Phineas Rueckert is a Paris-based journalist. His writing has appeared in the Nation, Vice World News, New Lines Magazine, Al Jazeera English, and elsewhere.
Religious identity has become an unusually prominent battleground in next year’s French election. During the pope’s visit to the country last week, left-wing France Insoumise resisted ultraconservative attempts to monopolize Catholic identity.
Blue-collar voters in northern France are often seen as a natural base for Marine Le Pen’s surging far right. Yet while her party has made major inroads in this electorate, local elections saw Communists resist what seemed like inevitable defeat.
The death of French far-right activist Quentin Deranque one month ago has cast a shadow over elections typically focused on local concerns.
Donald Trump speaks of an expanded Monroe Doctrine that asserts US domination across the Americas. Chilean ex-diplomat Jorge Heine told Jacobin about the need for a new nonaligned movement that can resist imperialist claims.
The Left’s candidate in Chile’s presidential election is Jeannette Jara, a Communist who was until recently the country’s labor minister. She’s running on her record of boosting the minimum wage and shortening Chileans’ working hours.
On Monday, France joined nine other countries in recognizing Palestinian statehood. But the long delay in making this move is a litany of missed opportunities.
The murder of mosque-goer Aboubakar Cissé in April again highlighted the prevalence of Islamophobia in France, discrimination that is driving increasing numbers of Muslims to leave the country.
In French-ruled Algeria, Frantz Fanon was a psychiatrist and an active member of the National Liberation Front. A new movie portrays his commitment to the anti-colonial struggle.
Marine Le Pen’s conviction shone a spotlight on her party’s misuse of public funds. Where the party already runs the government, in the southeastern town of Fréjus, its mayor, David Rachline, stands accused of a massive web of corruption.
Ian Brossat made his name as Paris’s housing chief, bucking the trend toward marketization by expanding social housing in the French capital. A member of the French Communist Party, he told Jacobin about his bid to become Paris’s next mayor.
This summer’s Paris Olympics saw an experiment in AI-assisted algorithmic video surveillance. Now French officials say they want to make it permanent, in what experts call a worrying use of invasive and even racially discriminatory technology.
Argentina’s far-right president, Javier Milei, promised to close press agency Télam and sack its 700 employees. But media workers fought back — and saved the agency from being shuttered.
Left-winger Gabriel Boric became Chile’s president two years ago on a wave of popular mobilization. But with a constitutional rewrite in tatters, plans to reform the country’s privatized pension system pose a tough test of his ability to make lasting changes.
Paris’s flashy new venues for the 2024 Olympics depend on the rather less glamorous labor of undocumented migrant workers. Their recent strike action showed how much the Games depend on them — and won them the right to regular migration status.
A new security law from Emmanuel Macron’s government will roll out an AI-based biometric categorization system. The law is billed as a measure for the 2024 Paris Olympics — but also allows a vast expansion of intrusive surveillance.
Emmanuel Macron promised he’d shorten France’s two-million-long waiting list for public housing. But the promised construction boom hasn’t materialized — and even poorly maintained housing is becoming ever more unaffordable.
Emmanuel Macron promised to end homelessness in his first year in office — but over his five-year term, it actually increased. Now, with the Left leading polls for June’s parliamentary elections, Macron’s failure on housing is coming back to haunt him.
French Communist Party leader Fabien Roussel is running for the presidency — and even polling ahead of the long-powerful Socialists. But a campaign heavy on identity also shows that the old workers’ parties are struggling to speak to a changed working class.