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This week

• 🚓British far-right arrested for harassing migrants

• 📉Fitch keeps A+ rating but loses its patience

🚓British far-right arrested for harassing migrants

Right, to start the week off: this Thursday, the British far-right were engaged in their typically foolish shenanigans, going to a foreign country and harassing migrants while livestreaming it for the world to see. This led to French police arresting five British men near Dunkirk for what the Nord prefecture describes as intimidation of migrants on the coast.

The officers also found, comme par hasard, four tear gas canisters on the group.

Authorities stated that the far-right militants were arrested for “participating in a group formed to prepare violence against people”, as well as for carrying category D weapons without a legitimate reason, and once released from police custody, they are expected to go into administrative detention pending expulsion from French territory.

The five far-right militants had been touring the coast in a minibus they had christened “the battle bus”, which tells you roughly not only what their plans were, but also how seriously they took the French criminal code.

Paris has spent a shockingly long period of time dealing with violent far-right British visitors across 2026. In mid-January the interior ministry banned ten members of the far-right ‘Raise the Colours’ collective from French territory over the destruction of small boats on the beaches of Nord and Pas-de-Calais, with Laurent Nuñez declaring “our rule of law is non-negotiable”.

The movement was started in the summer of 2025 by Ryan Bridge, a far-right activist from Birmingham, as a campaign to put English flags on lamp posts across the UK, usually accompanied by random clashes with people who told them to stop. Unsurprisingly, it took less than six months to progress from bunting to slashing dinghies in another country they didn’t live in.

A week after the bans, the Nord and Pas-de-Calais prefects banned gatherings across Dunkirk, Calais, Boulogne-sur-Mer, Montreuil-sur-Mer and Lille to head off Operation Overlord, a stop-the-boats mobilisation fronted by Daniel Thomas, once Tommy Robinson’s bodyguard, and named after the Normandy landings with all of the subtlety of a nuclear bomb.

Two men were arrested near Calais that weekend while filming themselves on a beach, and France later sent them home. French prosecutors had already opened an inquiry into aggravated violence against migrants at Grand-Fort-Philippe in September 2025.

The common thread is their obsession with publicising their foolishness.

Each far-right group has gone the extra mile to broadcast its outings live to a British audience that will most likely never set foot in Gravelines, with French sand serving as a film set for content made for England. They even go as far as publicising outright crimes, with aid workers having described supporters releasing dogs on migrants and volunteers, and reports of violence are unsurprisingly not rare in these events.

Luckily, Thursday’s five were picked up mid-broadcast, which at least spared investigators some legwork, despite complaints that they were arrested regardless of their “press badges.”

And as often seems to be the case in these situations, the timing is odd if stopping crossings is the stated goal.

Just over 21,000 people have reached England by small boat so far this year, according to Home Office data, a steep fall from the same period in 2025, a year that ended with around 41,500 arrivals. Weather still decides more than any patrol does: over 930 people crossed on Thursday and Friday alone, and AFP counts at least 24 deaths at sea since January.

What has actually collapsed is the diplomatic framework: the one-in, one-out returns pilot was scrapped on 1 October after Paris declined to renew it and pushed for an EU-wide arrangement instead. Nuñez told deputies it had sent 951 people back to France against 935 admitted to Britain, and Shabana Mahmood conceded that each return cost about £56,000, with scaling up proving “operationally difficult” for a variety of reasons.

Andy Burnham’s government now has no bilateral returns mechanism with France, and Reform UK keeps harvesting the issue regardless of what the numbers do.

Until the end of 2020, a British national on a French beach was an EU citizen, and expelling him meant clearing the bar set by the free movement directive: personal conduct posing a genuine, present and sufficiently serious threat, weighed for proportionality and open to challenge on exactly that ground.

However, post-Brexit, a Briton with no residence rights under the Withdrawal Agreement is a third-country national, and the French toolkit for third-country nationals is administrative and fast. The ten January bans required no conviction, and Thursday’s five may well be back in Kent before any judge rules on the substance of their case. This means Paris can display firmness towards far-right British agitators at zero diplomatic cost, a month after refusing London the returns deal it wanted, and many would argue it desperately needed, and come out on top.

Taking back control, it turns out, works in both directions; and as the situation has continued, so shall it most probably persist:

In January the two men arrested near Calais were held for incitement to hatred, a speech offence built around what they broadcast very publicly over the internet. Ten months later, the five at Dunkirk face accusations of preparing violence in a group and carrying weapons, which places the movement’s conduct in a completely different legal category altogether.

That trajectory matters more for Paris than for London, which will likely divert responsibility away from itself. French police on the Opal Coast already work under a British-funded mandate to stop departures, and they are now also absorbing the cost of British domestic politics arriving by ‘battlebus’ and armed with weapons, with no returns deal left to bargain over.

When the two governments next sit down to negotiate coastal funding, we should expect the French side to put the vigilantes on the bill, and for the British government to be put in the uncomfortable position of apologising and making amends as Brexit continues to make Britain “great”.

📉Fitch keeps A+ rating but loses its patience

Next up, the public finances, which spent the week doing what they do best: getting worse. On Friday evening Fitch held France’s sovereign rating at A+ but moved the outlook from stable to negative, rating-agency shorthand for a next move more likely to be down than up.

