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The Financial Times reported this morning that Paris and Berlin are in active discussions to overhaul, and potentially gut, the European External Action Service.

According to five senior officials briefed on the process, options on the table include stripping powers from Kaja Kallas and redistributing them between the Commission and member states, limiting her control over the EU’s network of more than 140 delegations, and shifting core functions like sanctions drafting and military mission proposals to the Council.

The Élysée has reportedly been circulating a preliminary assessment among capitals. The German government responded with its trademark blend of ambition and evasion: “We continue to strive for improving our decision-making processes.”

Translation: Ja.

The frustration driving all of this is real. The EEAS was formally launched on 1 January 2011, created by the Treaty of Lisbon to give the EU a coherent foreign policy voice, pooling diplomatic functions that had been scattered between the Commission and the Council Secretariat. Fifteen years later, nobody is satisfied.

Not the member states, who complain of too much overlap and too little coordination. Not the Commission, which under von der Leyen has steadily encroached on foreign and security territory it considers its own. Not even Kallas, who responded to the FT report with a note to staff that is best read as a diplomatic acknowledgement that yes, the system could work better.

The question is whether tearing the EEAS apart and redistributing its functions addresses the underlying problem, or reshuffles the pieces into a different kind of dysfunction.

How we got here

The EEAS was always a compromise architecture. Although the Lisbon Treaty provided the legal basis for its establishment, it provided no concrete guidelines regarding its competencies. Its architects had the difficult and politically sensitive task of creating a new bureaucratic actor not from scratch but from other bits of the EU bureaucracy.

It was created to support the High Representative, a role that is itself a compromise: simultaneously an EU foreign minister and a Vice-President of the Commission, accountable to both member states through the Foreign Affairs Council and to the Commission. The institutional design is deliberately ambiguous. Lisbon’s architects wanted a stronger EU foreign policy voice but could not agree on who would control it.

So they built a service that answers to everyone, and to no one in particular.

The High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy is one of the more unusual roles in any democratic system. Created by the Treaty of Amsterdam in 1999 and significantly expanded by Lisbon in 2009, the position was designed to bridge two institutional worlds that operate on fundamentally different logics: the intergovernmental Foreign Affairs Council, where she chairs 27 foreign ministers and is expected to reflect their collective position, and the European Commission, a supranational body with its own mandate and its own institutional interests to defend.

The EEAS, which the HR controls, sits entirely outside both institutions: not a Commission directorate, not a Council body, but an autonomous service with its own budget, its own staff, and an uncertain place in the ecosystem.

The current wave of criticism reflects something baked in from the start. Kallas speaking her own mind on EU-China relations is not a character flaw; it is what happens when the person in the role actually tries to use it. The overlap between the EEAS, the Commission’s external relations directorates, and national foreign ministries is not a management failure; it is structural.

Von der Leyen did not accidentally encroach on Kallas’ territory. She did so because the treaty allows it and because the “geopolitical Commission” was a political choice that her member-state supporters broadly backed, even if out of political laziness.

The pattern has been consistent across von der Leyen's second term. She pushed out Thierry Breton in September 2024, going behind his back to ask Macron to withdraw his nomination in exchange for a more influential portfolio for France. Breton publicly accused her of "questionable governance" on his way out.

Von der Leyen also took advantage of Macron's domestic weakness following his ill-fated decision to call snap elections in 2024: with French politics in freefall under Barnier, the Élysée needed somewhere to land a close ally, and Séjourné duly arrived as an Executive Vice-President with a large prosperity and industrial strategy portfolio. Paris got its upgrade; von der Leyen got rid of the one commissioner willing to openly defy her.

Von der Leyen has since moved to establish a new intelligence cell within her own secretariat-general, duplicating the INTCEN unit already in place within the EEAS under Kallas' authority. The proposal met resistance from member states and EEAS officials and was scaled back, but the impulse behind it was clear: the consolidation of foreign and security functions inside the Berlaymont, under her direct control.

Stefan Lehne, a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe, has argued that merging the EEAS into the Commission would clarify responsibilities and reduce duplication, and that existing structures and procedures are no longer fit for purpose. He is right that reform is overdue. But the EEAS is not the explanation for the Iran war, Trump’s tariff offensive, or the fragmented European response to Russia. Those failures have deeper roots.

The stakes are immediate. According to the FT's sources, ideas for reshaping EU foreign policy structures are being factored into a new EU security strategy that von der Leyen and Kallas are working on together, and which is set to be published this summer.

Whatever institutional architecture emerges from the current discussion will likely be baked into that document. A reform driven by cost-saving and capital frustration, rather than strategic logic, risks locking in dysfunction for another decade.

The accountability gap

The institutional debate tends to dance around the real problem: accountability. The EEAS is not dysfunctional because its people are incompetent. Brussels has no shortage of capable officials. The dysfunction stems from a system that has limited autonomy, is split across the Commission and the Council, and cannot be held responsible for its decisions the way national governments can.

You cannot vote out the EEAS. You cannot fire the High Representative at the ballot box. When things go wrong, which in foreign policy they regularly do, the only available corrective mechanism is the kind of informal capital pressure that Paris and Berlin are applying right now.

The High Representative is, by design, a role shaped entirely by whoever holds it. Every few years, one turns out to be effective, and everyone acts surprised. The rest of the time, it is a target. That is not a personnel problem. It is a constitutional one: a job defined by institutional ambiguity, with no democratic mandate for its choices and no electoral accountability for its results.

Redistributing EEAS functions to the Council gives member states more direct control, yes. It also gives them more places to shift blame when the next crisis hits, and risks more gridlock without genuine treaty change to address vetoes. Shifting powers to Commission directorates does not solve the accountability gap either; it means a different set of officials who cannot be voted out and make the same decisions.

The deeper problem is that foreign policy cannot credibly be led from Brussels under current treaty arrangements. Not because Brussels lacks talent or analytical capacity, but because the entity nominally leading on foreign policy has no genuine legal mandate for its choices and remains beholden to Von der Leyen’s office and to whichever Council configuration happens to hold the relevant dossier.

