This year’s presidential campaign has thus far generated little excitement, but behind the scenes a remarkable party realignment seems to be well under way. This was underscored by three events […]

The French party system is in deep distress. This was already apparent in 2017, when the arrival of “neither right nor left” candidate Emmanuel Macron destructured the opposition that had […]

This is the fourth and final review in our “Parliamentary Thinking” book forum.   Review of Parliament the Mirror of the Nation: Representation, Deliberation and Democracy in Victorian Britain by […]

With the news that Les Républicains are about to choose Christian Jacob as their new leader, it is clear that the party has no idea where it intends to go […]

Since November 17 of last year, we have been regaled every Saturday with the lament of the Gilets Jaunes, those salt-of-the-earth French men and women who join together to protest […]

Jean-Luc Mélenchon contains multitudes. After the Notre-Dame fire, he was among the most eloquent of commentators, intimately familiar with the history of the cathedral. But his familiarity with the vast […]

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, […]

  Since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, a common narrative to explain the state of American democracy has been the story of “norm erosion.” The premise of this narrative […]

  To mark the sixtieth birthday of France’s Fifth Republic, I recently went and flipped through a chapter I had been meaning to come back to in Raymond Aron’s Démocratie et […]

What better time to launch a few trial balloons than the August doldrums. A Le Monde interview with former prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin is rich in instruction as to thinking of this […]

The French party system, devastated by the Macron tsunami, has not recovered. Only a bleak wasteland remains. If one looks closely, there are signs of life, but just barely. Small […]

  It’s a year and a half before the European elections of May 2019, which will be the voters’ first turn to give a verdict on the Macron presidency at […]

This week’s Canard enchaîné reports that Emmanuel Macron—along with Richard Ferrand, the president of the parliamentary group of La République en marche—are struggling to control the left-leaning members of the governing majority who […]