🇫🇷Honour and dishonour
Final call for 2025 survey feedback, Olivier Faure re-elected as PS First Secretary, Macron brings together Israelis and Palestinians, and Sarkozy excluded from the Légion d’honneur
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This week
📝Final call for 2025 survey feedback!
🌹Olivier Faure re-elected as PS First Secretary
🇮🇱🇵🇸Macron brings together Israelis and Palestinians
🚫Sarkozy excluded from the Légion d’honneur
📝Final call for 2025 survey feedback!
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back! To start the week off, a final call for some feedback through the 2025 French Dispatch Reader Survey, which will be used to plan out the next year of this publication.
Just click on this image below, and be as honest as you can!
And once again: ahank you all for your long-term support!
🌹Olivier Faure re-elected as PS First Secretary
Back to the politics of it all, the Parti Socialiste saw their 81st congress take place this weekend in Nancy, and the membership of the party came together to vote for the leadership of the party ahead of an intense period of elections.
With the municipal elections coming up in 2026, and the French Presidential elections in 2027, the PS are aggressively moving forward to rebuild the gravitas of the long-standing power in French politics, to pull out of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s shadow, and retake control of the French left.
And while it was very, very far from the last congress in Marseille which Le Monde has generously described as “fratricidal”, the election was no less divided between Olivier Faure and his eternal competitor Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol.
Out of 25,164 voters and 24,809 cast votes, Faure won with 51.15% of the vote (12,689) against Mayer-Rossignol’s 48.85% (12,120), a majority of 569.
A very small increase compared to the “fratricidal” congress of 2023, where Faure had a majority of 393 votes, but where the victor announced that he would behave as “collegially as possible by seeking consensus”
Fortunately, this time there were no accusations of cheating between the candidates, and there was a more conciliatory attitude within the party in the aftermath.
It was made clear by the First Secretary’s camp that they are “in favour” of having alternative policy lines within the Parti Socialiste, but on one condition: That all of the actors recognise and defend the “clarity of the strategic line that we have defended” throughout the campaign.
This is because the Parti Socialiste would build a “common platform from Ruffin to Glucksmann,” an idea supported by Mayer-Rossignol’s faction of the party, close to Carole Delga and Francois Hollande, who reminded participants and media that there was no “ideological domination” with such a small majority.
The most important part of this weekend, aside from putting forward a potential candidate for the 2027 Presidential Elections, is that they will attempt to develop a stronger common political line to guide the party through the next two years of elections.
One proposal has been to force a clean break with Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise in the event of any municipal elections, early legislative elections, and presidential elections, in order to force a clear distinction between the left-wing PS and the far-left LFI.
There are several other proposals, but the line of the victor’s camp is very clear: any political line has to be based on Faure’s proposals and nobody else’s.
However, many have highlighted that Olivier Faure has changed over the last few years, having become far more courageous when it comes to standing up for his party, fighting against the domineering politics of La France Insoumise, and his willingness to listen to conflicting views internally.
For many people, it shows a lot more confidence from the leader, who could very well be building up his position as a coalition builder and a peacemaker between the left-wing parties and the centrists in the event that they fail to get their act together and nominate a successor to President Emmanuel Macron.
But the internal issues will nevertheless continue. There is no clear majority for a political line within the PS, with the new-school political line of Olivier Faure set to continue butting heads with the old-school style of politics, epitomised by politicians like Hollande, Cazeneuve, Mayer-Rossignol, and Glucksmann.
The party will continue to have to fight for its identity in the face of an increasingly desperate and aggressive La France Insoumise, which is only capable of thriving in events where the Parti Socialiste sees a complete collapse, like the 2022 Anne Hidalgo campaign.
Likewise, as the Centrists continue to find their way, led by Gabriel Attal’s Renaissance and Edouard Philippe’s Horizons, Faure’s PS will find itself squeezed to it’s right, with the social liberals from Renaissance looking to poach as many voters as they can from their left, not least from the Place Publique movement led by Glucksmann.
Oddly enough, for a politician who is increasingly important to the left, Place Publique is a party that strikingly resembles the political line of the old La Republique en Marche, shows the origins of LaREM and Renaisance through Macron’s initial adherence to the Parti Socialiste, and who attracted many members of Renaissance in the 2024 European elections.