Coalitions of the willing, backed by willing EU institutions, are how Europe has actually operated in every recent crisis, from Ukraine to Iran. Frustrating, perhaps, but at least it’s honest about what the current system can deliver.

The wrong surgery

What Paris and Berlin are proposing is essentially a reabsorption. The powers carved out in 2010 to build an autonomous diplomatic service would flow back to the bodies that predated it: the Council would get the harder security and sanctions work, the Commission would keep day-to-day diplomacy alongside its existing trade profile. The argument is that this reduces duplication, saves money, and makes the external action architecture less fragmented.

Some of that is probably true in narrow operational terms. The EEAS does overlap with Commission directorates. Sanctions drafting has acquired an EEAS dimension that arguably belongs in the Council. Budget pressures are real, and with the next multiannual financial framework negotiations underway, every institution with a significant headcount is a target.

But the structural problem this reshuffling attempts to address is not the problem that actually needs fixing. Pulling powers back from an autonomous service and returning them to bodies controlled more directly by member states is not reform toward a stronger European foreign policy. It is a reform toward a more intergovernmental one.

Every crisis of the past decade has demonstrated that intergovernmental coordination, while sometimes effective when big member states align, is unreliable, slow, and hostage to national political cycles. France and Germany are aligned now. They were not aligned on Ukraine for the first three years of the war. They will not always be aligned.

What the actual solution looks like

The federalist case for EU foreign policy is not, at its core, an argument about bureaucratic architecture. It is an argument about power. Europe currently punches well below its weight geographically, economically, and militarily because it acts as a collection of medium-sized states rather than as what it actually is: the largest single market on earth, home to 450 million people, with combined defence spending that would rank second globally if properly coordinated.

The gap between Europe’s resources and the geopolitical results it produces is not primarily a design problem for the EEAS.

Fixing it requires three things, none of which are on the table in the current discussion.

Treaty change and qualified majority voting. The current architecture was designed to manage foreign policy coordination between sovereign states. It was not designed to run a geopolitical power.

Any single member state can currently block any CFSP decision with its veto, regardless of how broad the consensus is among the other 26 member states. We saw this repeatedly under the previous Hungarian government of Viktor Orban, who frequently frustrated other member states with his antics.

Under qualified majority voting, 15 of 27 member states, representing 65 per cent of the EU population, would have to agree, and third countries would lose their current ability to divide the EU by instrumentalising individual members’ economic dependencies.

The 2020 Belarus sanctions were a painful illustration: the EU was slower to respond than post-Brexit Britain because Cyprus held the package hostage, linking Belarus sanctions to unrelated demands for EU action against Turkey over drilling rights in the Mediterranean. The deadlock lasted weeks and was resolved only after a political deal at the European Council.

The Commission put forward a proposal in December 2025 to enable qualified majority decision-making through legal bases outside the CFSP framework, a workaround that is heading in the right direction but does not actually get there.

Meaningful QMV in foreign policy requires treaty change, and treaty change requires the political will to have that fight.

Democratic legitimacy for foreign policy decisions. The European Parliament has almost no formal role in EU foreign and security policy. That has traditionally been defended on the grounds that security decisions require speed and confidentiality, both legitimate concerns that explain almost nothing about why parliamentary scrutiny is so weak.

Strengthening the Parliament’s oversight role, without giving it full executive authority, would go some way to closing the accountability gap that currently makes EU foreign policy institutionally rudderless.

A real EU foreign policy pole. Not a redistributed set of fragmented functions. Not a cost-saving exercise. A deliberate, treaty-backed decision to integrate the EEAS, the Commission’s external directorate, and the Council’s security apparatus under unified democratic oversight, with the resources and mandate to act as a genuine geopolitical actor. Structural integration, not structural reabsorption. The institutional infrastructure that actually matches EU ambitions to EU power requires accepting that the current system was not designed for that purpose and cannot be patched into one.

What Paris and Berlin are discussing will deliver neither. It may produce a tidier organogram and a marginally reduced budget line.

We Europeans have two options:

We can continue patching up a system designed for a completely different era, reshuffling functions between institutions that were never built to run the geopolitical juggernaut that we should be and simply hope that the next crisis finds the right coalition willing to act.

Or we can accept that genuine strategic autonomy requires genuine institutional courage: treaty change, democratic legitimacy, strong institutions, and a foreign policy entity with the mandate, resources, power and guts to match Europe’s actual weight in the world.

Blaming the High Representative for the current dysfunction is Brussels’ favourite sport, but it does nothing but embarrass us in front of our citizens and the wider world. Building the institution that would make that blame unnecessary is the harder work. It is also the only work that matters.

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This week

• 🏙️A new Paris metropole

• 🏛️Lyhanna affair causes institutional shame

• Bernadette Chirac has passed away

🏙️A new Paris metropole

So, to start the week off: France’s Haut-Commissariat à la Stratégie et au Plan, headed by former Europe minister Clément Beaune, published a policy paper on 4 June arguing that Paris needs a radical institutional overhaul to match its physical reality. The core argument: the périphérique remains a 19th-century administrative wall, and the city-region’s governance is a dysfunctional mess.

The indictment of the current setup is damning.

The Métropole du Grand Paris, created in 2016, has failed on almost every front: a 2023 Cour des comptes report found structural dysfunction, near-zero financial redistribution, and a housing plan that was voted through but never implemented. Seven layers of government (Paris, arrondissements, suburban communes, EPTs, MGP, Region, State) produce paralysis rather than policy, and have failed to serve their citizens.

The proposal is sweeping: abolish the MGP, the three inner-ring departments (Hauts-de-Seine, Seine-Saint-Denis, Val-de-Marne) and their communes, and merge everything with Paris into a single “Ville du Grand Paris” of 6.9 million people. In their place: 40 named “districts” of roughly 170,000 people each, with identitarian, geographically evocative names rather than numbers, a directly elected Mayor of Greater Paris, and a Grand Paris Council. The Île-de-France region would survive intact for the outer ring.