What made this one notable is that Fitch didn’t even wait for its own calendar. EU rules oblige agencies to publish sovereign reviews on a pre-announced schedule, and Fitch had to invoke the exemption for a material change in creditworthiness to justify stepping outside it. In August it had kept the outlook stable and still described the French economy as resilient. Two months later it found weaker growth, higher borrowing costs and a wider deficit, all piling onto debt dynamics it already considered weak.

The numbers make for grim reading. Fitch now sees debt climbing from 115.7% of GDP in 2025 to around 124% in 2028, roughly double the median for A-rated sovereigns, and reckons the cumulative adjustment needed to stabilise it has grown from 3% of GDP to 3.5% over a single summer. The government, for its part, has already conceded a 2026 deficit of 5.4% against its 5% target.

The timing was, comme d’habitude, impeccable. That same morning INSEE’s first estimate showed GDP shrinking by 0.1% in the third quarter, after a flat second quarter and a contraction in the first, and Roland Lescure admitted that “the French economy is at a standstill”.

Just three weeks ago, the Banque de France had pencilled in a growth rate of 0.1% for the quarter. France has dodged a technical recession purely because the second quarter came in at zero, a margin INSEE’s downward revisions have been shaving all year. October inflation, for good measure, hit 3.4%, its highest since late 2023.

Bond markets, naturally, got there first. The ten-year OAT (Fungible Treasury Bond) crossed 5% on 21 October, up from 4.1% in Fitch’s August review, and the spread over German Bunds briefly touched 174 basis points. Investors are now demanding a higher return to hold French debt than Italian debt, with the gap reaching a record 30 basis points earlier this month.

To put this in context, in July 2012 during the Eurozone Crisis, Italy was paying over 400 points more than France, and anyone who predicted this reversal at the time would have been politely shown the door.

To add to the fun news, Fitch expects interest payments to rise from 2.5% of GDP in 2025 to 3.3% in 2028, versus a peer median of 1.5%, money that goes to bondholders before a single euro reaches a hospital or a lycée.

Moody’s spared France a week earlier, holding it at Aa3 with a negative outlook instead of cutting, though it warned that fragmentation could “continue to impair the functioning of the country’s legislative institutions”.

Which brings us to the budget.

Left untouched, the government’s own late-September projection put the 2027 deficit at 6.4% of GDP. The draft aims to drag that down to 5% through a €54 billion effort, €43 billion of it in new measures. Fitch calls the plan ambitious, then forecasts 5.5% anyway, citing weaker growth and the concessions it fully expects the Assemblée to extract along the way.

As for getting it through Parliament, Sébastien Lecornu told Le Figaro that “at the end, there will be a vote”, a line he also used last year before forcing the 2026 budget through with three uses of 49.3 that stretched into February. The Parti Socialiste, whose restraint saved him then in exchange for suspending the pension reform, sound far less obliging with the presidential election six months away and a victory to fight for against not only Marine Le Pen, but far-left firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

One executive source was rather more candid about the government’s thinking: “nobody gives a damn about the parliamentary debates”.

Which is a little bit harsh, but to be entirely honest, mostly accurate. Fitch expects the budget to pass “by constitutional mechanisms”, which is rating-agency-ese for article 49.3 or ordinances, and has priced that in without much fuss. What actually worries the agency is what comes after.

The committee wrote that the emerging presidential debate has done nothing to strengthen its confidence in durable deficit reduction, and it pencils in parliamentary elections as likely on top of the presidential one, so it is already marking manifestos that barely exist.

It also ranks France below the 50th percentile on the World Bank’s political stability indicator, which is not a great look for a country supposed to be a primary driver of the European Union.

The rating’s own arithmetic shows how little cushion is left: Fitch’s model produces A+ by itself; the committee then deducts a notch for debt and the political environment, and adds one back because France came through the pandemic without lasting damage.

Take away a Covid-era adjustment from 2020 and France is an A credit on Fitch’s own scorecard, which means that whoever moves into the Élysée next May inherits a very thin margin, interest costs at more than double the peer median, and a Fitch review due by the end of February that will treat every campaign promise as a line in the debt model.

The candidates have only a few months to get their sums straight, and on current evidence, with Mélenchon calling for us to ignore debt and Le Pen working to upend the budget and abandon our allies, we’re in trouble.

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This week

• 📢Unions keep the peace during second protests

• 🏛️Racist Trappes gunman says he was avenging the looted shops

📢Unions keep the peace during second protests

So, to focus on the big story of the week: following the carnage that broke out last week across France, a second weekend of protests took place without a repeat of the looting and violence that shocked just about everyone. Thanks to the government's insistence that only unions organise protests, and the very strong security presence, the 24 October protests were a success.

The method was simple enough. After addressing the nation in front of 16.7 million viewers last Sunday, Macron refused Laurent Nuñez’s offer to resign and told him to come up with a new strategy for dealing with rioters.

What emerged was a two-track approach: union-led marches went ahead, while non-union demonstrations were explicitly banned across six cities. Around 70,000 police and gendarmes, 20% more than last week, were deployed, alongside soldiers from the Sentinelle mission.

The high-level of arrests linked to the 17 October riots may have also helped more than a little bit.

On Saturday evening Nuñez could say that “the marches went well”, even as he complained of extremely high levels of violence against officers on the fringes of the protests. Close to 1,000 people were arrested nationwide, 142 of them in Paris, which was thankfully a fraction of the previous weekend’s tally.

