — stretching the meaning of the word quite a bit — the “liberal” Macron in France. The one country in the EU that currently has the far right in government is Estonia, where the nationalist EKRE party has talked tough about the EU and federalism. But in the end, it presented no effective opposition to the package, after Estonia was promised a windfall of EU subsidies as a result. Other right-wing populists, like Matteo Salvini in Italy, muted their criticisms even longer ago. [...]

Even a federal Europe would not, as such, alter the underlying economic systems leading to more and more environmental destruction in search of personal and national profits. Indeed, once one looks under the hood of the European liberalism’s internationalist rhetoric, the practical work of European integration is often advanced by the same inward-looking arguments as nationalism always has been: the idea of a continent threatened by, say, China or Russia, or international terrorism. Indeed, when looking at Macron talking about the “cultural vitality” (though not the values) of Hungary and Russia as a model for his preferred European “civilization state,” or Belgian liberal Guy Verhofstadt — for decades almost the living personification of the EU — literally referring to an “EU empire,” one wonders whether the idea of a European federation guided by the values of the Polish or Hungarian governments is as far off as one might think, even now.

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Foreign Policy: It’s a New Europe—if You Can Keep It

 The lockdowns that stopped the virus in Europe have had a devastating economic impact. Again, the American habit of dramatizing data by means of annualizing rates of change disguises the fact that economic implosion in Europe has been every bit as bad, if not worse. The U.S. economy fell 9.5 percent in the second quarter of 2020. Germany’s contracted by 10 percent. In Spain, the collapse was twice as bad, at 18.5 percent. (If Spain reported its data in the American style, it would be down 65 percent on the year.) [...]

In the process, the more conservative voices of Northern Europe extracted serious concessions. Unfortunately, those came at the expense of some of the more progressive and innovative budget elements, including spending on joint efforts in the areas of health care and green investment. Thankfully, the package is up for debate in the European Parliament, which is, step by step, asserting leverage over Europe’s politics. Earlier in the crisis, the Parliament favored a far more expansive plan, and hopefully it will make adjustments to the July compromise. [...]

This summer, there was certainly nothing inevitable about the way the deal was done. It did not seem likely. Credit goes to the European Commission for raising the stakes, upping the original suggestion by Merkel and Macron to an ask of 750 billion euros, on top of the regular 1.1 trillion euro ($1.3 trillion) multiyear budget. (It was the Commission’s officials who dug up the legal precedent that would allow the EU to justify massive borrowing.) Among national governments, one has to admire the Spanish and Italians, who began the long march toward a constructive European response back in March and suffered through the demeaning objections of Northern Europeans without walking away. The best that can be said for the Dutch and the Austrians is that they gave way in the end. Perhaps the shameless defense of the narrowest conception of national interest by Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte and Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz will serve some useful purpose in dampening criticism from their domestic populists. [...]

It was not by accident that as the crisis deepened, the French government started its latest approach to Berlin not via the chancellery but by working its connections to the Social Democrats in the German Finance Ministry. In a desperate effort to revive the flagging political fortunes of the Social Democrats and his own chances of party leadership in 2019, Finance Minister Olaf Scholz had become the leading German proponent of European reform, pushing ideas both for unemployment insurance and banking. Both had been met by stony disapproval from the CDU and a nein from the chancellery.

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UnHerd: The irresistible rise of the civilisation-state

America’s decline is impossible to disentangle from China’s rise, so it is natural that the rapid climb of the Middle Kingdom back to its historic global primacy dominates discussion of the civilisation-state. Though the phrase was popularised by the British writer Martin Jacques, the political theorist Christopher Coker observed in his excellent recent book on civilisation-states that “the turn to Confucianism began in 2005, when President Hu Jintao applauded the Confucian concept of social harmony and instructed party cadres to build a ‘harmonious society.’” In any case, it is only under his successor Xi’s rule that China as a rival civilisation-state has really penetrated the Western consciousness. “The advent of Xi Jinping as the Chinese president in 2012 propelled the idea of ‘civilization-state’ to the forefront of the political discourse,” the Indian international relations scholar Ravi Dutt Bajpai remarks, “as Xi believes that ‘a civilization carries on its back the soul of a country or nation.’” [...]