The fiscal rationale is blunt: Paris and Hauts-de-Seine have a GDP per capita above €100,000, nearly three times the national average, while neighbouring Seine-Saint-Denis has roughly half Paris’s tax base despite far greater social needs. A unified collectivité would force structural redistribution rather than relying on the weak, voluntary equalisation mechanisms that exist today. At its core, this is a forced solution to the Seine-Saint-Denis problem, one that successive governments have acknowledged and none have fixed.

The paper is careful to frame the reform as decentralising, not centralising: districts would gain powers currently held by departments (social welfare, schools, planning pre-authorisation). That framing matters politically. Past attempts to rationalise the Paris city-region have collapsed precisely because suburban mayors read “simplification” as annexation by Paris, and fought back hard enough to water the whole thing down. The district model, with named units, elected councils, and meaningful competences, is designed to pre-empt that objection.

Whether it succeeds is another question. The political ask is enormous: it would effectively end dozens of mayoralties and redraw the map of the most watched piece of political real estate in France ahead of the 2027 presidential election.

It is also worth asking who is really behind this. Clement Beaune is not a neutral technocrat. He was Macron’s Europe minister for several years, ran unsuccessfully in the 2026 Paris municipal election, and is widely seen as positioning himself for the already crowded 2027 presidential election.

Publishing a huge and divisive political proposal like this under the HCSP banner gives the idea institutional cover and Beaune a political barrier to protect himself, but we have to be clear that this reads as much as a political manifesto as a policy document. The author has skin in this game.

However, this context does not invalidate the arguments: the scale of the dysfunction is real, and the international comparison is sobering.

Paris, at 105 km², is dwarfed by Greater London at 1,572 km², Rome at 1,287 km², and Moscow at 2,561 km², and this huge gap is not just a curiosity but an indictment of Paris being left behind.

It goes to the heart of why Paris consistently punches below its weight in global city rankings despite being the EU’s largest metropolitan economy. London’s Greater London Authority, created in 2000 as part of Tony Blair’s New Labour reforms, and is the closest model for what Beaune is proposing.

It took a strong political, reformist will, a referendum, and a decade of bedding in, but it is seen as a genuine success and as something that not only improved citizens’ lives but also strengthened London’s power as a city.

Yet despite the clear upsides, none of this discussion is on the French calendar yet, and understandably, many elected officials are unhappy about losing their positions.

Beaune’s paper is explicitly a pre-election trial balloon, not a government proposal, but it has arrived following Grand Paris’ governance being prominently featured in the 2026 municipal campaign, and at a time when the Grand Paris Express megaproject is finally and visibly connecting the banlieues to each other.

The infrastructure is starting to make the institutional dysfunction harder to ignore; we just need the political will to make it happen.

🏛️Lyhanna affair causes institutional shame

The death of an 11-year-old girl in the Gers has opened one of the most damaging institutional crises the French judiciary has faced in years. What the facts reveal is not a single catastrophic decision but a system that processed a child's life through bureaucratic routine and produced nothing.

The political fallout is now moving faster than any inspection report can contain, and the death of Lyhanna has done what few cases manage in French public life: producing a moment of genuine, cross-party institutional shame.

Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin appeared on TF1 this past Friday to acknowledge that the judicial system had failed to protect the child, to present his personal apologies to her family and to the French public, and to admit that the handling of prior complaints against the suspect amounted to “an immense failure.”

That a serving garde des sceaux delivered that kind of on-camera mea culpa, unprompted by a parliamentary inquiry or a court ruling, is very telling about the severity of the failure, and the shock that has taken over the discussion of this tragic event.

The facts are damaging precisely because they are procedural rather than exceptional, and because Darmanin had issued a circular in January specifically prioritising sexual violence complaints involving children. For reasons nobody can explain, this was not acted upon.

There are, he acknowledged, three million complaints currently backlogged in French police stations and gendarmeries, of which 70,000 involve rape or sexual assault.

The system did not fail Lyhanna through malice. It failed her through routine and bureaucratic backlog. That distinction matters less to the politicians already shaping the case into a campaign argument. Bruno Retailleau, LR president and increasingly the right’s most credible presidential contender, moved quickly.

His proposal for a disciplinary court to replace the Conseil Supérieur de la Magistrature’s (CSM) sanctioning function is intended both to provide stronger punishments and also to resonate with the public.

The disciplinary court would be a citizens’ panel chosen by lot, sitting alongside magistrates and independent figures, chaired by a non-magistrate, open to referrals from citizens, hierarchical superiors, and the justice minister.

Whether the proposal is serious judicial reform or scaffolding for a presidential platform, it has landed at a moment when the institutional defence of judicial independence sounds, to many ears, like corporate self-protection.

The magistracy’s representative bodies have pushed back. The union warned against scapegoating before the inspection reports are finalised, and highlighted that there are currently “four times fewer prosecutors in France than in Europe”.

Both the national conference of prosecutors general and the national conference of public prosecutors reminded ministers in a joint statement that they had already flagged the backlogs as alarming, and that prioritisation of domestic violence and drugs cases was itself creating delays elsewhere.

That pushback is legitimate. It is also, for now, losing the argument in the court of public opinion.

President Emmanuel Macron, speaking from his trip in Montenegro, condemned the “unacceptable” situation and said he would not hear arguments about resources. "It is clear that there has been a dysfunction”

The inspection report is due in a fortnight, and whatever it finds, the political damage to the government and trust in the judiciary has already been done, and the reform pressure, whatever form it eventually takes, is not going away.

It’s why Darmanin has urgently summoned all public prosecutors in Paris to a meeting on Monday morning to get to the bottom of the failures.

A “marche blanche” will take place this Sunday, with 5,000 attendees expected.