The calm came at some cost to the movement, however, with the ministry counting 410,000 marchers, 110,000 in Paris. As is always the case with protests, the CGT Union disagreed with the government's claims and said it was actually 800,000 and 250,000. A week earlier the ministry’s own count was 550,000, with the same 110,000 in Paris, so on that metric the official turnout fell by about a quarter nationally and by nearly a third outside the capital.

Le Monde called it a slight drop, which is generous.

Leaning on the unions didn't stop the state from making their jobs harder, however.

On Thursday, the Île-de-France intersyndicale negotiated and signed a Bastille-Nation route with the Préfecture de police; on Friday afternoon, the Préfecture banned it and moved the march to a 5.4 km stretch of the maréchaux between Porte d’Italie and Porte de Vincennes, towards the city’s edge.

The student union Fage warned the switch “weakens the safety conditions of the demonstration”, and the tribunal administratif rejected the unions’ challenge on Saturday morning. The CGT’s Karl Ghazi told Le Monde that the Préfecture had “clearly decided to play up the tension”, but the stewards marched anyway and kept the protest calm and orderly.

Things were fairly similar in Marseille, where an agreed route steered clear of the shopping streets looted a week earlier, and the march ran for three hours without incident. Trouble began to flare only after the union stewards left. In Lyon, where the préfecture banned the march outright, around ten thousand people spent the afternoon being dispersed with tear gas for ignoring the prefectural order.

As I discussed with several news outlets during the week, the protests themselves have also morphed recently:

The movement grew out of lycéen anger over school funding and diesel at a record €2.39 a litre in late September, with the cost of living crisis having been a major problem for years now due to COVID, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Donald Trump’s idiotic war against Iran.

Yet Le Monde’s reporters in Paris heard little about fuel and a lot about the police and Emmanuel Macron, making this a true Gilets Jaunes protest.

Unfortunately for everyone, the government is doing its best to keep that vibe shift going: In a circulaire to prosecutors on Thursday, justice minister Gérald Darmanin asked them to seek deprivation of civic rights, the vote included, alongside protest and social media bans, wherever an offence reveals “a break with the republican pact”.

The penalty already exists under article 131-26 of the penal code, capped at five years for a délit, but framing it in such an elastic phrase is a political choice.

Tensions will likely continue, with the CFDT, CGT, FO, Unsa and FSU calling for a general strike on 5 November against €54 billion in planned budget cuts, and gilets jaunes on the Paris metro already promising an “acte III” for 31 October.

Saturday’s calm carries a bill the government has not yet read. By channelling protest through the unions, ministers have made the intersyndicale the guarantor of public order, and the unions know it.

The CFDT’s Raphaël Breton is already treating 5 November as the next stage, and the leverage seems entirely on his side: if Beauvau wants another peaceful day, it needs the stewards more than the stewards need Beauvau.

🏛️Racist Trappes gunman says he was avenging the looted shops

As France braced for a second weekend of protests, the week's darkest story happened Friday morning in the Yvelines. A man drove through Trappes and neighbouring La Verrière firing a submachine gun out of his car at people who weren’t white, killing one man and wounding five others, including a 12-year-old girl.

What ties this attack to everything else going on in France right now is the motive. According to Le Monde, Kévin T. told the first officers on the scene that he had “avenged the shopkeepers” looted on 17 October by targeting Black and Arab citizens. His shots, investigators say, were aimed exclusively at non-white passers-by.

Macron went to Trappes on Friday evening and didn’t mince his words, calling it a turning point and “a planned terrorist act to kill our compatriots, our children” because of their skin colour or religion. Trappes mayor Ali Rabeh (Génération.s) called it “objectively an attack, with a racist connotation, probably Islamophobic”.

The condemnations were unanimous on paper, from Lecornu to Mélenchon to Bardella, even if the tone was decidedly uneven: The left went straight for the very clear racism of the situation, while the right’s first reactions were noticeably more cautious, with Marine Le Pen initially saying the motives still had to be established. Only once the PNAT’s line was clear did she describe a terrorist act “aggravated by the abject motive of racism”.

In Trappes itself, the mood was anger more than shock. Around 200 people gathered on Saturday near the square where Pengo Bossio Wangi was shot, under a banner bearing his face and the words “Les mots tuent” (“words kill”). Rabeh, speaking at a protest against the RN’s congress in Orléans, said those who spread racist rhetoric bear part of the responsibility for having armed the gunman ideologically.

The family’s lawyer, Yassine Bouzrou, has asked investigators to map out exactly how Kévin T. was radicalised and what he was reading.

However, Macron’s “turning point” framing deserves a closer look. His claim that this is the first planned terrorist act targeting people for their skin colour or religion is simply not true. In May 2025, Hichem Miraoui, a Tunisian, was shot dead by his neighbour in Puget-sur-Argens, and the PNAT took that case too: its first homicide involving a far-right suspect, after 15 non-lethal cases since 2019. That suspect also ended up denying any racist motive once in custody.

The government spent last week insisting, through Nuñez, that the 17 October violence was the work of ultragauche militants. Kévin T. read the same images through the lens of race and the banlieues, and that reading didn't come out of nowhere: Trappes has served for over a decade as the right's shorthand for everything said to be wrong with the quartiers.

One of the major risks now is that we see an emulation of the discourse we see in the United States, with the white terrorist being positioned as an “isolated, unstable man”, a frame that stands in stark contrast to the way Black and Arab terrorists are framed, and the case is rapidly shifted from terrorism to mental illness, effectively closing the question of what fed his interpretation of 17 October.