Yet the appeal of the civilisation-state model is not limited to China. Under Putin, the other great Eurasian empire, Russia, has publicly abandoned the Europe-focused liberalising projects of the 1990s — a period of dramatic economic and societal collapse driven by adherence to the policies of Western liberal theorists — for its own cultural sonderweg or special path of a uniquely Russian civilisation centred on an all-powerful state. In a 2013 address to the Valdai Club, Putin remarked that Russia “has always evolved as a state‑civilisation, reinforced by the Russian people, Russian language, Russian culture, Russian Orthodox Church and the country’s other traditional religions. It is precisely the state‑civilisation model that has shaped our state polity.” In a 2012 speech to the Russian Federal Assembly, Putin likewise asserted that “we must value the unique experience passed on to us by our forefathers. For centuries, Russia developed as a multi‑ethnic nation (from the very beginning), a state‑civilisation bonded by the Russian people, Russian language and Russian culture native for all of us, uniting us and preventing us from dissolving in this diverse world.” [...]

In a revealing 2018 essay, Putin’s adviser Vladislav Surkov — who was fired from his role this February — foregrounded this hybridity, part-European and part-Asian, as the central characteristic of the Russian soul. “Our cultural and geopolitical identity is reminiscent of a volatile identity of the one born into a mixed-race family,” Surkov wrote. “A half-blood, a cross-breed, a weird-looking guy. Russia is a Western-Eastern half-breed nation. With its double-headed statehood, hybrid mentality, intercontinental territory and bipolar history, it is charismatic, talented, beautiful and lonely. Just as a half-breed should be.” For Surkov, Russia’s destiny as a civilisation-state, like that of the Byzantium it succeeded, is one as “a civilisation that has absorbed the East and the West. European and Asian at the same time, and for this reason neither quite Asian and nor quite European.” [...]

Warning his audience that “we know that civilisations are disappearing; countries as well. Europe will disappear,” Macron lauded the civilisational projects of Russia and Hungary, which “have a cultural, civilisational vitality that is inspiring,” and declared that France’s mission, its historic destiny, was to guide Europe into a civilisational renewal, forging a “collective narrative and a collective imagination. That is why I believe very deeply that this is our project and must be undertaken as a project of European civilisation.”

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Social Europe: A ‘Hamiltonian moment’ for Europe

Part of the ‘Compromise of 1790’, Hamilton’s proposal as Treasury secretary, to nationalise state-level debts, is inseparable from US white-supremacist history. When Hamilton’s first attempts to achieve his purpose met no success, he negotiated a compromise with Jefferson, then secretary of state, and James Madison, member of the House of Representatives—both from the Virginia plantation elite. The compromise involved two apparently unrelated political steps.

The southern plantation elite in Congress agreed to take on the debt of the northern, non-slave states by supporting the Assumption Act of 1790. In return, the southern elite achieved its goal of locating the national capital in slave territory, with the creation of the District of Columbia via the Residence Act of the same year. [...]

This arrangement fits neatly into the propaganda of the ‘frugal four’: Merkel, Macron and the commission want the long-suffering northern-European taxpayer to take on the debts of feckless southern governments. Yet Europeanising debt aims to avoid sovereign-debt speculation, not shift the cost of debt service. As a result, it would reduce the likelihood of a northern ‘taxpayer bailout’ of southern-European governments.

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FRANCE 24 English: France won’t ‘erase’ history by removing colonial-era statues, Macron says

Unusually for a French leader, Macron acknowledged that someone’s “address, name, color of skin” can reduce their chances at succeeding in French society, and called for a fight to ensure that everyone can “find their place” regardless of ethnic origin or religion. He promised to be “uncompromising in the face of racism, anti-Semitism and discrimination”. [...]

Amid calls for taking down statues tied to France’s slave trade or colonial wrongs, Macron said “the republic will not erase any trace, or any name, from its history ... it will not take down any statue”. [...]

But government minister Sibeth Ndiaye — a close Macron ally and the most prominent black figure in current French politics — wrote an unusually personal essay Saturday in Le Monde calling for France to rethink its colour-blind doctrine, which aims at encouraging equality by ignoring race altogether.

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UnHerd: Will Macron dump his Prime Minister?

The constitution and conventions of the French Fifth Republic provide for a double-headed, or chauffeur-driven, government. The president is in power but not at the wheel; the prime minister runs the country day-to-day. The president controls foreign and defence policy and sets the course for the nation. In Charles de Gaulle’s conception of things, it was the prime minister’s job to deal with “events, dear boy,” and become unpopular. The president should remain aloof, monarchical and — in theory — adored by his people. Jean-Pierre Raffarin, in becoming the object of blame for the death of a semi-wild cat, was doing more or less what Le Général had intended. [...]