Bernadette Chirac has passed away

To finish the week: Bernadette Chirac, former First Lady of France and one of the important figures in Fifth Republic political history, died peacefully on the evening of Friday, 6 June, surrounded by her family. She was 93.

Born Bernadette Chodron de Courcel in Paris in 1933, into a family of military men, diplomats and industrialists ennobled under the Second Empire, she met Jacques Chirac at Sciences Po in 1951 and married him in 1956.

Bernadette was never simply a political spouse, but was a successful politicienne in her own right. Elected to the Corrèze general council in 1979, she held her seat for 36 years, building an independent political base that her husband had originally engineered to keep her occupied, and which she turned into something he came to admire.

She was also president of the Fondation Hôpitaux de Paris for over two decades, making the annual Pièces Jaunes campaign a fixture of French public life. Her role and her work was shaped in large part by the suffering of her elder daughter Laurence, who battled severe anorexia for much of her life before dying in 2016.

Sharp, often caustic, and entirely uninterested in playing the decorative role the Élysée and other politicians often expected of her, she outlived her husband by nearly seven years.

And after the death of former President Jacques Chirac in September 2019, Bernadette did not appear in public again.

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The recent interview between Yuliia Mendel and Tucker Carlson was not merely a media appearance; it functioned as a calculated effort to erode international support for Ukraine at a pivotal moment.

When President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s former press secretary sat down with the American conservative podcaster on May 11, 2026, the conversation was framed as a bombshell revelation. In reality, it appears to be a masterclass in intertextual messaging. Mendel, who once described Zelenskyy as a “breath of fresh air” and a “meritocrat by nature” in her 2022 memoir, suddenly shifted to labelling him a “dictator” and the “greatest obstacle to peace”.

The dramatic reversal can be understood as more than just an isolated incident of a disgruntled former employee speaking out; however, it fits into a broader information campaign that undermines the foundations of Ukraine’s defence.

Carlson’s platform is a deliberate choice. His audience, averaging 3.2 million viewers in prime time and over 5.5 million YouTube subscribers1 2, has long been fed a steady diet of simplified narratives claiming Ukraine is “to blame” or that Zelenskyy is an “obstacle to peace.”

It’s important to remember that Carlson has a well-documented history of amplifying Kremlin-aligned talking points, having told his viewers that Russia is “not the enemy” of the United States and famously interviewing Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2024 without challenging him on war crimes3.

By utilising Carlson’s expansive reach, the interview served as a strategic hit aimed far beyond the President himself. It targeted the provision of Western weaponry essential for Ukrainian defences, the stability of sanctions against the Russian Federation, and the fundamental right of Ukraine to conclude this war on its own terms.

The Anatomy of a Smear Campaign

During the interview, Mendel advanced a series of claims that closely echoed established Russian disinformation tropes. She suggested that Zelenskyy’s alleged drug use is an “open secret”, a baseless rumour long pushed by Russian state media and repeatedly debunked by independent fact-checkers.

This is not a casual accusation, but a very specific action that is designed to play into the Kremlin’s favoured trope of portraying the Ukrainian leader as an unstable, drug-addicted and paranoid narcissist unfit to command Western support or negotiate peace.

Similarly, Mendel weaponised the very real internal challenges Ukraine faces. It is true that Ukraine is actively grappling with corruption, as evidenced by recent high-profile legal developments, including the May 2026 arrest of former top presidential aide Andriy Yermak on money laundering charges.

However, rather than acknowledging these investigations as evidence of functioning democratic accountability and anti-corruption reforms in wartime, Mendel uses them to portray a state beyond redemption. She claimed that Ukraine suffers from a total lack of free speech, a narrative contradicted by the 2026 Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index, which ranks Ukraine 55th globally, higher than several Western democracies and vastly outperforming Russia’s dismal 172nd placement.

Perhaps most egregiously, Mendel asserted that Zelenskyy personally agreed to cede the Donbas region to Russia during the 2022 Istanbul negotiations. The Ukrainian Presidential Office swiftly refuted this, noting that Mendel, who left her post in 2021, had no access to state decision-making or the negotiation process.

Yet, the truth of her statements is almost secondary to their intended effect. As disinformation researcher Alyona Hurkivska noted, Mendel’s portrayal depicts Ukraine as a “weak, zero-agency, corrupt, and hopeless country with no future”.

It is also worth recalling that Mendel resigned in 2021 following complaints of aggressive behaviour towards journalists, and that just a year later, she published a memoir about Volodymyr Zelenskyy (‘The Fight of Our Lives: My Time with Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s Battle for Democracy, and What It Means for the World’) describing him as the “nation’s protector”. This adds further questions regarding her aggressive about-face.

This framing attempts to rob Ukrainians of their voice, suggesting they are mere victims of their own leadership rather than active defenders of their sovereignty. It mirrors the Kremlin’s cognitive warfare strategy, which seeks to undermine Western resolve by portraying the defence of Ukraine as a lost cause.

It is no coincidence that within 24 hours of the interview’s release, Russian state media apparatuses, including RT and prominent propagandists like Vladimir Soloviev and Olga Skabeeva, were eagerly amplifying Mendel’s claims, according to NewsGuard’s monitoring.

After decades of experience with Russian information warfare, Ukrainians have long developed an ear for such dissonance, and their warnings have increasingly found institutional backing in the West. The mechanism behind such campaigns has already been exposed in court.

In 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted two RT employees over a $10 million scheme that covertly funded right-wing American content creators through a company called Tenet Media, whose stable of influencers included prominent conservative commentators, to spread these types of narratives precisely.

But more can and has to be done.

Targeting the Lifelines of Defence

The timing of the Mendel broadcast is critical. Ukraine is currently navigating a complex geopolitical landscape where international support is both vital and vulnerable. In the United States, debates over munitions stockpiles and the viability of continued military aid remain contentious 4. Meanwhile, the European Union recently finalised a €90 billion loan to support Ukraine’s urgent budgetary and defence needs.

