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POLITICS

What’s going on with France’s government now the Olympics are over?

French president Emmanuel Macron may, possibly, be naming a new prime minister next week - here's the latest in the ongoing saga of the French government.

Published: 13 August 2024 16:33 CEST
Updated: 16 August 2024 13:15 CEST
What's going on with France's government now the Olympics are over?
France's President Emmanuel Macron may announce a new prime minister next week. Photo by Christophe SIMON / POOL / AFP

Over three weeks France – and much of the world – was busy being enthralled by the Paris Olympics. From the beautiful venues to the astonishing sporting feats and the general sense of joie de vivre, it was a very happy period.

But now the Olympics are over (although the Paralympics start soon) and France must again face its lack of a government.

What happened again?

In case a newly-acquired knowledge of the rules of competition skateboarding has caused you to forget, here’s a brief recap of where we were politically when the Games began at the end of July.

A parliamentary election, hastily called by Emmanuel Macron, resulted in an inconclusive result in which no party or group won a majority in the Assemblée nationale in the second round of voting on July 7th.

Instead three blocks emerged – the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) left alliance with 193, centrists including Macron’s party on 164 and the far-right Rassemblement National on 143. No party came even close to the 289 seats required for a majority. 

Things drifted for a while as it became obvious that not only did no party have a majority, but no-one had any immediate prospects of forming an alliance or coalition that would take them to the magic 289 seats.

On July 17th, Macron formally accepted the resignation of prime minister Gabriel Attal and his government, but asked them all to stay on in ‘caretaker’ roles until a new government could be created.

The caretaker government has been in power ever since – it can take decisions in case of emergency or urgent need, but has severely limited powers.

READ ALSO How does France’s caretaker government work?

Then what happened?

The Olympics started. Although no-one actually agreed to a political ‘truce’ the French public and French media seemed very happy to be distracted from this ongoing mess and instead focus on sport.

It helped that the Paris Olympics were a big success – the city looked gorgeous, French athletes won plenty and the whole country was in an unusually good mood.

But the politicians were still working behind the scenes, right?

There doesn’t seem to be much evidence of this. Most of the cabinet immediately decamped to the Games and were pictured cheering on French athletes and generally having fun.

Macron himself appears to have loved the Games – he attended multiple events, embraced French athletes and the closest he appears to have got to politics was attending the France-USA basketball final with the American ‘second gentleman’ Doug Emhoff. 

Meanwhile other ministers decamped to the seaside or the country for their traditional summer holidays.

The politicians of the leftist NFP continued to bang the drum for a new government, especially their eventual pick for prime minister Lucie Castets, who has been touring France introducing herself to the people and generally giving the vibe of a politician on the campaign trail.

So what now?

The Olympics are over and the Paralympics, while likely to be a fantastic sporting spectacle, probably won’t be accepted as an excuse to continue the drift.

Although the usual sleepy August spirit has seized much of the country, some politicians have returned to the fray – on Tuesday, Attal proposed to the various parties of the French parliament that they ‘build a legislative compromise’ with a left-to-right spectrum of parties, but excluding the far-right Rassemblement National and the far-left La France Insoumise.

This is basically what the Macronists were proposing before the Olympics, and it remains to be seen whether they will find enough (or any) parties willing to agree to join, and who could be acceptable to all parties as a candidate for prime minister. Meanwhile the NFP continues to insist that as the largest group it has the right to nominate a prime minister, the aforementioned Castets.

So who’s in charge?

Macron remains president, with the wide-ranging powers afforded to him by the French constitution, but when it comes to government it’s still in caretaker mode, with Attal as a caretaker PM with limited powers.

How will this go on for?

Well, the Constitution does not provide any kind of limit for how long a caretaker government can remain in place, nor does Macron have a constitutional deadline by which to name a prime minister.

However, Macron did announce on Friday that he would be holding a series of meetings with other group leaders on Friday, August 23rd after which he may, possibly, name a new prime minister.

This is not guaranteed, however and it’s possible that this could drag on until September.