The age of Facebook and Twitter, the decay of the traditional media, and the decline of deference, has made the notion of wholesale power without detailed responsibility unsustainable. The French people now take the view that they elect a president to run the country — not just to represent and guide the nation. If things go wrong, even if they do not go very wrong, it is the president in the Elysée Palace that they blame; they tend to be forgiving, or indifferent, towards the man (there has only once been a woman) in the Palais Matignon, the home and office of the prime minister. [...]

There have been opinion polls showing prime ministers to be more popular than presidents in the past — but an 11 to 13 point gap is exceptional. Macron has received the blame for what has gone wrong in France’s response to the Covid crisis, even though France has got many things right. Philippe, who has been in day-to-day control and was personally responsible for at least one bad decision, has prospered in popular opinion. He is seen as a likeable man and a safe pair of hands. [...]

Meanwhile Philippe made a series of very competent appearances at press conferences and on the TV news, painstakingly explaining the science and the logistics of the Covid crisis. Overall, France has coped better than most similar countries but, unlike Germany, failed to test widely and rapidly. The government initially misled the nation on the reasons for this failure. Philippe and his ministers made more mis-statements than Macron, but Philippe has attracted less of the blame.

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UnHerd: Can Emmanuel Macron reinvent himself?

If I had to sum up Macron’s argument in a few words, it would be these: there is no going back to the world before 2020. If we in the West want to preserve those things that we value most — democracy, openness, some level of prosperity, the environment — we must learn the lessons of Covid-19 and do things differently: more manufacturing close to home; more focus on people, less on finance; more national and European sovereignty; better, not less, multilateral or international cooperation. [...]

But all the same, Macron is extraordinary. Compare his willingness, and ability, to wrestle intellectually with the greatest crisis of our lifetimes with Donald Trump’s ignorance, narcissism and bluster; Boris Johnson’s evasive eloquence; and even Angela Merkel’s belief that Germany’s rigid, pre-Covid approach to Europe can be re-assembled Humpty-Dumpty-like without change. [...]

All the Macron achievements of the past three years — and there are many — look likely to be dwarfed or ruined by Covid-19. French unemployment had fallen sharply for the first time in a decade; there are suddenly nine million people on a temporary unemployment scheme (the most generous of its kind in the world with state funding of 80% of net salaries). How many of those jobs will survive the crisis?

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TLDR News: Amazon Has Been Shut Down in France: Coronavirus in Europe

FRANCE 24 English: Math genius Villani frustrates Macron's effort to win Paris

Opinion polls show Villani, 46, a mathematician who turned politician three years ago, is a long shot to win the election in March. But he could frustrate efforts by President Emmanuel Macron to claim the mayor’s office, one of the biggest prizes in French politics, by splitting the vote and handing the mayoralty to someone else. [...]

Villani - a winner of the Fields Medal, often called the nobel prize of mathematics - says if elected he will invest 5 billion euros in a green programme and shift the terminus for long-distance trains out of central Paris.

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The Guardian: Turkey denies blackmailing Nato over Baltics defence plan

Erdoğan has blocked a defence plan for Poland and the Baltic states until Nato recognises that the Syrian Kurdish YPG are a terrorist threat that must be addressed. Ahead of his departure from Ankara, Erdoğan reiterated the Turkish position, telling reporters: “If our friends at Nato do not recognise as terrorist organisations those we consider terrorist organisations ... we will stand against any step that will be taken there.” [...]

Macron is angry both at the Turkish decision to invade Syria, and the manner in which the decision was taken in consultation with only one Nato ally, the US. Macron warned it will create a humanitarian disaster, undermine the YPG’s leading role in suppressing Isis and complicate efforts to secure a peace settlement across Syria. [...]

On Monday US Defence Secretary Mark Esper urged Turkey to stop holding up support for the military plan. Esper warned Ankara that “not everybody sees the threats that they see” and added he would not support labelling the YPG as terrorists to break the impasse. “The message to Turkey ... is we need to move forward on these response plans and it can’t be held up by their own particular concerns,” he said as he flew to London.

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Associated Press: France and Germany propose EU overhaul after Brexit upheaval

Paris and Berlin, long seen as the axis of the continent’s post-World War Two unification process, said a “Conference on the Future of Europe” was necessary to make the EU “more united and sovereign” across a range of challenges.

