John Lichfield

1 week ago | thelocal.fr | John Lichfield

We seem to be going through a period of “peak France”. Farmers with €200,000 tractors besieged the National Assembly this week; taxis blocked roads all over France. A pro-farmer law, scrapping some environmental rules, was rejected by the Assembly on Monday. So the farmers were furious? No, they were delighted and took their tractors home. Taxi unions won concessions from the government at the weekend. So the taxi-drivers were delighted? No, they were furious. The blockades continue.

2 weeks ago | thelocal.fr | John Lichfield

The French centre-right changes leaders as frequently as it changes names. According to Les Républicains, or whatever the movement is fleetingly called, each new beginning promises the resurrection of “Gaullism” as France’s dominant political force. The latest Messiah of the centre-right is Bruno Retailleau, 64, who started in politics as an anti-Gaullist and an extreme anti-European nationalist.

3 weeks ago | thelocal.fr | John Lichfield

France's most popular TV channel postponed one of its most popular programmes on Tuesday night to give three hours of air-time to an unpopular President. Viewers were supposed to watch Koh-Lanta, in which competitors seek to become the last survivor on a desert island. Instead they watched Emmanuel Macron struggle to escape the domestic, political isolation forced on him by a disastrous snap election 11 months ago. That election was a failed gamble; so was Tuesday’s marathon TF1 interview.

4 weeks ago | thelocal.fr | John Lichfield

Jean-Luc Mélenchon does not like journalists, especially British or American journalists. Interviews with him have a habit of exploding into insults after a few minutes. All credit then to Leila Abboud, the Paris bureau chief of the FT, who lasted more than three hours with the bad-tempered old fox in an interview published last weekend. She even managed to make the hard-left veteran appear likeable.

1 month ago | thelocal.fr | John Lichfield

There are, by my calculation, 17 doctors within 15 kilometres of my village in the hills of Calvados. When I need to see a doctor, I can usually get an appointment within 24 hours. If I lived 50 kilometres to the south, in the great, green, sprawling, empty département of the Orne, life would be very different. The Orne has only 264 general practitioners – 66 fewer than it needs to reach the national average of 0.83 doctors for every 1,000 people.