By painting Ukraine’s leadership as hopelessly corrupt and dictatorial, the Mendel-Carlson interview provides rhetorical ammunition to those seeking to cut off this essential aid. If Western audiences can be convinced that their tax dollars are funding an authoritarian regime rather than a democratic ally fighting for survival, the political will to sustain military assistance will inevitably fracture.

Furthermore, this narrative threatens the stability of sanctions against the Russian Federation. As Transatlantic unity faces ongoing pressure and the global energy market fluctuates, enforcing sanctions requires unwavering commitment. Messaging that delegitimises Ukraine’s struggle serves to justify sanctions evasion and the normalisation of relations with Moscow.

The Reality of the Ukrainian Struggle

Former officials are, of course, entitled to criticise wartime leadership, and democracies depend on dissent and scrutiny of our political leaders. A problem arises, however, when unverified claims are amplified through media ecosystems that have repeatedly circulated Kremlin-aligned narratives, exploiting democratic growing pains to justify external abandonment.

The reality of the Ukrainian struggle is found in the daily grind of defence and recovery, not in the polished frames of a manipulated broadcast. While such “bold interviews” attempt to package falsehoods as alternative perspectives, the true measure of the state lies in its endurance and the agency of its people.

Consider the rapid decision-making immediately following Russian strikes. Just hours after a recent 72-hour truce expired, Russia launched over 200 attack drones at Ukrainian targets. In the face of such relentless aggression, Ukrainian communities continue to demonstrate extraordinary fortitude. The World Bank estimates the cost of Ukraine’s reconstruction at nearly $588 billion, yet local initiatives focused on energy security and business development in frontline cities persist 5.

This is the tireless fight for every international aid package and the unwavering support for local communities on the front lines. It is a reality defined by the 58% of Ukrainians who continue to express trust in their President amidst an exhausting war, not by the fabricated grievances of a former aide seeking relevance on a foreign stage.

The Mendel-Carlson interview does not exist in a vacuum. It appears to be the latest iteration of this strategy. It relies on the illusion of insider credibility to launder Kremlin-aligned messaging for a Western audience.

The international response to Ukraine should be guided by verifiable evidence and strategic realities rather than narratives amplified through disinformation ecosystems. As the global community evaluates its ongoing commitment to Ukraine, it must base its decisions on the documented realities of the conflict, rather than the orchestrated theatre of political manipulation.

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This week

• 💊France first country in Europe to reimburse weight-loss drugs

• 🇲🇪Macron supports Montenegro’s EU Accession

💊France first country in Europe to reimburse weight-loss drugs

Let’s start the week off with some interesting news: the French government has announced that it will begin reimbursing weight-loss drugs starting from 15 June.

Focusing on the weight-loss drugs Wegovy and Mounjaro, Health Minister Stéphanie Rist announced Thursday, making France the first EU country to cover GLP-1 receptor agonists under standard public health insurance on a permanent basis.

Reimbursement is formally set at 65% of the purchase price, though Rist said most patients will end up fully covered. “Officially, reimbursement will be set at 65%, but virtually all patients will be fully covered because they have comorbidities, such as hypertension or diabetes,” she told French television.

The drugs, produced by Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, work by mimicking the hormone GLP-1, which suppresses appetite. They have been available on prescription across France since 2024 and, since June 2025, can be prescribed by any generalist doctor rather than only specialists.

And the important thing to note about this is that, until now, patients have been paying around €300 per month out of pocket, a barrier that has kept the treatment out of reach for most citizens. As of late January, more than 70,000 patients are already on Mounjaro in France, despite the cost.

This will also become part of the wider French government’s strategy to ensure that the French population is as healthy as possible, not only for health reasons but also because it’s a genuine positive for the French economy, due to a hoped-for lessened strain on health services due to a lower obesity rate in France.

For example, around 18% of the French population, roughly 10 million people, are obese according to the 2024 national epidemiological survey. EU-wide, the European Parliament puts the figure at 17% obese and 51% overweight among adults aged 16 and above.

The reimbursement decision matters beyond France. GLP-1 drugs have remained out of reach for most patients across Europe, and Paris has now set a precedent our European colleagues will likely want to follow.

Public reimbursement of these new, novel drugs is what takes a drug from a luxury to a treatment, and France is taking the lead in making this happen.

🇲🇪Macron supports Montenegro’s EU Accession

Moving to the international stage: Emmanuel Macron received Montenegrin Prime Minister Milojko Spajić at the Élysée this Wednesday, using the meeting to reaffirm French backing for Montenegro’s EU accession bid ahead of the EU-Western Balkans Summit in Podgorica on 5 June, where Macron is also expected to attend.

“Montenegro can count on the full political support of France in the final stage of the negotiation process, and the preparation of the Treaty of Accession to the European Union,” Macron said, with both sides confirming the objective of closing all remaining negotiating chapters by the end of 2026.

Montenegran accession has a final target date of 2028.

Montenegro has 14 chapters provisionally closed and, by Podgorica’s own account, is the most advanced candidate in the Western Balkans field. Spajić was also scheduled to meet French parliamentarians during the Paris visit, signalling that the lobbying effort extends beyond the executive.

The accession treaty now being drafted would be the first of its kind in over a decade, a fact both sides flagged explicitly. The document is being prepared by an ad hoc working party, and its significance goes beyond Montenegro: it will effectively serve as the template for future accessions, including potentially Ukraine.

That context gives the Franco-Montenegrin exchange a weight beyond the bilateral. Rule of law, Spajić was careful to stress, remains an absolute priority for Podgorica, a nod to the conditionality that Brussels has consistently attached to Western Balkans progress.

Spajić also pushed back against any suggestion that Montenegro is seeking favourable treatment. “We are not seeking shortcuts, but fair recognition of our achievements, and everything we do is fully in line with the rules,” he said. It is the kind of statement that plays well in Brussels and Paris alike, where the political appetite for enlargement has returned, but the institutional caution has not entirely disappeared.

