The Weekly Dispatch is your weekly update on major events taking place in French and European politics, published on Sundays to give you the ideal summary of current affairs.

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This week

• 🏉It’s Six Nations Time!

• 🇮🇱 Netanyahu ally’s election has been invalidated

• 📉Local Authority investment is falling

• 🏦A reform of the French institutions

• 👷🏾‍♂️Unions are losing registered employees

🏉It’s Six Nations Time!

Just a quick reminder to all of you sports fans reading

Following more than a few years of questioning our abilities, we’re now finding ourselves with a truly first-class team competing at the world level and is unbeatable when it switches on and begins rampaging across the field!

Let’s try a little something here: as I’ve had one or two people tell me that they’re interested in reading some sports coverage in this newsletter, why don’t you let me know your opinion in this poll below?

And if you’re a sports writer with an itch to write about French football, rugby, judo, or anything else, let me know in the comments below! Maybe we can sort something out!

🇮🇱 Netanyahu ally’s election has been invalidated

You may not know of the tale of deputy Meyer Habib, a man who has developed a fascinating reputation for the problematic and irregular behaviour he’s accused of, even if it’s not necessarily always verifiable.

With accusations that he has flooded voting booths with non-citizens, who couldn’t vote, to clog up the process after getting his supporters to vote early, amongst other more problematic claims, there is now one incredibly problematic issue at hand.

Having recently been re-elected to represent the 8th Constituency of French people living abroad in the June 2022 legislative elections, the Constitutional Council has now chosen to invalidate the victory won by the narrow margin of 193 votes against the candidate from Renaissance.

There were two reasons for this:

Firstly, his supporters, some of whom spoke as municipal officials in Israel and some as representatives of religious actors, called to vote for him.

Secondly, and more seriously, his team set up a hotline that was supposed to help those struggling to vote online, his team of councillors offered to vote in place of people who were having difficulties, all by using their personal identifiers and passwords.

Unsurprisingly, these are both very big no-nos in an election and can be considered both an act of foreign interference in an election and an attempt to remove the democratic ability of citizens to make a proper decision.

One sore point is that he found out about this while accompanying his friend Benjamin Netanyahu and sat in the place of honour right next to him as they spoke with about sixty French business people.

On the bright side for the 61-year-old Habib, the Council did not declare him ineligible for future elections, which will take place sometime in April or May, and he will likely run again, as one particular phrase rung out through the Hôtel du Collectionneur:

However, if he somehow failed to be elected again, it’s already been made clear that Benjamin Netanyahu would nominate his friend and ally as the Israeli Ambassador to France.

📉Local Authority investment is falling

There is a growing problem in France at the moment, with inflation and energy prices impacting the wallets of French citizens and businesses and the risk appetite of local officials.

It turns out that the economic pressures have caused local elected officials to become increasingly cautious and that they have stopped financing projects with the dedicated credit that the government gave them for this purpose.

This led to the Minister Delegate in charge of Territorial collectivities and Rural affairs, Dominique Faure, calling for these local officials to start investing. She also reminded them that the government “has put 4 billion euros” in the 2023 budget to support the investments of local authorities.

The situation has provoked enough concern by the governing majority that the delegation to the territorial communities of the Assemblée National carried out a whole morning of work on the topic.

“The period is anxiety-provoking for elected officials, which may lead them to be very cautious in 2023. Yet now is not the time to slow down. We have a wall of investments in front of us,” said the president of the delegation, Thomas Cazenave (Renaissance).

Currently, the debate is turning towards the idea of local authorities leaning into debt, with Christophe Béchu (Horizons), the minister for Ecological Transition and Territorial Cohesion, pushing through a bill that will allow a “‘whatever the cost’ of investment” strategy.

“Get into debt! Public money will not be able to do everything,” Béchu said, arguing that the challenge as it stands far exceeds the means of the state and even equating the climate as a “loan shark”

🏦A reform of the French institutions

There’s been perennial discussion of how the French republic should be formed, how it should look, what the goals are, and where we should be headed as a country.

For this reason, every French president of the fifth republic has thought about reforms and transformations that could reinforce the republic and bring us to the next stage of our history.

This is what led former French president François Hollande to put aside his grudges against his former finance minister, Emmanuel Macron, to meet him for a two-hour lunch and discuss this critical topic.

With Emmanuel Macron having made a reform of the Republic a part of his initial 2017 campaign and having repeatedly spoken to journalists about a need to “restore popular sovereignty”, this would have been a fascinating meeting to be a fly on the wall in.

Hollande previously suggested several ideas in his 2019 book, “Répondre à la crise démocratique” (Responding to the democratic crisis), with the major suggestion being to remove the position of Prime Minister from the French system.

While a radical step, this could go some way to creating a stronger link between the President and the French and could fit into the idea of returning “popular sovereignty” to the French people, but it could also give the French President more power, and lead to more discontent from those who disagree with him.

Expect a discussion on this in a future dispatch, as well as an exploration of my personal views on this topic on a WIP project,

👷🏾‍♂️Unions are losing registered employees

Let’s finish the week with an interesting story that touches on the ongoing protests against pension reform.

A note was published this week by the research department of the Ministry of Labour that stated that membership in workers’ unions has dropped in the last decades, with the most recent figures from 2019 having already shown a decline of 0.9 points in six years.

With figures having last been stable back in the 90s and only 10.3% of employees in France currently declaring that they are a member of a worker’s union, you’d be forgiven for thinking that they are a faltering force and not much of a presence.

However, with 27.87 million citizens being employed in France in 2021 and unemployment having dropped since then, there are 2.78 million members who are available to engage in strike action.

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