Just a few months ago, leftists and liberals worldwide braced for a grim future. Right-wing parties and candidates across Europe—boasting a common catalog of xenophobia, Euroscepticism, and Islamophobia—were gaining traction. In elections for the European Parliament, these parties rattled long-standing balances. The once-taboo, far-right National Rally (RN) in France trounced President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist coalition, […]
Tag: Emmanuel Macron
Africa in G20: New Promises for Inclusive Climate Action?
The recent G20 conference, held in India in early September, took an unexpected turn when the African Union (AU), consisting of 55 nations, received an invitation to join the ranks of the world’s most influential economies. As a result, the G20 transformed into the G21, with 19 member nations alongside two political and economic entities […]
France’s Ban on Religious Symbols Violates Free Expression
France, a nation with a history entangled with the church and fraught with religious conflict, has become staunchly secularist in modern politics, prompting a decades-long political controversy over the existence of Islamic symbols in public schools. On September 4, 67 girls were sent home from French public schools after refusing to remove their abayas, a […]
Where do Tacos Come from? // History of Things (Transcript)
This is a transcript of Bearly Political’s most recent podcast. Listen to the full episode here. Zachary: Like a lot of people during the pandemic, I took up a new hobby: hiking. At the time, I was living in Southern France, near these alpine foothills, and every week or so I’d trek across those Mediterranean mountaintops […]
D10, Democracy, and Donald
Since 2014, a group of high-ranking officials from leading democratic nations have held secret meetings each year to discuss protecting the liberal world order. Who’s this mysterious group? They call themselves the D10, and its members are no surprise: America, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan, Australia and South Korea, and the European Union. But […]
Qui est Emmanuel Macron?
On the evening of May 7th, spectators across the world took a deep breath of relief, as French rejected an extreme-right presidential candidate. Despite the (at least) momentary respite and the soaring optimism in the ‘heart of Europe’, the question remains if the new President, Emmanuel Macron, can transform the momentum of his campaign into […]