Macron described Montenegro as evidence that enlargement is possible and achievable, and said he was optimistic about the country’s trajectory. For France, the framing is deliberate. Macron has invested political capital in relaunching enlargement as a European strategic priority, and a Montenegrin accession by 2028 would be the most concrete vindication of that position yet.

It’s also important to remember enlargement is one of the EU’s most effective foreign policy tools, binding candidate states to Union norms long before they join and extending European influence outward in the process. Montenegro’s accession, if it proceeds on schedule, would demonstrate that the mechanism still works and send a strong signal to other accession countries, such as Ukraine and Moldova.

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This week

• 🌍France remains most attractive EU country for foreign investment

• 🇮🇱Ben-Gvir banned from France

• 🏛️Attal announces 2027 Presidential run

🌍France remains most attractive EU country for foreign investment

Let’s start the week off with some positive news: France has, once again, been found to be the most attractive country for foreign investments in Europe. This is the 7th consecutive year where this has been the case, and has often been hailed as a Macron effect.

Ernst & Young releases an annual ‘Foreign Direct Investment Survey’ for each global region, in which it measures and assesses the attractiveness of regions and countries globally.

The goal here is for these reports to help inform the decisions of global businesses, which need all the information they can get to make their investment decisions, and governments, which need information to remove barriers to growth.

As you can see from the chart below, France is in first place with 852 projects, followed closely by the United Kingdom (730), Germany (548), Turkey (383), and Spain (376).

However, it should also be noted that while France is doing well, it has still seen a 17% drop in projects. Alongside this, there’s also bad news for the continent: Europe’s ability to attract investment appears to be eroding, with a drop of 7% compared to the previous year.

As you can see from the above graphic, things have been steadily falling since 2021, with Europe receiving around 192,094 less FDI projects in 2025 than the recent 2021 peak.

There can be many explanations for this, with the geopolitical context becoming increasingly unstable, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Iran-American war creating havoc.

There is also the socio-political dimension: countries like the US are completely changing their strategies due to political positioning under leaders like Donald Trump, and other countries simply do not have economies that can currently sustain high-level investments.

But I will be going further into depth on this topic and the report this week.

🇮🇱Ben-Gvir banned from France

So, moving on to foreign affairs, France has banned Israeli national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir from French territory.

The move was announced by French foreign minister Jean-Noël Barrot on Twitter this past Saturday, citing his conduct toward French and European passengers aboard the Gaza flotilla.

“With immediate effect, Itamar Ben-Gvir is barred from entering French territory.

This decision follows his unspeakable behaviour towards French and European citizens travelling on the Global Smud flotilla.

We disapprove of the flotilla’s approach, which serves no useful purpose and places an undue burden on diplomatic and consular services, whose professionalism and dedication I commend.

However, we cannot tolerate French nationals being threatened, intimidated or brutalised in this way, especially by a public official.

I note that these actions have been condemned by a large number of Israeli government and political leaders.

They follow a long list of shocking statements and actions, and incitement to hatred and violence against Palestinians.

Like my Italian colleague, I call on the European Union to impose sanctions on Itamar Ben-Gvir as well.”

The move came days after Ben-Gvir posted a video to his Telegram channel showing dozens of activists from the flotilla kneeling with their hands bound, set to the Israeli national anthem. “Welcome to Israel, we are at home!” he wrote alongside the footage. Detained passengers subsequently reported physical violence, groping and deliberate humiliation at the hands of Israeli forces.

Barrot made clear France had no sympathy for the flotilla’s mission, which he described as producing no useful outcome and straining diplomatic and consular services.

The ban was about something else: “we cannot tolerate that French nationals may be threatened, intimidated or brutalised, least of all by a public official.” Barrot also called on the European Union to follow suit with its own sanctions against the minister.

Around fifty vessels had departed Turkey last week in a renewed attempt to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Israeli authorities intercepted the flotilla on Monday off Cyprus, detaining 430 activists, including 37 French nationals. All were expelled by Thursday.

Even Benjamin Netanyahu distanced himself from Ben-Gvir’s conduct, saying the treatment shown in the video was not in keeping with Israeli values and norms. Barrot noted the incident was the latest in a long pattern of inflammatory statements and actions against Palestinians.

🏛️Attal announces 2027 Presidential run

Ending the week with some big news:

Former prime minister and current secretary general of Renaissance Gabriel Attal finally declared his candidacy for the 2027 French presidential election on Friday.

Choosing the pastoral Mur-de-Barrez, a village of 700 people in the Aveyron department, Attal made a deliberate political statement in choosing the Massif Central as his starting point.

The declaration came at the end of a “débat citoyen et banquet républicain” organised by the local mayor, Pierre Ignace (Renaissance), and around a hundred residents had received a vague invitation to meet a mysterious “national political guest.”

The format nodded to Jacques Chirac’s 2002 declaration from Avignon. Prompted by Ignace, Attal delivered his announcement before a large French flag: “Yes, it is because I love France deeply, and because I love the French deeply, that I have decided to run for the presidency of the Republic.” A large French flag hung on the facade behind him.

The symbolism was thick. Attal, 37, grew up in Paris’s 6th arrondissement, attended the Ecole alsacienne and Sciences Po, and held five government posts in six years before reaching Matignon in January 2024.

His team know his profile, how it sounds to the average French citizen, and exactly how it plays publicly as a political attack.

Which is exactly why the Aveyron trip was organised and designed as it was, hoping to counter the image of a macronisme that is too urban and too disconnected from what French political shorthand calls “le pays réel.” His adviser Patrick Vignal put it plainly: the goal is to “deconstruct this image of a Macronie that is too metropolitan and not sufficiently rooted in the real country.”

Not everyone found it convincing. According to reports by Le Monde, Arnaud Péricard, spokesperson for Horizons, was dismissive before Attal had even arrived: “The hypocrisy knows no limits. You don’t invent a local connection, you build one.”

