Published in the Libération on 8 July under the title: “Quickly, a provisional government with the left, the centre and the right”

The majority is not unfindable. France – after exit polls – is not ungovernable. It is not chaos. A majority exists. It is there. All you have to do is to accept to see it, because 174 elected members from the united left-wing parties and 156 from the centrist parties that supported Emmanuel Macron’s re-election make how many MPs in all?

There is so much bad news that we are not able to see the good. We know about the bad news. Next Sunday, the French far right could come to power. Even if it does not occur, Europe’s second-largest power is in danger of becoming ungovernable for a long time to come. Germany is not in much better shape, and so the whole Union is weakening at the very moment when war is taking hold on its eastern border, when total chaos is threatening the Middle East, and when the United States is turning away from Europe and the Mediterranean to focus on Asia and the Chinese challenge.

Op-ed published in the Libération on 11 June

Yes, of course, these results are overwhelming almost everywhere, especially in France. With extreme right-wing parties adding up to some 40% of the votes cast, France has clearly been weakened by these European elections and could soon be even weaker, tragically so, if the early elections that Emmanuel Macron decided to call on Sunday were to give power to the Lepénistes in less than a month’s time.

The European political scenes are going to Americanise. This is inevitable and now desirable because, whatever the precise outcome of the battle of the European elections, extreme right-wing groups will become a key force in the Parliament.

It has not been reported enough, but what has the Weimar Triangle, which the Guardian calls the Union’s “new powerhouse”, just declared? Well, last Wednesday, the foreign ministers of the three countries that make up the Triangle – Poland, France and Germany – concluded that the European Union should become a “real geopolitical player” – something that France used to call a “Power Europe”.

The first hypothesis is that he wants to take Kharkiv. He is closing in on it so methodically, one suburb after another, that we cannot rule out the possibility that this is Vladimir Putin’s objective, but perhaps he is not lying when he says it is not.

To know what an anti-Semite is, one would also need to know what anti-Semitism is. To know what an anti-Zionist is, one would also need to know what a Zionist is. It is on these questions of definition that so many of the debates sparked off by the massacre of 7 October and the bombardments of Gaza are drifting off course, but this is not the only one, for take the French students who are occupying Sciences Po or their faculty in solidarity with the people of Gaza.

They do not want to give up. The demonstrators who take to the streets of Tbilisi night after night refuse to allow Bidzina Ivanishvili, Georgia’s richest man, to use his parliamentary majority to compel the opposition forces to declare themselves “foreign agents”.

Yesterday united in stopping the Iranian strikes against Israel, the Arab countries, Europe and the United States must now impose peace on both the Israelis and the Palestinians.