These include Europe’s role in the world and its security, they said in a document that comes amid growing concern that Europe is ill-equipped to deal with new security and economic challenges, especially from a rising China. [...]

The two-page Franco-German paper said other areas where Europe needed to be more united included its near neighbors, digitalization, climate change, migration, the fight against inequality, the “social market economy” and the rule of law.

It said a reflection lasting more than two years should consider reforms that would, among other aims, promote democracy and the functioning of a bloc that will group 27 countries after Britain’s expected departure on Jan. 31.

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BBC4 Analysis: A question of artefacts

How should museums deal with contentious legacies?

Two years since the French President, Emmanuel Macron, called for the restitution of objects taken at the height of Europe’s empires, some French and Dutch museums have started the process to hand back some artefacts. However, most of the UK’s main institutions remain reluctant.

Should we empty our museums to make amends for our colonial past? In this edition of Analysis, David Baker speaks to people on all sides of the argument to get to the bottom of a topic that is pitching the art world up against global politics.

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TLDR News: What Deal Does the EU Want From Brexit?

There's been a lot of talk, on this channel and elsewhere, about what kind of Brexit deal the UK wants. There's been significantly less conversation about what the EU wants out of it. So in this video, we discuss what the EU27 want from Brexit (and more specifically what France, Germany and Ireland are looking for).

Bloomberg: Donald Trump Throws a Tax Bomb at Emmanuel Macron

Now U.S. officials have found a new angle of attack: European digital taxes, specifically France’s. The French are about to impose a 3% levy on sales made in the country by tech companies with more than 750 million euros ($845 million) of global revenue. The likes of Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Apple Inc. have been up in arms about what they describe as an unfair tariff on Silicon Valley. And now they’ve been joined by their government, which is starting a probe of the French tax under Section 301 of the U.S. Trade Act, alleging harm against American interests. [...]

While the French initiative certainly has flaws, Paris is also being singled out for political and tactical reasons. Several other countries are introducing a digital tax too, and France would happily ditch its levy in favor of an OECD solution. What’s really motivating Trump’s team is the chance to drive a wedge between the French president Emmanuel Macron and his euro zone partners. Germany has held back from introducing a tech tax of its own, no doubt fearful of U.S. retaliation, while Ireland – whose low corporate tax rates are a magnet for tech giants – has fought hard against the idea. [...]

Zaki Laidi, an international relations professor at Sciences Po in Paris, has called for a “Euro-Pacific Partnership,” bringing together Canada, the EU, and the remaining countries in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. This would support the WTO (which is under siege by the Americans), comply with the Paris climate accords, and reform dispute settlement procedures rather than rip them up. As for tech, an EU or OECD agreement on digital taxes would make more sense than messy national solutions – and would avoid Trump’s opportunistic singling out of individual victims.

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New Statesman: Why the EU’s new top team is a setback for pro-Europeans

But let's say it goes ahead: what does it mean, and which European leaders have done well out of it? The agreement is a whomping defeat for the Spitzenkandidaten system, where the pan-European parties (the centre-right European People's Party, the centre-left Party of European Socialists, the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats, soon to be renamed Renew Europe) nominate candidates for the top posts and whoever wins the elections across the bloc gets to have their chosen candidate installed in the top post. In the end, none of the candidates selected by the pan-European parties got the big jobs, with horse-trading among individual member states once again the crucial factor.

Assuming it goes ahead, who are the big winners? Most obviously, it’s a victory for Belgium’s Charles Michel, who has carved out a lifeboat for himself away from the jockeying for power in his country, which could yet see his Reform Movement tossed out of power. It’s a coup for Angela Merkel, who has managed to back a nice little sinecure for von der Leyen, a Merkel loyalist once widely tipped as her chosen successor, whose handling of the defence brief saw her miss out on the top job. And it tilts the balance of European power a little to the left.

It's a qualified victory for Emmanuel Macron. He has frustrated, and quite probably destroyed the Spitzenkandidaten (or “lead candidate”) system, which he dislikes, in exchange for a return to the previous era of European power politics. He has successfully found a top job for his Renew Europe group in Michel's job as Commission President. He prevented Manfred Webber, the EPP's candidate, from taking the EU's top post. And he has bagged a big job for a French national in Lagarde, though the IMF chief has no experience in monetary policy at a fraught time for the global economy. Against that, he failed to secure his first choice as Commission President in the Socialist Frans Timmermans.

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