Marseille’s battle against the surveillance state

Heading toward Marseille’s central train station, Eda Nano points out what looks like a streetlamp on the Rue des Abeilles. Its long stand curves upward to a white dome shading a dark bulb. But this sleek piece of urban furniture is not a lamp. It’s a video camera, with a 360-degree view of the narrow street. 

Nano, a 39-year-old developer, wants to make residents of Marseille more aware that they are being watched. She is part of a group called Technopolice that has been organizing efforts to map the rise of video surveillance. With some 1,600 cameras in the city, there is plenty to find. Mixed in among them, Nano says, are 50 smart cameras designed to detect and flag up suspicious behavior, though she is unsure where they are or how they are being used.

Across the world, video cameras have become an accepted feature of urban life. Many cities in China now have dense networks of them. London and New Delhi aren’t far behind. 

Now France is playing catch-up. Since 2015, the year of the Bataclan terrorist attacks, the number of cameras in Paris has increased fourfold. The police have used such cameras to enforce pandemic lockdown measures and monitor protests like those of the Gilets Jaunes. And a new nationwide security law, adopted last year, allows for video surveillance by police drones during events like protests and marches.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/06/13/1053650/marseille-fight-surveillance-state/

 

Elections législatives 2022 : le parti présidentiel rattrapé par le dégagisme

Le désir de renouvellement des élus qui habite les électeurs a empêché Emmanuel Macron d’obtenir la majorité absolue. Le président semble avoir été sommé de changer radicalement de méthode.Une fois mis en mouvement, le dégagisme s’avère un mécanisme électoral presque impossible à enrayer. Porté au pouvoir par ce puissant phénomène de rejet, de ses prédécesseurs tout autant que de ses concurrents issus des partis traditionnels, Emmanuel Macron pensait lui avoir échappé en obtenant sa réélection à la présidence de la République, il y a près de deux mois. Las, c’est la majorité absolue qu’il revendiquait à l’Assemblée nationale qui vient d’être frappée de plein fouet par ce désir de renouvellement des têtes et de bouleversement des situations acquises qui semble tenailler les électeurs français. Au soir de ce second tour des élections législatives, M. Macron se retrouve face à un état des lieux tout aussi inédit que celui qui avait été dressé à son entrée à l’Elysée, cinq ans plus tôt.

https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2022/06/20/elections-legislatives-2022-le-parti-presidentiel-rattrape-par-le-degagisme_6131200_3232.html

 

How Much Haiti’s Freedom Cost: Takeaways From a Times Series

A failed state. An aid trap. A land seemingly cursed by nature and human nature alike.

When the world looks at Haiti, one of the poorest nations on the planet, sympathy for its endless suffering is often overshadowed by scolding and sermonizing about corruption and mismanagement.

Some know how Haitians overthrew their notoriously brutal French slave masters and declared independence in 1804 — the modern world’s first nation born of a slave revolt.

But few know the story of what happened two decades later, when French warships returned to a people who had paid for their freedom with blood, issuing an ultimatum: Pay again, in staggering amounts of cold hard cash, or prepare for war.

For generations, the descendants of enslaved people paid the descendants of their former slave masters, with money that could have been used to build schools, roads, clinics or a vibrant economy.

For years, as New York Times journalists have chronicled Haiti’s travails, a question has hovered: What if? What if the nation had not been looted by outside powers, foreign banks and its own leaders almost since birth? How much more money might it have had to build a nation?

 

Why Is Macron Hated?

France is not the United States. Many liberals, including me, worried that Marine Le Pen might just win the French presidency for the same reason that Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016: Loathing of the more liberal candidate would enable the far-right populist to squeak through.

Fortunately, enough people who dislike President Emmanuel Macron held their noses and voted for him in the second-round runoff in order to thwart Le Pen. If one must choose between cholera and the plague, many voters stated, then the former was clearly the better option. Macron himself acknowledged as much in his victory speech, stating that, “To all those who voted for me, not in support of my ideas but to block the far right from winning, your vote obligates me.”

But the fact that 41.5% of voters chose Le Pen, a candidate who represents a deeply reactionary, nativist, and illiberal strain in French politics, is still worrying enough. Why, then, do so many people hate Macron?

The reasons French voters give for rejecting Macron are similar to those cited by US voters who could not bear Hillary Clinton. They are the candidate’s perceived arrogance, entitlement, aloofness, and – as with Clinton’s infamous “basket of deplorables” remark about Trump supporters – a history of insulting less educated people with conservative views.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/why-many-french-voters-hate-emmanuel-macron-by-ian-buruma-2022-04

 

Le programme de Marine Le Pen reste avant tout hérité du Front national de son père

DécryptagesLa comparaison des positions de la candidate à l’élection présidentielle avec son programme de 2017 et de 2012 ainsi qu’avec celui de son père en 2007 montre quelques revirements, mais surtout beaucoup de continuité.

Héritière du parti de son père, Marine Le Pen prétend depuis sa première campagne présidentielle, en 2012, préparer son mouvement à gouverner. Elle affirme s’inscrire dans une nouvelle opposition politique entre les « patriotes », qu’elle représenterait, et les « mondialistes », Emmanuel Macron en tête.