But, as always, politics is a fickle and dynamic thing, and nobody knows what the future holds.
🇮🇱🇵🇸Macron brings together Israelis and Palestinians
Moving internationally now: Emmanuel Macron led a joint Franco-conference of Israeli and Palestinian civil society in Paris this Saturday as part of a fresh Franco-Saudi diplomatic push to revive the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process, revive the creation of a “demilitarized” Palestinian state, and support “Israel’s full integration in the Middle East”
In his tweet, Macron said that representatives of Israeli and Palestinian civil society had gathered in Paris to deliver what he described as a "message of hope", while outlining the goal of “an international conference at the United Nations in New York.”
“The goal is a demilitarized Palestinian state which recognizes Israel’s existence and security, backed by an international stabilization mission. This is the necessary precondition for Israel’s regional integration and the establishment of mutual recognition.”
The international conference could prove difficult, however, with the ongoing geopolitical instabilities, and Macron openly acknowledged that logistical and security challenges could delay the summit. Most notably, the travel difficulties faced by Palestinian Authority leaders could be a major spanner in the works of this conference.
However, Macron insisted that any delays would lead to an urgent new date being set.
The proposal is a clear sign of a growing convergence between Paris and Riyadh on regional security and diplomacy, particularly following the breakdown of normalisation talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia after the events of October 2023.
France’s role not only serves as yet another reminder of its increasingly aggressive use of soft power in the post-Trump world, but it’s a keen reminder of the longstanding French commitment to multilateralism, as well as its strategic use of soft power to position itself as a diplomatic broker in global conflicts.
Hosting civil society figures in Paris also gives Macron the chance to emphasise a French vision of diplomacy that is anchored in dialogue, international law and prestige.
It is also a key sign that France continues to see itself as more than a bystander in Middle East politics, and that France intends to maintain a leadership position in international affairs and diplomacy.
But we’ll have to wait and see where this goes. With Israel currently intensifying what could lead to a long-term war against Iran, and with the ongoing desperation of the Netanyahu government to stay in power, nobody knows how successful any initiatives could be.
But, hope is always an important factor to keep alive, and an international conference could very well apply enough pressure to bring an end to the ongoing suffering we’re seeing in Palestine and Israel.
🚫Sarkozy excluded from the Légion d’honneur
When it rains, it really, really pours, and Sarkozy is getting an incredibly rare treatment that has never been meted out to a president of the Fifth French Republic.
Following the French Appeals Court upholding Sarkozy’s conviction for the wiretapping case, and the concretisation of his one-year prison term, Nicolas Sarkozy now has the honour of not only being the first French president to be sentenced to a prison term, but only the second French head of state to be excluded from the Légion d’honneur.
The first, of course, was Maréchal Philippe Pétain, who was condemned in 1945 for high treason and collusion with the enemy. Great company.
For those who aren’t aware of what the ‘Legion of Honour’ is:
The Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur is the highest and most prestigious order of merit within the French state, covering both the military and civil spheres, and was initially created by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802.
Based out of the Palais de la Légion d'Honneur, the order is divided into five separate ranks that denote seniority and increased distinction (or honour, I guess):
Chevalier (Knight)
Officier (Officer)
Commandeur (Commander)
Grand officier (Grand Officer)
Grand-croix (Grand Cross).
And to receive this honour, you need to meet certain criteria, most notably and very basically, a certain level of integrity. As per the Grande Chancellerie de la Légion d’Honneur, this means that, before anything else:
“the future legionnaire must have a clean criminal record and good morals”
And unfortunately for Sarkozy, being hit by such a large series of criminal cases, convictions, and genuinely bad behaviour, means he’s not really meeting this very basic criterion.
And while French presidents automatically earn the Legion d’honneur by virtue of automatically becoming the Grand Master of the Legion, they do not have the right to keep it.
So Nicolas Sarkozy gets to lose yet another symbol of his long and increasingly disgraced career.
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Lawfully, I think that Sarkozy, and even others as Le Pen and Melanchon, should end up at some "Hall of Shame" list.
Petain was not the first
Napoleon I, his brothers and certain officers who joined Napoleon in the 100 days were also stripped of their membership. Then, each major revolution saw other names removed from the membership - 1830, 1848, 1870 - all led to removals.