Anne-Sylvaine Chassany

European governments are struggling to adjust to France’s new political reality, with a diminished presidency and a parliament more consumed by domestic concerns than the bold pro-EU initiatives Emmanuel Macron once excelled in. Sunday’s snap vote plunged the Eurozone’s second-largest economy into political turmoil, with Macron facing a hung parliament and likely “cohabitation” with a prime minister from a rival party. “He’s no longer in the boxing ring,” said Enrico Letta, former Italian prim…

The first skirmishes between Socialist president François Mitterrand and his conservative prime minister, Jacques Chirac, erupted shortly after the parliamentary elections that led France into a “cohabitation” in March 1986. Chirac defied protocol and joined the president at the G7 summit in Tokyo that year. Once there, Mitterrand excluded him from top negotiations. But Chirac then insisted on accompanying the president to the EU leaders’ meeting in The Hague, along with the foreign minister.…

Welcome back to the special French election edition of Europe Express. Early on in the three-week campaign to elect a new Assemblée Nationale, Marine Le Pen received an endorsement which for decades would have been unthinkable for the party founded by her antisemitic father and a group including former Waffen-SS and Vichy collaborationists: Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld. The 88-year-old activist, whose work on the Holocaust has helped convict the “Butcher of Lyon” Klaus Barbie and Nazi collabora…

Former French president François Hollande dreamt about it. Will it come true under a UK government? After his election in 2012 the Socialist leader triggered a mini exodus of French private equity executives to London over a pledge to tax “carried interest”, the share of profit they earn on asset sales, at 75 per cent. The rate would only have applied to earnings above €1mn and for two years. But it was part of a longer-term plan to treat “carry” as ordinary income, rather than capital gain, wh…

A Tucker Carlson YouTube show about Russia’s wonderful supermarkets was probably not the kind of global publicity French retailer Auchan was looking for. From the start of Vladimir Putin’s full-scale assault on Ukraine, the company owned by the very private Mulliez family has pushed back against activists’ calls to leave Russia. Just as such pressure seemed to be abating, the former Fox News commentator, fresh from his two-hour interview with the Russian president, stepped into one of the group…

There was a slight gasp among my headset-wearing neighbours in the World Economic Forum’s congress hall when Javier Milei blamed all political movements except his own for the west’s woes. “Whether they proclaim to be openly communists, fascists, Nazis, socialists, social democrats, national socialists, Christian democrats, neo-Keynesians, progressives, populists, nationalists or globalists, there are no major differences. They all say the state should steer all aspects of the lives of individu…

Private equity executives are predicting a sharp increase in takeover activity as buyout firms that have held on to investments in the hope of higher prices finally begin to capitulate. There has been a marked drop in private equity groups selling portfolio companies since a peak in 2021, as rising interest rates have made financing more difficult and hurt valuations. Investors in buyout funds have begun to increase pressure on groups to sell long-held investments and start returning cash, how…

As artificial intelligence dominated conversations between political and business leaders at the World Economic Forum this week, a relative newcomer emerged as the toast of Davos: French AI start-up Mistral. Chief executives of three large tech companies told the Financial Times the group’s latest AI model was one of the best available products, according to technical benchmarks used by companies to evaluate their performance. One US Big Tech executive said that nine-month old Mistral was doin…

China’s economy grew an “estimated” 5.2 per cent last year, beating the official target, the country’s number two leader Premier Li Qiang said in Davos, as he sought to allay concerns over its recovery from the Covid pandemic. In a speech at the World Economic Forum, Li also urged the world to address what he described as a “trust deficit” among nations and, in a veiled dig at the US, said “multilateralism” did not mean that only a few countries could set the rules. Li said China’s growth rate…

Last month the chief of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund struck the gong of the Hong Kong stock market. In doing so Yasir al-Rumayyan was not just marking the exchange’s opening that day, but also the kingdom’s ambitions in Asia. Having set up an office in Hong Kong in 2022, the Public Investment Fund would move to mainland China and India “hopefully, very soon”, he declared. This was music to the Hong Kong authorities’ ears, more accustomed lately to foreign investors departing amid height…

A few hours before OpenAI’s board sacked its chief executive, starting a five-day soap opera that has gripped the global artificial intelligence community, Xavier Niel unveiled an attempt to create a French version of the Silicon Valley start-up in Paris’s 13th arrondissement. Kyutai resembles OpenAI in its original form, rather than its current dysfunctional state: a non-profit research lab designed to build and experiment on large language models — the algorithms that are predicting the end o…

For a while French cement group Lafarge operated a plant in North Korea, about 40km from Pyongyang — except it didn’t, really. The expat supposedly running the facility sat in the capital and could only visit with a minder. Operational or financial control over the plant was illusory. But the French company, which inherited the asset when it bought Egyptian construction group Orascom in 2008 and has since merged with Swiss rival Holcim, kept a stake until 2017 and would regularly send teams of…

Some companies seized on widely reported disruptions to raise prices and increase margins at the expense of consumers

In case you hadn’t noticed, an incredibly bold experiment in social dirigisme is unfolding not in France, where linguistically and spiritually it belongs, but in the land of the free. The Frenchwoman writing these lines confesses she has been flabbergasted by the conditions, unveiled this week, attached to $39bn in grants and loans in the US Chips act, which is designed to encourage the development of an entire semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem in America. What US commerce secretary Gina R…

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

With each new shock, the bloc moves closer to a cohesive approach but it will always be nation first

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

A memoir exposing how the author as a 14-year-old was abused by a man 36 years her senior