And of course, Horizons is led by centre-right Presidential candidate, former prime minister, and mayor of Le Havre, Edouard Philippe, and this is part of their ongoing competition. Attal is widely considered the main obstacle for Philippe, who remains the favourite to carry the bloc centre-right into 2027.

Attal’s supporters like to compare the contest to Chirac versus Balladur in 1995, casting their man as the scrappy outsider who will overcome a more established, experienced candidate.

Philippe and his party are also attempting to deal with the fallout of his ‘Cité Numérique’ corruption case, which risks creating a similar dynamic to 2017’s infamous Fillon affair, where François Fillon’s presidential ambitions completely imploded.

For now, Attal and Philippe have agreed to discuss the “necessity of uniting” until February 2027, with both privately hoping the other will drop out first or be knocked out due to polls or other external factors.

Attal’s strategy has been to move fast and make noise, and his closest adviser and Renaissance director general, Maxime Cordier, has framed it in terms of building momentum: “What is crystallising in public opinion is the candidates’ ability to put themselves on the line, carry the country with them and create momentum.”

The proposals have come quickly: reopening the Surrogacy (Gestation pour Autrui, GPA) debate, pension reform without an age pivot, an overhaul of the labour code and juvenile justice, scrapping the overtime cap, and questioning the primacy of international law. Opponents within the ex-majorité présidentielle accuse him of opportunism and poll-chasing in an already polarised political scene.

And the tensions are already showing: Elisabeth Borne resigned from the Renaissance leadership on May 6 due to disagreements over the party’s direction, and she has said she will not attend his first campaign meeting, scheduled for May 30 at the Porte de Versailles in Paris.

Neither will National Assembly president Yaël Braun-Pivet nor minister Aurore Bergé. However, that’s not to say there’s no momentum behind him. A pre-launch appeal signed by “500 mayors and local elected officials” and published in La Tribune du dimanche last week showed some strength.

However, it turned out to include just over 70 actual mayors, with the rest being municipal councillors.

While this has been criticised, Attal’s camp is playing down the potential problems. His popularity at book-signing sessions and on social media is the reassurance they keep returning to. A first meeting at Porte de Versailles, where Renaissance members will likely vote to confirm him as the party’s candidate shortly after.

However, the big question is whether he can succeed in the démacronisation of his image, and whether any success will hold in the long term is another question.

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I had the great pleasure to head to Prague this week to take part in the 2026 GLOBSEC Forum, and had the chance to catch up with a friend of the Dispatch, from , for a live video recorded on the sidelines.

As you’ll hear in this video, Thursday set the tone for the whole event.

A session featuring former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and former US Defence Secretary Mark Esper addressed Europe’s new security reality, which is the polite way of saying: what happens when you can no longer assume Washington has your back.

Both men agreed the dependency had gone on too long. Rasmussen pushed for a formalised Coalition of the Willing within NATO; Esper preferred expanding the existing Joint Expeditionary Force rather than risk further fracturing the alliance.

They found common ground on Ukraine’s NATO membership, arguing for the German 1955 model, with Article 5 applying only to government-controlled territory. Rasmussen went further, making the case that Europe had thrown away its best leverage during the Iran conflict by immediately declaring it wasn’t its war.

What was harder to watch was the broader conference atmosphere around US-EU relations. The official discourse from established politicians was notably managed: resilient partnership, shared values, transatlantic cooperation intact. However, the audience did not seem persuaded, and it appeared that there was a gap between what the podium says and what the people in the seats actually believe, and Prague made that visible.

Later that afternoon, I was on stage with French Minister Delegate for European Affairs Benjamin Haddad, ECFR director Mark Leonard, and others for a panel on whether Europe’s institutions are actually built for the moment they keep claiming to be rising to. That conversation was rather less diplomatic. Haddad made the case for optimism, but tied it to delivery on the single market and the upcoming Multi-annual Financial Framework.

Others on the panel were less patient: the argument that Europe has spent years being passive where it needed to act and hyperactive where it needed to restrain itself landed with some force.

The question of whether Brussels can reform fast enough to matter before the moment passes did not receive a comfortable answer.

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The Parquet national financier confirmed that a formal judicial investigation will be opened against Édouard Philippe, his deputy, Stéphanie de Bazelaire, and the metropole’s director general, Claire-Sophie Tasias. The opening order was signed on 7 May, according to Le Monde’s reporting from yesterday.

An investigating magistrate, a juge d’instruction, now takes over a preliminary inquiry that has been running since 2023, with searches already carried out at the hôtel de ville and the metropolitan offices in April 2024.

The charges are familiar to anyone who has followed the file: misappropriation of public funds, favouritism, illegal taking of interest, concussion (the unlawful collection of sums by a public official), and moral harassment. Philippe’s office told AFP the candidate “takes note” of the procedure and will answer the magistrate’s questions “as he always has, with serenity.” His lawyer, Emmanuel Marsigny, declined to comment.

The Cité numérique file

The case turns on a multi-year service agreement signed on 30 July 2020. The communauté urbaine, then chaired by Philippe, contracted with the association LH French Tech for €2.154 million. The association was chaired pro bono by de Bazelaire, who also held an elected position as deputy mayor for digital affairs.

The arrangement: a public official negotiating a €2.154 million public subsidy with an association run by another elected member of her own majority. LH French Tech, created in July 2020, was the only candidate to respond to the call for expressions of interest that the metropole itself had launched four months earlier.

The whistleblower, who has used the pseudonym Judith throughout the file, was hired as deputy director general in September 2020, and by the time she started raising internal notes about LH French Tech in late 2021, €1.15 million had already been transferred.

The agreement was cut short in March 2022, the lease at the Cité numérique was terminated three months later, and the association was placed in liquidation in 2023. Her fixed-term contract was not renewed, and she filed a civil-party complaint in June 2025, which eventually led to the case being referred to an investigating magistrate.

She has since obtained whistleblower status from the Défenseur des droits, granted on 21 January 2025 after a two-year adversarial enquiry. The metropole is contesting that decision before the tribunal administratif de Paris, which her counsel describes as a textbook strategic lawsuit designed to silence her (procédure-bâillon, or SLAPP).