One thing we do know – parliamentary elections are limited to once every 12 months, so there cannot be another one until June 2025.

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PARIS

Paris and Milan judged closest in the world to becoming ’15-minute cities’

Paris and Milan are among the cities closest to reaching the urban planning goal of being a "15-minute city," while car-dependent metropolises in the United States and elsewhere lag behind, a worldwide analysis said on Monday.

Published: 16 September 2024 17:29 CEST
Paris and Milan judged closest in the world to becoming '15-minute cities'

In fact, the central areas of many cities already meet the definition of a 15 minute-city, which means that residents are within a quarter-hour walk or bike ride from everything they need to a lead a good life, the analysis found.

But even within a city, there are often stark differences between the wealthy inner cities and the urban sprawl on their outskirts, according to the Italian researchers behind the new study.

The concept of the 15-minute city gained traction during the Covid pandemic, when lockdowns put more focus on local neighbourhoods.

It has since been embraced by dozens of mayors around the world — and become the target of conspiracy theorists online.

For the new study, published in the journal Nature Cities, the researchers built an online database looking at roughly 10,000 cities globally.

They used open source data to map out how far of a walk or cycle residents were from different services, including shops, restaurants, education, exercise and healthcare.

“A lot of people already live in a 15-minute city,” study co-author Hygor Piaget Monteiro Melo told AFP.

But it depends on where you look within a city, he said, because of the inequality in access to services between the centre and periphery.

No ‘utopia’

What is clear, the researchers noted, is that population density is a crucial factor — if enough people are living close enough to each other, it is much easier for them to have easy access to services.

This meant that somewhat smaller yet relatively dense cities such as Italy’s Milan or Spain’s Barcelona scored well on their map, which was made available online.

When it came to the biggest cities, “Paris is an outlier,” lead study author Matteo Bruno told AFP.

The mayor of Paris embraced the concept in 2020, and a “considerable fraction” of the city is below the 15-minute mark, the study said.

Some European cities have a head start because they were built centuries ago at a time before cars — when basically all towns had to be 15-minute cities, the researchers said.

Cities built more recently with cars specifically in mind — particularly in the United States — fared far less well on the map.

Atlanta in particular stood out as being a long way from being a 15-minute city. Future Olympic host Los Angeles also lagged behind most others for walkability, as did several Chinese cities including Chongqing.

But when it comes to cities, there are always trade-offs — and there is no single right answer, the researchers said.

“The 15-minute city is often presented as a utopia — it’s not,” Bruno said.

Americans in sprawled-out cities usually have their own houses and backyards, while Europeans in densely populated cities tend to live in apartments, illustrating the important role played by culture, Bruno said.

And central parts of US cities such as New York, San Francisco and Milwaukee were under the 15-minute threshold.

“Manhattan is definitely one of the most 15-minute places ever in the world,” said Bruno, a researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Rome.

‘Conspiracy mongers’

There has been confusion about the concept in the past, the researchers lamented.

For example, “traffic has nothing to do with the 15-minute city,” Bruno said.

In fact, slow traffic could indicate an area is more pedestrian friendly, he added.

Yet it was new “low-traffic zones” in the UK that turned the ire of conspiracy theorists towards 15-minute city proponents.

Confusing the two ideas, online groups including vaccine and climate sceptics falsely claimed that 15-minute cities were part of a secret plot to restrict the movement of citizens.

The Italian researchers, who have themselves been targeted by “Twitter haters,” emphasised that nothing about the 15-minute city concept involves confining anyone.

Researcher Carlos Moreno, a high-profile proponent of 15-minute cities who has advised Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, was also “attacked by the worldwide conspiracy mongers,” he told AFP.

Moreno welcomed the new study, praising how the idea had swiftly become a topic of interest for researchers around the world.

Just last week, Valerie Pecresse, the right-wing head of the greater Paris Ile-de-France area, presented a plan for a 20-minute region, he pointed out.

Bruno said that the 15-minute metric is just one element in the “recipe” that makes a good city.

Other parts of the recipe include tackling inequality and segregation, improving public transport, reducing traffic and so on, he said.

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