Mediapart in English

The many tens of thousands of self-employed community nurses and home carers working across France are on the front line when it comes to caring for patients and the vulnerable at home. Yet despite the huge mileage many of them do each week, the French government's recent 69-million-euro relief package to combat rising fuel prices does not include them. Meanwhile, the steep increase in the cost of petrol and diesel caused by the US-Israeli attack war on Iran continues to cut deep into their income. One union now warns that nurses may soon have to choose which patients to look after.

A Paris court will this Monday start hearing a case featuring military personnel from the French external secret service, former agents from the country's domestic intelligence agency, greedy Freemasons, ruthless company bosses and a list of crimes stretching all the way up to murder. This case, known as the 'Athanor affair', and set to last more than three months, will highlight a lawless world of business where the phrase “eliminating the competition” can sometimes mean exactly that.  

In 2001 a young woman called Loana appeared on a television programme called 'Loft Story' – a French version of 'Big Brother' – and went on to become France's first reality television star. On March 25th, after years marked by suicide attempts and hospitalisations, the 48-year-old was found dead. As Mediapart's Faïza Zerouala argues in this op-ed article, her tragic story raises questions about the way the entertainment industry exploits vulnerable people, with scarcely anyone lifting a finger to help.

A number of youths caught up in the drug trade in the French Mediterranean city of Marseille have lost their lives in recent years, many of them just teenagers. As head of the juvenile division at the Marseille court, deputy prosecutor Céline Raignault is tasked with tackling this major issue. She is now trying to get drug traffickers prosecuted for 'human trafficking' because of the way they employ and exploit minors, whom she considers victims of modern-day slavery. The magistrate sets out her approach in this interview with Mediapart.  

The former French prime minister Lionel Jospin has died at the age of 88. For five years the socialist politician headed a broad-left government under rightwing president Jacques Chirac, a political arrangement known as 'cohabitation'. While with hindsight his 1997 to 2002 'plural left' government now seems like a golden era, ‘Jospinism’ will always remain as an unfinished corrective to the socialism of the François Mitterrand years and a missed chance to break with a social democracy that had embraced the neoliberal global order. Mediapart reports on Lionel Jospin's political legacy.

After the second round of the municipal elections on Sunday, marked by a high rate of voter abstention, the French political landscape remains highly fragmented. The far-right Rassemblement National has made inroads in medium-sized towns, the Right and the Socialist Party share the major cities, and the radical-left La France Insoumise is gaining ground. Within the Left internal frictions have re-emerged, a year ahead of the 2027 presidential election. Mediapart’s co-editor Lénaïg Bredoux and political correspondent Ilyes Ramdani analyse the outcome of this key vote.

Around 17 million registered voters were called to the urns on Sunday to decide the final results of France’s nationwide two-round municipal elections in those places where candidates garnered less than 50% in the first round on March 15th. These include France’s largest cities and towns, and notably Paris. Follow us here for a summary of initial results and reactions as they arrive through the evening.  

French voters were called out on Sunday for the second round of nationwide municipal elections to decide a final result in those places where no candidates garnered a majority of votes cast in the first round. One of the most undecided contests is that in Paris, which the socialists have reigned over for the past 25 years. Emmanuel Grégoire, the candidate to replace outgoing mayor Anne Hidalgo, came first in the vote last Sunday, well in front of conservative candidate Rachida Dati. But amid backroom deals during the week, the centre-right candidate was ordered to merge his bid with that of Dati, while the far-right candidate has stood down, also in Dati’s favour. But will their electorates back Dati in sufficient numbers at the urns?

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, 71, and nine co-defendants, all found guilty last year over their various roles in seeking funds for his 2007 election campaign from the regime of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, were back in court this week after nine appealed their convictions, and prosecutors appealed an acquittal. In what is effectively a retrial, due to last until June 3rd, Sarkozy, if he loses his appeal, faces a maximum sentence of ten years in jail. “I committed none of the things for which I was convicted,” France’s first post-war head of state to have ever been imprisoned told the court this week.