And the worst part of this is that it feeds into the ongoing split between the far-right and far-left six months out from a presidential election, with the parties most exposed to the “words kill” charge having every incentive to let things keep spinning out of control to feed their narratives.

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Raphaël Glucksmann will be the social-democratic candidate for the 2027 presidential election following his crushing victory in the left-wing primary today with 66.13% of valid votes.

The Place publique MEP won 79,613 votes, more than four times the tally of Olivier Faure, first secretary of the Socialist Party, who came second on 14.48%. Ségolène Royal finished third on 7.62%, ahead of Emmanuel Maurel (5.92%) and Jérôme Guedj (5.83%), and no second round will be needed.

A condemnation of the Nouveau Front Populaire

The campaign focused on Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who spent Sunday at a rally in Clermont-Ferrand. Glucksmann, with Guedj alongside him, accused Faure of drifting back towards La France insoumise, as Faure had done with the Nupes in 2022 and the Nouveau Front populaire in 2024.

Olivier Faure, for his part, said Glucksmann kept handing Mélenchon victory in absentia, and repeatedly revived the charge of macronisme against the MEP, pointing to the former Macron allies around him.

The two candidates who campaigned on a clean break with LFI took close to 72% between them, while the driving force behind both alliances finished below 15%. Guedj drew the same conclusion within minutes of the result, hailing a clean and decisive win that showed left-wing voters wanted no alliance with LFI.

That verdict needs a caveat about who delivered it. Socialist members voted by 55% in early July for a closed primary limited to the PS and allied organisations such as Place publique, rejecting Faure’s plan for an open vote among all left-wing sympathisers. Glucksmann had refused for months to enter any primary, and only declared in August, once the format suited him.

Glucksmann’s party, Place publique, nearly tripled its membership ahead of the vote, and registrations passed 140,000 against a forecast of 90,000. Part of the electorate that rejected Faure’s strategy was recruited for the purpose, so Sunday’s result measures the balance of the social-democratic camp more than the mood of PS members.

Militant landslides travel badly

Big wins in Socialist nomination contests have not translated into a strong national performance in the PS’s recent history.

Benoît Hamon won the open primary in January 2017 with nearly 59% in the run-off against Manuel Valls, in front of up to two million voters, and then collapsed to 6.36% in the first round that April as Valls and much of the party’s right wing drifted towards Emmanuel Macron.

Anne Hidalgo took more than 72% of the PS members’ vote in October 2021 while polling between 4% and 7% nationally, and she delivered the worst presidential result in the Parti socialiste’s history, with 1.75% the following April.

Ségolène Royal, unaffectionately nicknamed “tata yoyo” by militants for her conspiratorial and hostile behaviour towards just about anyone and everything, won the 2006 members’ ballot with 60.7% in a single round before losing to Nicolas Sarkozy in the second round of the 2007 election.

Glucksmann starts from a stronger position than Hidalgo did, though hardly a commanding one: the latest Ifop poll, published on 30 September, had him fourth in the first round. He appears to know it, writing on Twitter that “this first place gives me no rights. Nothing is won.” The scale of the exercise points the same way: the open primaries that chose François Hollande in 2011 and Benoît Hamon in 2017 drew between 2.6 and 2.8 million and between 1.6 and 2 million voters respectively.

Political scientist Frédéric Sawicki had warned that a primary only works if the losers respect the result, citing Manuel Valls’s refusal to back Hamon in 2017, with a hint between the lines that this may have helped Emmanuel Macron to win.

However, most of Sunday’s losers settled that question quickly. Royal said she was very disappointed but promised to work for unity on the left with everything she had, and Maurel said the size of the win placed obligations on Glucksmann and on the rest of them collectively. Faure had not reacted publicly by the time this article was published. Former President François Hollande, who refused to stand and whose potential candidacy has been a spectre over the left, has been positioning himself since the summer to move if Glucksmann slides in the polls, and fourth place nationally gives him reason to keep that door open.

Royal also named a deeper problem: for the first time since the party was founded, she said, there is “no PS candidate as such”.

Glucksmann needs the Socialist Party to run his campaign, but the party still answers to Faure, who has now lost two votes on its direction in three months, first to his own members and then to a candidate from outside the party.

On the eve of the vote, Faure warned that a Glucksmann victory would mean the “effacement” of the PS from the presidential contest, perhaps confusing himself with the party. He must now put it at the service of the man he said would write it out of that contest.

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This week

• 🌹French left votes in primary first round

• 🌿Mélenchon visits Gergovia

• 🧾 Bardella’s poor spelling adds to evidence

🌹French left votes in primary first round

Kicking off the week with what could be a consequential event for the 2027 Presidential Elections: the French left are going to the polls today to vote on their candidate for the Elysée.

And despite the fact that, in last week’s Dispatch, we saw an Elabe poll showing that barely a quarter of the country was following the left Primary, people clearly were paying attention, and not just militants.

To begin with, the electronic ballot run by the Parti Socialiste (PS), Place Publique (PP) and the Gauche Républicaine et Socialiste (GRS) came under an aggressive cyberattack the moment it opened at 08h00 on Friday, with bots swarming the e-voting platform with fake simultaneous connections until legitimate voters could barely get through.

The attack was so successful that, by 19h00, only 20,000 of the 140,000 registered had managed to cast a ballot, so the committee, chaired by Patrick Mennucci, pushed the closing of the first round of voting from 20h00 on Saturday to 18h00 Sunday, while the three parties took the matter to court and Sébastien Lecornu reportedly called in ANSSI, the French cybersecurity agency.

