Must our political discourse be civil? Is incivility a mark of defiance, or its own form of virtue-signaling? Are rejections of politeness and refusal to debate deliberate moral choices, […]

Welcome to Tocqueville 21’s weekly revue de presse, where we re-cap some of the most thought-provoking articles we’ve seen on democracy and politics in France, the US, and beyond. As […]

Welcome to Tocqueville 21’s second weekly revue de presse, where we re-cap some of the most thought-provoking articles we’ve seen on democracy and politics in France, the US, and beyond. […]

  If the lesson of last month’s election to the European Parliament is that the “establishment” is struggling, then count Lithuania out. Voters across Europe shifted from traditional center-right and […]

It is now two weeks since the European Parliament elections, and the dust has yet to settle. It was a remarkable election in many ways–unprecedented, really. Normally, EP elections are […]

  In the wake of the Brexit referendum, the socialist Red-Green Alliance and the far-right anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party appeared on camera together, issuing a common call for Denmark to […]

Slowly but steadily, European politics is Europeanizing. While the last round of European elections seemed addled by disputes over the size of bananas and the color of passports, as the […]

The polls were wrong. Despite a lackluster campaign, interest in this election was higher than predicted, and turnout rose. The contest between Macron and Le Pen ended about as expected, […]

Slovakia, my home country, made global headlines in March with the election of our next president: Zuzana Čaputová, a liberal lawyer known for her environmental activism. Compared to worrisome developments […]

The otherwise dull-as-dishwater campaign for the European elections has produced one amusing passe-d’armes involving two rather surprising combatants: Nathalie Loiseau, the head of LREM’s list, and Edwy Plenel, the editor of Médiapart. […]

This year’s European Union elections are arousing even less interest than usual in France. It’s not hard to understand why. European elections are always a referendum on the sitting president, […]

Yesterday, former French president François Hollande addressed a student conference at Harvard’s Kennedy School and then met with faculty and students to discuss European and trans-Atlantic politics (in the picture […]

As France’s political parties wither away, French civil society may be organizing itself to fill the void. Perhaps that is too optimistic a read of what those perennial civil-society reformers, […]

It’s back to the Renaissance: France and Italy are at war. Will we witness a new Battle of Marignano, where the French were victorious, or a Battle of Pavia, where […]

After what Le Monde has called “Eight months of hostilities” between France and Italy, the Quai d’Orsay recalled its ambassador from Rome. The stated reason was a meeting this week held between Luigi Di […]

The Gilets Jaunes, contemners of a political system they regard as rotten to the core, are in the process of discovering that the anti-political invariably leads to the political. Two […]

I look beyond French borders to consider the evolving political situation in Europe’s four largest economies in the winter issue of The American Prospect.   Photo Credit: ActuaLitté via wikimedia […]

To hear the Gilets Jaunes tell it, you’d think the government has nothing on its mind but how to squeeze the last centime out of the harried taxpayer. But every […]

Image by Copyleft and Foto-AG Gymnasium Melle via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0 ; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Macron_%26_Le_Pen.jpg) My latest on the state of France in The New Republic.

Image by Rivdumat via Wikimedia Commons (Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication ; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Groupe_France_Insoumise_à_l%27Assemblée_Nationale_2017.jpg) One of the most frequent criticisms on the French left of La France insoumise […]

Emmanuel Macron has won a Pyrrhic victory. From the beginning of his presidency he has made winning Germany’s assent to a “Eurozone budget” a strategic goal. Conventional wisdom, which despite […]

Angela Merkel has never been a leader in a hurry. She took six months to form her current coalition government. She has taken even longer to respond to Emmanuel Macron’s […]

“When France sneezes, Europe catches cold”: in these days, Count Metternich’s famous quip could arguably be extended to nearly all European democracies, whose precarious health reverberates on the whole Continent. […]