It was not so much yes to Emmanuel Macron as no to Marine Le Pen but, ultimately, the French election delivered the result that political moderates across Europe had desperately hoped for.
As France’s president begins a second term, however, the problems facing him are myriad; he must reunite a fractured nation and help sustain the EU as an economic and political force in a world where old certainties no longer exist and the balance of power is shifting. Angelique Chrisafis and Jon Henley report from Paris on a nation that seems united only in anger at its political leaders.
Then, the historian and columnist Timothy Garton Ash outlines Macron’s challenges on the international stage. Can the French president’s singular ambitions be squared with the needs of the EU collective? “I have never seen a human being with more drive and self-belief,” observes Garton Ash. “But he can often seem arrogant, Jupiterian, neo-Napoleonic … Macron’s ‘we’ all too often sounds like the royal we, meaning me. To adapt Louis XIV: ‘L’Europe, c’est moi.’”
As the Ukraine war enters a new phase, Isobel Koshiw meets Ukrainian troops on the southern front, who talk of the harsh reality of life there. Military analyst Jack Watling reflects on the futility of Russia’s siege on Mariupol, while Luke Harding reveals a bizarre move to restore old Soviet iconography in Russian-occupied areas.
There’s also a longer report from Diyora Shadijanova on social media influencers in Russia and how younger people there are coming to terms with the war amid severe information restrictions.
There are no finer chroniclers of the English than the writer and actor Alan Bennett. As extracts from his lockdown diaries reveal, advancing years have in no way diminished his talent for spotting glory in the mundane.
Then, in Culture, the sculptor Antony Gormley talks to Claire Armitstead about the shift in form and scale for his two major new works.