Mennucci’s account of events grew steadily more dramatic as the weekend went on and details became more concrete: On Friday evening, he told AFP that everything was back in order, but by Sunday he was telling La Tribune Dimanche that e-votez, which he described as the leading provider in France, had never faced an offensive on this scale, and that this was “an attack on French democracy” reaching well beyond a Socialist primary.

Considering how vocal Raphael Glucksmann has been about supporting Ukraine, I’m sure we can all guess who was behind this.

In the same interview, Mennucci assured readers that no bot had managed to vote and that the whole episode was not a failure, two reassurances organisers tend to offer only after people start asking some harder questions.

Thankfully, once the issues were resolved, voter turnout recovered, and by 14h00 on Saturday 91,470 people had voted; by 08h00 on Sunday, the organisers counted 110,709.

Close to 80% of all the registered voters, with ten hours left to vote, from an electorate that had already comfortably exceeded the 90,000 registrants originally forecast. Whatever the rest of the country thinks, or whatever the polls have shown us, the faithful showed up.

MEP Raphaël Glucksmann (Place Publique) goes in as the favourite with polling numbers that have consistently put him in competition with Attal (REN) and Mélenchon (LFI). The PS First Secretary Olivier Faure is his main challenger, with Ségolène Royal, Jérôme Guedj and Emmanuel Maurel filling out the rest of the field.

Results are due this evening, with a run-off on 16 and 17 October if nobody clears 50%.

The turnout figure flatters the exercise, mind you, because the register was kept small on purpose. Anyone outside the three organising parties had to sign up on a platform called Choisir2027 and pay €15 for the privilege. The fee, cut to €10 for those on low incomes, has been criticised for tilting the electorate towards Glucksmann’s ‘better-off’ supporters.

Above all else, it was a curious entry price for a camp that spends most of its time talking about the cost of living and is battling La France Insoumise and the far-left for the working-class vote.

The open primary that picked François Hollande in 2011 drew between 2.6 and 2.8 million voters at €1 a head, and even the 2017 edition that handed the nomination to Benoît Hamon managed around 1.6 million. This year’s entire register is roughly 5% of the 2011 turnout, and if tonight’s margin is tight, the runner-up already has a ready-made grievance about a ballot under attack from its first minute.

But there are also strong reasons for concern with how the left-wing primary appears to show a still-fragile PS that may struggle to fight Mélenchon.

The stakes tonight go well beyond Solférino, and whoever wins inherits the job of overtaking Jean-Luc Mélenchon as the left’s leading candidate, with some polls showing it to be a steep climb: Cluster 17’s mid-September survey for Politico had Mélenchon on 19%, level with Édouard Philippe, with Glucksmann on 12 to 14% and Marine Le Pen far ahead on 30 to 31%.

A Glucksmann win would put the centre-left’s best-polling figure at the head of the PS machine and its money, while an upset by Faure would hand the nomination to the party apparatus over the man pollsters have been testing all year, and Mélenchon’s case for the useful vote on the left would more or less write itself.

Plus, we’d likely see another 5 years of a very submissive PS.

Fun fact of the day: today is also the day Marine Tondelier’s Ecologists and François Ruffin’s Debout! hold their own unitary primary between the two politicians, so by Monday morning the non-Mélenchon left will have two freshly anointed candidates and no mechanism for choosing between them aside from common sense.

What we do know is that, since Elabe found last week that 73% of PS-PP sympathisants reject any legislative alliance with LFI, whatever deal emerges will be struck without Mélenchon, which is precisely how he likes it.

🌿Mélenchon visits Gergovia

Speaking of the devil: while the centre-left was busy fending off bots, Jean-Luc Mélenchon (LFI) spent his Saturday on a history field trip.

Mélenchon made his third pilgrimage to the plateau of Gergovia, 750 metres up in the Puy-de-Dôme, where the Gauls handed Julius Caesar his first military defeat in 52 BC. The point of the visit was to tie the war of movement, the tactic Caesar was famous for, to his own leadership in turning La France Insoumise into one of the most disruptive forces in French politics.

Oddly enough, for a man standing on the site of a great Gaulish victory, he sided with the Romans, telling museum staff he admires them more as soldiers because the Gauls were too disorderly for his taste. In short, Mélenchon wants a party that never stands still and constantly pushes toward the next crisis or event it can exploit.

We’ve seen this in recent weeks, first with his push to cancel part of the French debt and pick a fight with our European partners, and then with the lycée blockades.

To begin with, cancelling French debt is one of his flagship plans, first aired in late June: take the 18% of French debt held by the Banque de France and throw it on the fire, on the incredible assumption that nobody would ever notice it was gone. When he later switched to asking the European Central Bank (ECB) to put Covid-era debt in the freezer, economist Xavier Ragot pointed out that this would run straight into the EU treaties guaranteeing the bank’s independence, a detail LFI seems content to leave for later.

Naturally, it also fits the line Mélenchon has held through his last two presidential campaigns: hostile to the EU treaties, and to NATO on top of that.

Somewhere in Frankfurt, someone is presumably still laughing while the Euronext president tries to avoid a heart attack: “He’s either mistaken if he doesn’t know how it works, or he’s lying if he does.”

The lycéens, meanwhile, are the high-school blockades that Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu’s office blames on LFI and its far-left proxies, accusations that came after 1,747 arrests on Friday 2 October alone and more than 5,000 over the week. LFI coordinator Manuel Bompard fired back that Matignon was sliding into conspiracy theories and insisted LFI had nothing to do with it, even though Mélenchon has made little effort to hide his enthusiasm for the movement.