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We may finally be seeing the next step in the federalisation of the European Union.

Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Poland have spent the last few weeks locked in negotiations behind closed doors. The conclusions are about to land in Berlin, where German finance minister Lars Klingbeil is expected to read them out, marking the latest bid by Europe’s six largest economies to deliver what twenty-seven have failed to in over a decade: a real market for European capital.

The grouping calls itself the E6, and was launched in late January by Klingbeil and his French counterpart Roland Lescure. Its four declared priorities are the Savings and Investments Union, the international role of the euro (and the digital euro), joint defence procurement, and secure supply of critical raw materials.

The Diagnosis

European households are sitting on roughly €11 trillion in cash deposits, the largest pool of idle wealth in the developed world. The money earns close to nothing and finances close to nothing. Across the wider continent, private savings stand at €33 trillion. Every year, around €300 billion of European capital walks out of the door, the bulk of it heading to Wall Street. The US stock market accounts for around 54% of global market capitalisation. Large European markets sit at 15.7%.

The intellectual case has already been made. Twice. In April 2024, former Italian prime minister Enrico Letta published Much more than a market, a report commissioned by the Council. He diagnosed the problem in detail: twenty-seven national markets, twenty-seven sets of insolvency rules, twenty-seven tax regimes, and a population that quite reasonably parks its money in the bank rather than navigate that maze.

Five months later, Mario Draghi delivered The Future of European Competitiveness. He estimated that Europe needs an additional €750-€800 billion in annual investment to keep pace with the United States and China. Without it, he wrote, the bloc faces an “existential challenge”.

The Dark Trading Fight

The opening fight is technical and revealing. France and Spain have drafted a joint position paper, seen by POLITICO, targeting so-called ‘systematic internalisers’. These are the in-house trading platforms run by investment banks, most of them sitting in the City of London, on which firms like JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs handle European equity trades without showing the prices to the wider market. Paris and Madrid want sunlight. London’s banks have grown comfortable.

The Real Argument

The smaller capitals are nervous, and not without reason. Ireland and Portugal have warned that the E6 risks steamrolling the twenty-one other governments. Luxembourg, whose financial sector was built on regulatory arbitrage, has gone further. Its finance minister, Gilles Roth, has argued publicly that turning ESMA into a centralised supervisor would not help the EU reach its stated objectives. Those concerns are real. They are also parochial.

A continent that wants to negotiate with Washington and Beijing on equal terms cannot continue to run fifty-two separate financial supervisors. The numbers do not allow it. The geopolitics do not allow it. The Commission’s own proposal for an expanded ESMA, with an independent Executive Board overseeing the largest cross-border firms, has the European Central Bank’s full backing.

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Donald ‘#TACO’ Trump has once again chickened out, backing down from his threats to erase Iran’s 2500-year-old civilisation last night if the Iranian government didn’t capitulate.

Which of course, they didn’t, instead putting forward a ten-point peace plan to end the American-Iranian war that would amount to a complete and utter American capitulation, and would solidify Iran’s position as the regional hegemon.

So, realising that once again his geopolitical skills are non-existent and you can’t just be a bully to a foreign state in quite the same way you can be to young or vulnerable individuals, Donald Trump has chickened out, and here we are.

And as discussed in the Dépêche of the day, Donald Trump continues to reinforce the anti-American and illiberal order.

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With Hungary heading to the polls in six days, on Sunday, 12 April 2026, Viktor Orban is growing increasingly desperate as he faces an almost certain defeat to Péter Magyar after 16 years in power.

For Europeans, these elections offer the prospect of a Hungary and a European Union finally free of Orban’s disruption, and the end of the autocratic regime that has enriched him, his oligarch friends, and Vladimir Putin. It promises an end to the Hungarian veto, which has hamstrung the European Union and prevented us from advancing our project, becoming stronger, and improving the prosperity of our citizens.

And as has been underlining, this is one of the first post-truth elections, which is why we’re taking a look at Viktor Orban’s attempted false flag in Serbia.

After explosives were found on a pipeline carrying Russian gas from Serbia into Hungary, Orban and his allies aggressively pointed the finger at Ukraine and attempted to undermine Magyar’s campaign, before Serbian intelligence killed the conspiracy with one small comment.

And of course, as you can imagine, this is all because his party, Fidesz, is looking at the end of their dominance in Hungary.

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So, for more than a few years now, I’ve been receiving regular requests to do more audio-visual content, more short-form content, and more briefs explaining the day-to-day politics in Europe, the United States, and the wider world.

And so I’m happy to announce that a new project will be coming to The French Dispatch, the Dépêche, bringing you, my dear readers, more regular, rapid, raw briefs to keep you updated on what is happening in the world around us.

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👋Hey guys, Julien here. The French Dispatch is a reader-supported publication, and both our coverage of current affairs as well as our ability to bring you more news and information on the world around us is entirely funded by paid subscriptions and donations.

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So, ladies and gentlemen, Donald Trump’s war on Iran is continue to splutter, with America having failed to remove the Iranian regime, inflaming tensions across the Middle East, and actively creating a scenario that is sending oil and gas prices skyrocketing.

Not only this, but Donald Trump has managed to create a situation where he is now pushing to remove sanctions on Russia, and is actively berating European leaders for refusing his petulant demand for a third Gulf War.

So I sat down with from so that we could chat about France’s role in leading the European rejections of Trumps demands, how the Europeans are all positioning themselves ahead of the upcoming Council summit, and what we can expect.

We also talk about Macron’s strategic pivot as he reaches the end of his presidency, what we can expect from America, and why Donald Trump has genuinely pushed his so-called allies too far.

Let us know what you think, and forgive our being sabotaged by the ’s recording studio, which has wrought untold havoc on our geopolitical opinions and caused a small delay in the audio.

And if you want to check out my previous discussion following the opening salvo of the American-Iranian war, check out my video with from

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