🚀The Weekly Dispatch - Rush to the future
🚀The Weekly Dispatch - Rush to the future
13 November 2022 - Macron announces the National Strategic Review, there are new solar Panel fields, Agnès Pannier-Runacher under siege, Bayou attacks the RN on Russian funding, and working groups.
The Weekly Dispatch is your weekly summary of major events taking place in French and European politics, published on Sundays to give you the perfect way to catch up on current affairs.
If you enjoy reading this, like this post and share it with your network! And of course, don’t hesitate to subscribe if you want to receive more directly to your inbox.
This week in the Weekly Dispatch:
🪖The National Strategic Review
This week saw Emmanuel Macron give a speech outlining updates to the strategic priorities of the French state, as well as clarifying the French position on the use of nuclear weapons, clarifying comments he made regarding Russian threats towards Russia.
Check out a breakdown of this speech here:
☀️New solar panel fields
We got a lot of good news on the ecological front this week, starting with something that is on everyone’s mind: energy!
Having been debated recently in the French Senate (the upper house of the French legislature) a new bill was finally adopted that will require every car park with 80+ parking spaces to have solar panels installed from July 1, 2023 onwards.
According to government sources, this plan has the potential to produce up to 11GW of clean energy across France, or the equivalent of the power produced by ten nuclear reactors, which will do a lot to support French energy independence, as well as potentially providing a strong example to our fellow EU member states.
Initially, the suggestion was to have it apply to all car parks larger than 2,500 m², equivalent to 100 parking spaces, the debates pushed it towards the final proposal, due to a combination of easier calculation and better coverage.
However, there are exceptions: parking lots for heavy goods vehicles have been exempt, and “remarkable” sights - protected areas or otherwise - have likewise been exempt to avoid distorting or destroying areas.
💸Agnès Pannier-Runacher under siege
This week saw the Minister for the Energy Transition come under a lot of pleasure, after details about a company that her father created, which was benefiting from tax havens, were revealed by the website Disclose.ngo.
To keep a long story short (unless you guys want the long story, in which case subscribe and comment below):
Jean-Michel Runacher, a former executive at Franco-British oil company Perenco, created a company called Arjunem
Upon its creation, he injected €1.2 million in the forms of shares for investment funds
Agnès Pannier-Runacher’s three children, aged 5, 10 and 13 years old, were made joint shareholders, with their grandfather, for the cost of €10
According to accusations, this was done so that the three children would each receive c. €1 million upon his death, all while “avoiding…to pay inheritance tax upon his death”.
Another big issue: the Arjunem arrangements are based in tax havens (Guernsey, Ireland, and Delaware) while being managed in Luxembourg, raising further accusations of conflict of interest, and effectively handing an open goal to the opposition.
In the face of attacks during the Questions to the Government session, with Cyrielle Chatelain (EELV) calling the situation “Cahuzac 2.0”, and Clémentine Autain (LFI) who states that it underlines “the exemplary nature of La Macronie”, Pannier-Runacher denounced a “web of lies and of allegations” had this to say:
“My children have not received a euro from this company [Arjunem] and, personally, I will never receive a euro from this company."
Her entourage also came to her defence: “Agnès Pannier-Runacher has no right, present or future, on the assets of this company and is not associated with it"
However, the issue at hand is that the minister is the one who signed all the notarized documents on behalf of her three children back in 2016.
With some questions regarding the possible reporting of these connections, and while the opposition will smell blood in the water, we can’t know where exactly this “affaire” will go. However, it will be interesting to track where this goes, with the question of conflict of interest in place.
🇷🇺Bayou attacks the RN on Russian funding
In more high-voltage news, the former national secretary of Europe Ecologie Les Verts (EELV), sent a report this Wednesday to the Paris public prosecutor’ss office regarding the financing of Marine Le Pens’ Rassemblement National (RN) by Russian companies.
Highlighting what he believe could be “illegal financing of political parties” and “illegal seizures of interest”, his report included statements from the former French ambassador to Russia, Jean-Marice Ripert, who stated that “a certain number of French politicians, of a certain stripe, came and did not leave empty-handed”.
With a report that combines reports from the US State Department on Russian spending to influence elections, as well as press reports on links between the RN and Russian companies close to the Kremlin, including one company that bought the RN’s Russian loan.
In his report, Bayou notes that:
“According to the words of the treasurer of the RN, Wallerand de Saint-Just, in the press, the members of this company presented themselves as acting on orders of Russian power…”
Notably, the company in question took the RN to court over this loan, showcasing the leverage that the Russian state could have over the far-right party. This led to an agreement in 2020 allowing “the RN to stagger its debt until 2028 in order to be able to repay this loan and thus allows it to avoid cessation of payments".
Highlighting the fact that this could constitute some form of illicit financing, Bayou denounced the action. “This situation creates a real imbalance between the parties having to repay their maturities quickly, in accordance with French law, and those who must “submit” to the arbitration of a much more favourable Russian court decision… and subservient to the Kremlin.”
Bayou’s report called for several investigations, covering “illegal financing of a political party, illegal financing of electoral campaign(s), embezzlement of public funds, misuse of corporate assets and/or illegal taking of interests and influence peddling”.
Where this could go is hard to say, as this could require lengthy investigative and legal procedures, but this would be a difficult situation to navigate for the new RN President, Jordan Bardella, who has recently taken the reigns from Marine Le Pen.
For her part, she seems relatively unworried, with her entourage claiming that “the RN has no fear about the collection of gossip that constitutes this report”.
Want to read more about the new RN President? Check out the below:
🏛️The fight for parliamentary working groups
Let’s finish up this with some bubbling drama from the Assemblée National, where Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National has reached out for two important working groups: AIDS, and antisemitism.
With the parties currently negotiating who will lead on the working groups, the far-right group is continuing to build up its image of respectability, and recover from Grégoire de Fournas’ (RN) racist attack on Carlos Marten Bilongo (LFI/NUPES).
Naturally, having the far-right in charge of a working group on antisemitism is a red line that many were completely unhappy with, and the Presidential Majority and the left moved against it aggressively.
When Sébastien Chenu, the vice-president of the RN, offered to chair the group on antisemitism, Sylvain Maillard (Renaissance) moved aggressively against it.
“The deputies from the left, LFI, PS, ecologists came behind us. It's a real casus belli for us. It is out of the question that we give in on this point: we absolutely want to recover the presidency of this group” - A source from the party.
There was a similar outcry regarding the RN chairing the AIDS working group, due to the historic aggression shown towards people who suffered from AIDS from the party.
“A list of NA study group assignments is circulating, in which co-chairmanship of the AIDS group would go to the RN. @YaelBRAUNPIVET denied this attribute°. BUT, we remain extremely vigilant. We know our enemy.”
The big argument is the below poster, which was used by the party to equate AIDS (SIDA en bon Francais), with Socialism, Immigration, Drugs, and Affairs.
With the decision on the chairing of Working Groups expected to take place on December 7th, it will be very interesting to see where negotiations go, and of course, you will read about this in a future dispatch.
Thank you for reading the French Dispatch! If you liked what you read please don’t hesitate to like this post and subscribe to the newsletter by clicking/tapping the button below:
And if you’d like to contribute a coffee or two to help fuel my coverage of the wild world of politics, feel free to click on the picture below:
Funny to see that Jean-Michel Runnacher's company Ajurnem is just an anagram of his initials and first 3 letters of his name. That's my 2 cent.