Both are textbook examples of Mélenchon’s long-term strategy: highly politicised situations where dissent spills over into confrontation with state institutions, in this case blockades marred by violence and thousands of arrests.

And it is the strategy working exactly as designed, with LFI dragging the agenda wherever it likes and everyone else chasing after it and trying to repair the structural damage left behind.

But has his strategy actually paid off?

His 19% in the Cluster 17 poll above puts him close to his 2022 score, when 21.95% left him barely more than a point short of the run-off. His route to the second round depends on the rest of the left staying fragmented enough for him to remain the only credible option, and on his ability to keep it that way.

As long as the debt and the lycéens dominate the headlines (which, to be clear, they likely will not), Glucksmann, Faure and Tondelier have to spend their time reacting to him instead of setting their own terms, which is exactly the political battle he prefers.

Even if these rows fade, Mélenchon will keep pushing for more protests as long as he finds them useful. He has already described the 6 October mobilisation as a starting point for the lycée movement, and the 2027 budget’s passage through Parliament this autumn hands him a running platform for the debt plan and for the “abandonment of education and students”.

And once tonight’s result is in, LFI will also have a named rival to attack.

🧾 Bardella’s poor spelling adds to evidence

Moving on to the other extreme: Last week, we left Jordan Bardella (RN) calling Mediapart’s evidence of his antisemitism crude forgeries, and this week he stopped answering Mediapart completely and is now hiding behind his lawyer.

And it’s not because he’s doing so well.

On Friday, Mediapart revealed that at 22h52 on 12 September 2013, the eve of Bardella’s 18th birthday, the Messenger account attributed to Bardella told its correspondent it had just discovered online that Emmanuel Macron, then deputy secretary-general at the Élysée, had worked for the Rothschild bank.

The fact itself was true and had been public for a year, but the Rothschild name has long been a staple of antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish control of finance, and the message sits in the very conversation that contains the antisemitic remarks. Two minutes earlier, Bardella’s own Twitter account posted the same scoop, and both messages share the same spelling mistake: the first h is missing from Rothschild.

Ironically, while RN figures had argued that the spelling was so dreadfully bad that the messages could not possibly be his, these mistakes have now become some of the best evidence that these messages are his.

Before Bardella and Co could even think of fighting back, Le Canard enchaîné piled in. On Tuesday, Bardella told journalists he gave up Facebook a long time ago, but according to the Canard, he recently went out of his way to clean out a second account, deleting all the messages that had still been there on 28 September, when Mediapart’s first story ran.

So, on top of all of the above, Bardella seems to have deleted every single message on this second account by 2 October, and when pressed for a reply, the RN simply insisted, “Jordan Bardella has never logged into any Facebook account”.

Someone should probably show the RN’s press office a recording of Tuesday’s press conference.

The worst part is that all Bardella is doing is creating more reasons for more information to come out. His defamation complaint may yet backfire, since an investigating judge can requisition Meta and demand they establish who was behind the account. On top of all of this, and back to the politics of it all, the centre-right voters that the RN desperately needs in a second round are watching their leaders split: Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin accused Bardella of lying shamelessly, while Bruno Retailleau (LR) said he would wait for the courts.

But for now, the RN militants seem only interested in heading to Orléans for the RN congress on 24 and 25 October, where Bardella is the only candidate for re-election. Expect a coronation staged as an act of defiance, and keep an eye on the blank vote.

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This week

• 📊The Glucksmann lead primary France forgot

• 👎Bardella falls into trap in antisemitism investigation

• 🇪🇸Macron’s royal banquet ambushed by Senate

📊The Glucksmann lead primary France forgot

Starting the week off with a fascinating poll: it seems people are not really paying attention to the left-wing primary

With five days to go until the PS, Place publique, and the ‘Gauche républicaine et socialiste open their electronic ballot’, Elabe has checked whether anyone outside the party has tuned in. The results aren’t great.

Turns out, only 25% of French adults say they are following the primaire, compared with 42% at the same point in the 2017 Socialist primary and 36% for the right’s contest in 2016.

The 2017 benchmark offers little comfort for anyone, given that the race that drew more interest went on to hand Benoît Hamon the PS's presidential candidacy, resulting in a calamitous 6.4% in the presidential first round. Five candidates are on the ballot (Raphaël Glucksmann, Olivier Faure, Ségolène Royal, Jérôme Guedj and Emmanuel Maurel), with a first round on 9 and 10 October and a run-off on 16 and 17 October.

Inside the party, the mood is lukewarm. 56% of PS-PP sympathisants say they are interested, but only 11% say they are very interested, and they split 49% to 50% on whether their own nominee can reach the presidential run-off, with a mere 8% answering “certainly”. The wider electorate is blunter: 72% expect the winner to fall in the first round.

The programme is the easy part. Wage indexation and a windfall tax on oil majors both score 95% among PS-PP sympathisants, and cutting VAT on electricity to 5.5% wins 89% of the country, since nobody in polling history has lost votes promising cheaper electricity.

The fault lines show up when you put PS-PP voters beside LFI ones. Public debt ranks second among PS-PP priorities at 33%, ahead of climate, while only 9% of LFI sympathisants mention it. A return to retirement at 62 draws 95% of LFI sympathisants and a rather less militant 64% on the PS-PP side. Mass regularisation of undocumented workers scrapes 56% among PS-PP sympathisants and 40% nationally, which tells you why no front-runner is leading with it.