Mais le Front national (FN), devenu Rassemblement national (RN) en 2018, a-t-il vraiment changé depuis l’époque de Jean-Marie Le Pen, qui faisait figure de repoussoir pour la majorité de la classe politique ? Y a-t-il eu des changements de fond dans le programme du parti d’extrême droite en quinze ans, et si oui, lesquels ?

https://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2022/04/19/le-programme-de-marine-le-pen-reste-avant-tout-herite-du-front-national-de-son-pere_6122812_4355770.html

 

Pour le second tour, une responsabilitè historique

C’est une répétition à laquelle il ne saurait être question de s’habituer. Pour la troisième fois en vingt ans, l’extrême droite sera présente, dimanche 24 avril, au second tour de l’élection présidentielle qui opposera Marine Le Pen à Emmanuel Macron. Depuis le début du siècle, le parti tenu par le clan familial des Le Pen a accédé à autant de finales du scrutin majeur de notre démocratie que les candidats de la droite classique, et à une de plus que ceux de la gauche. Chaque fois, le score cumulé des représentants de la droite extrême a été plus élevé : de 19 % en 2002, il est passé à 26 % en 2017 puis à 32 % aujourd’hui, si l’on additionne les suffrages obtenus par la candidate du Rassemblement national et ceux d’Eric Zemmour et de Nicolas Dupont-Aignan.

https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2022/04/11/presidentielle-2022-pour-le-second-tour-une-responsabilite-historique_6121659_3232.html

 

In Zeiten des Unvorstellbaren

Ein Etappensieg der Extremisten. Am Sonntag haben ihre Kandidaten in der ersten Runde der französischen Präsidentschaftswahlen die Mehrheit der abgegebenen Stimmen erhalten und die Rechtsextremen mehr als der Präsident Emmanuel Macron. Die hergebrachten Parteien der gemäßigten Linken und Rechten hingegen sind pulverisiert.

Wie geht es nun weiter? Wer gewinnt die Stichwahl zwischen Marine Le Pen und Macron? Beide haben eine reale Chance.

Dass jemand wie Le Pen das höchste, so machtvolle Staatsamt in Frankreich erlangen könnte, ist ein Gedanke, den allein schon zuzulassen schwerfällt. Aber dies ist die Zeit des Unvorstellbaren. Nach rund 70 Jahren weitgehender Stabilität in Europa, die wir für Normalität gehalten haben, setzt sich allmählich die Erkenntnis durch, dass Frieden, Demokratie und Prosperität die Ausnahme sind. Kostbar und zerbrechlich.

Gefährdet sind sie heute durch Russlands Vernichtungskrieg gegen die Ukraine, die Faschisierung einer der zwei großen Parteien Amerikas und nunmehr durch ein drohendes Erdbeben im Zentrum der Europäischen Union, das unweigerlich auf einen Sieg Marine Le Pens in Frankreich folgen würde.

https://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2022-04/stichwahl-emmanuel-macron-marine-le-pen

 

In the long shadow of De Gaulle

It is an early spring day in Courseulles-sur-Mer, a sleepy fishing port on France’s north coast. The Channel sparkles in the morning sun, the white smudge of a ferry edging across the horizon towards Le Havre. On the beach a cluster of middle-aged men in neon sportswear are rigging up their sailboards. It is hard to imagine a scene more remote from the horrors recently unleashed at the other end of the European mainland, in Ukraine.

But if places have memories, these sands know something of the horrors of war. In 1944 they were Juno Beach, one of five D-Day landing sites, where thousands of mostly Canadian troops braved machine gun fire and mines as they stormed ashore. A Sherman Tank stands next to the merry-go-round on the seafront. Towering above the beach is an 18m-high Cross of Lorraine, the two-barred cross used as a symbol by the Free French during the war. The monument marks the spot where, on 14 June 1944, Charles De Gaulle first put his foot back on the soil of mainland France after years of exile in London.

One can trace the story of contemporary France back to this point. From Courseulles, De Gaulle was driven to Bayeux near by. With characteristic immodesty, he would later recall how “at the sight of [me], its inhabitants were overcome by a kind of stupor which exploded into cheers and tears”. Other accounts relate a more restrained response. Still, such was the symbolism of the site that he returned to it in 1946 to lay the foundations of Gaullism, in a speech calling for a highly centralised constitutional order: a strong and quasi-regal presidency, a weak parliament and an all-encompassing statist emphasis on national stability and independence. This was the vision that he would put into practice when he came to power during the Algerian crisis of 1958, the dawn of the Fifth Republic, and which defines so much about today’s France.

https://www.newstatesman.com/long-reads/2022/03/in-the-long-shadow-of-de-gaulle-france-faces-the-polls

 

LR : À droite toute !

La campagne présidentielle démarre vraiment, maintenant. Le paysage politique est planté. Le congrès de désignation du candidat du parti Les Républicains a levé le voile sur la dernière inconnue qui subsistait. C’est Valérie Pécresse qui sera sa candidate, la présidente de la région Ile-de-France, qui n’était pas la favorite, ayant triomphé de tous ses concurrents. « La droite républicaine est de retour », a-t-elle aussitôt clamé. La droite, oui. Mais quelle droite ?

https://www.politis.fr/articles/2021/12/lr-a-droite-toute-43874/

 

The state of France’s relationship with Britain

EVEN TRAGEDY, it seems, cannot bring Britain and France together. For a brief moment on November 24th, after 27 refugees died in the icy English Channel trying to cross in an inflatable boat from the northern French coast to Britain, it looked as if tensions between the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, might ease. But this was not to be. For behind the row about migrants lies a fundamental problem: the two neighbours are separated by a narrow channel of water and a gulf of mutual distrust.

Neither side is blameless in this latest spat. The day after the drownings, and without warning the French, Mr Johnson tweeted a letter he had sent to Mr Macron. In it he proposed ideas about better cross-border cooperation, such as the dispatch of British soldiers and policemen to patrol French beaches, which had already been rejected by France as an infringement of sovereignty. The letter also proposed a “returns agreement” to take back migrants who arrive in Britain, which the French have repeatedly made clear is a matter for EU, not bilateral, discussion.

https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/11/27/the-state-of-frances-relationship-with-britain