Then comes the question that has hung over every Socialist dinner since the NUPES was stitched together in 2022: 73% of PS-PP sympathisants oppose a legislative alliance with LFI, 44% of them strongly, while 92% of LFI sympathisants want one. Across the whole left, 60% are in favour. The candidates themselves, in this primary, disagree on the potential alliance, so the primary result will double as a referendum on Jean-Luc Mélenchon held without his voters.

PS-PP sympathisants are split 49% apiece on whether the exercise will unite or fracture the centre-left, and 67% of the public expect fracture. The Ecologists and Debout! are holding their own unitary primary on 11 October without the PS, with pro-Melenchon Marine Tondelier (EELV) and François Ruffin (former LFI) leading them.

When looking at age brackets, the interest in the primary peaks among 18- 24-year-olds (41%), who appear to be the most hopeful and are the most confident the nominee makes the run-off (48%) and the least hostile to LFI (48% favourable, against 13% of over-65s). The vote, however, is open only to members of the three organising parties or to those paying €10 or €15 online, an electorate that looks a good deal more like the retirees than the students.

The most revealing number sits deep in the cross-tabs: Renaissance sympathisants (38%) are more interested in this primaire than Ecologist ones (33%). Read alongside the rest, the poll describes a centre-left electorate whose instincts sit closer to the central bloc than to the Mélenchon-aligned far-left.

It’s clear that PS-PP sympathisants reject an LFI pact at almost exactly the national rate (73% against 74%), back parliamentary planning of immigration at 82% where LFI sympathisants manage 62%, and worry about debt like people who have read a Cour des comptes report.

With Emmanuel Macron unable to run, the nominee’s realistic route to the second round runs through the social-liberal wing of the Macronists, who want to continue their fight, rather than through Mélenchon’s voters.

Whether a members-only vote produces a candidate able to walk that route is what we will learn in the weeks to come but signs do point preliminarily to a more-likely-than-not Glucksmann victory, and a hard campaign after that.

👎Bardella falls into trap in antisemitism investigation

Moving on to the next story, which will undoubtedly shock many people: Mediapart has released proof of fairly severe antisemitism within the far-right Rassemblement National.

And it was Le Pen protegé Jordan Bardella!

On Monday 28 September, Mediapart published what it says are private conversations from 2013 in which a 17-year-old Jordan Bardella, then a Front National youth activist in Seine-Saint-Denis looking to move up the ranks, repeatedly recycled the oldest antisemitic tropes, from Jewish control of the banks to Zionism and high finance as a single conspiracy, alongside admiring words for the work of Alain Soral and Dieudonné.

The president of a party that now bills itself as the “shield of the Jews” dismissed the material as crude forgeries and a dirty-tricks operation, while Marine Le Pen, ambushed by questions at a building trade fair, cut short her press conference and pronounced the story too mad to be anything but a fake, despite conceding that she did not actually know what it contained.

This was also accompanied by many, many claims that Bardella would never say anything antisemitic, that the RN was not antisemitic, that, in fact, it was the far-left who were the problem, not Bardella and co, and that all the claims were fake and Bardella would sue everyone for defamation because it was all fake.

Then, after several days of far-right defensive circus, Mediapart dropped its proof and work.

On Thursday, it explained that the Messenger conversations came from two completely unconnected sources who had the same conversations, and that one participant had obtained the full extraction from Meta under the GDPR before having it certified by a bailiff.

The export dates the exchange, showing it had not been altered afterwards, and clearly lists the account holder as Jordan Bardella, with biographical details scattered through it lining up well with anecdotes that Bardella himself had recounted in his 2024 autobiography. A further set of emails, one sent from an address traced to a 2012 FN Youth membership file, points to a sustained interest in Soral and his writings between 2012 and 2014.

Bardella’s answer was to call the evidence “crude montages” and add a forgery complaint to the defamation complaint that the Paris prosecutor has confirmed has been filed. Bardella has, funnily enough, chosen the ‘constitution de partie civile’ route for his complaint, which may be due to the fact that it has zero realistic chance of reaching a judgment before the 2027 presidential election and is therefore ideally suited to a campaign.

So, we have Bardella pretending forgery on one hand, and Marine Le Pen pretending she wasn’t convicted on the other, because her appeal means she doesn’t have to wear an electronic bracelet yet.

As mentioned earlier, the Rassemblement National took a hard line, and it held steady throughout the week, even as the ammunition used to defend Bardella grew increasingly strange.

• Le Pen told her MPs that Mediapart had better “put on its Kevlar suit”, which many took as a very odd threat to the publication.

• Frédéric Falcon, who drafts the RN’s housing programme, called Mediapart a “Nazi” site, which is odd for a party that was founded by literal nazis

• Guillaume Bigot argued that the Mossad would surely have spotted any antisemitism before Israel welcomed Bardella on an official visit.

• An anonymous RN deputy went even further than all of this, asking “who had never carved a swastika into a school desk with a compass” to throw the first stone, a line that defends the content of the messages and quietly abandons any pretence of forgery

• Bardella’s own remarks on X after all of this fell in the same stream of thought, claiming that at 17 he was starting his life rather than doing politics

And these people want to run the French republic.

Thankfully, outside of the far-right bunker, everybody had a far more normal and less extremist position: Édouard Philippe judged it as “almost established” that Bardella had written the antisemitic messages, and Olivier Faure declared that Bardella could no longer aspire to reach Matignon and become Prime Minister.

President Emmanuel Macron, speaking from a state visit to Madrid on Wednesday, called the reported remarks "extremely serious and unacceptable" and took a swipe at Le Pen's Kevlar threat, prompting Bardella to retort that he had marched against antisemitism in Paris after 7 October 2023 while the President had stayed at home, a fair hit on November 2023 that does nothing to explain 2013.

However, outside the political class, the French appear less exercised: a YouGov poll found that 60% consider the remarks serious, yet only 38% think Bardella should step down as party president, while 47% say he should stay.

Those numbers explain why the RN is betting everything on denial, and also show where the real exposure lies.

Bardella’s value to Le Pen in 2027 has never been with her own voters, who forgive almost anything, but with the presentable Matignon candidate she needs to reassure the LR and centre-right voters she desperately needs to convert in a run-off to win the second round.

Unfortunately for her, Edouard Philippe’s intervention suggests that the central bloc intends to (thankfully) fight the RN aggressively on precisely that ground, using the affair to keep its voters from crossing over in the second round because, quite simply, it is so awful.

The day before Mediapart published, Bardella told L’Opinion that his appointment as Prime Minister was not a done deal; it was meant as modesty, and it may yet read as foresight.

🇪🇸Macron’s royal banquet ambushed by Senate

Moving back to more respectable politics: Emmanuel Macron had a two-day state visit to Spain this week, the first by a French president since Nicolas Sarkozy in 2009. While it was meant to crown three years of rapprochement with Pedro Sánchez, the initiative lasted only until they sat down to dinner.

This is because, as the Macrons were preparing for a gala dinner with Felipe VI and Letizia at the Royal Palace on Tuesday evening, the Spanish Senate rejected the Treaty of Barcelona by 142 votes to 106, with the Partido Popular (pp) and Vox voting down a friendship treaty that the two leaders signed in January 2023 and that the Congress of Deputies approved in June.

The PP’s stated objection concerned article 2.4, which provides for a minister from one country to be invited regularly to the other’s Council of Ministers, a clause the party presented as a foreign intrusion into Spanish cabinet government even after Paris and Madrid clarified that the visiting minister would meet colleagues on the margins of the meeting.

The PP-controlled Senate referred the clause to the Constitutional Court, which unanimously found it compatible with the Constitution on 23 September, six days before the vote.

Having lost on the law, the PP did what they do best and fell back on petty politics, citing new reservations about bilateral consultations and the wording on energy interconnections amongst other things, with the evident aim of denying Sánchez a diplomatic trophy in the year before a general election, as they do everything they possibly can to take him down.

At the Moncloa on Wednesday, Sánchez told his guest that he “can only apologise” for the vote and promised that a friendship treaty would be approved before the end of the legislature. Macron preferred to play it down, calling the rejection “a setback, not a drama” and stressing that he respected the Senate’s decision.

The two governments at least confirmed a forthcoming agreement allowing Spanish companies to launch rockets from French Guiana, while Macron used the same press conference to condemn the antisemitic messages attributed to Jordan Bardella that we saw above, with the French campaign naturally following him across the Pyrenees.

Luckily, the treaty isn’t exactly dead, though the route back is narrower than Sánchez’s confidence suggests. Under article 74.2 of the Spanish constitution, a joint committee of deputies and senators must now seek a compromise, which the PP’s absolute majority in the Senate makes unlikely; if that fails, Congress can override the upper house with an absolute majority of 176.

In June the treaty scraped through the lower house with 175 votes, leaving Sánchez one deputy short on the same arithmetic, and Junts, which backed the text while complaining that it does too little for rail and road links between Catalonia and France, now knows precisely that it can start extracting payment.

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EU home affairs ministers recently held an emergency video summit on the Ceuta crisis, but by the time they met, nearly all 72,000 people who crossed from Morocco last Thursday had already been sent back. Not one made it to the EU mainland.

And as is usual when there are incredibly ridiculous political situations in the EU, and I sat down yesterday for a Substack Live to unpack what happened and why it matters. Here’s what stood out:

• The obvious question: why, if the evidence is to be believed that Moroccan authorities let 72,000 people cross in the first place, was this point never raised

• The summit looked more like damage control than a real response, papering over a clear lack of EU unity

• Morocco wasn’t mentioned once, reportedly because Spain didn’t want to risk retaliation from Rabat

• On the ground in Spain, Dave found fury at what people see as a total absence of EU solidarity

• In another piece I wrote in The French Dispatch , I broke down the case that this was a hybrid attack by Morocco, and that European governments are choosing to pay Morocco off rather than investigate or retaliate

And of course, it wouldn’t be a Dave and Julien episode if we didn’t touch upon American intransigence: we discussed the leaked US State Department memo suggesting Washington could back rival claims to European overseas territories, including Ceuta and the Falklands, as retaliation for Europe staying out of the Iran War.

Let us know what you thought, read our other articles, and remember to subscribe!

Gulf Stream Blues

Ceuta exposes Europe's chronic lack of unity

Thursday was a dark day for the European Union, and not for the reasons that Europe’s far right and their backers in Washington would have you believe. 60,000 migrants invaded the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, located on the African coast and surrounded by Morocco, in the largest single-surge border violation in EU history. That was followed by the largest …

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3 months ago · 18 likes · Dave Keating

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