Foreign News
What just happened in France’s shock election?
Nobody expected this. High drama, for sure, but this was a shock.
When the graphics flashed up on all the big French channels, it was not the far right of Marine Le Pen and her young prime minister-in-waiting Jordan Bardella who were on course for victory.
It was the left who had clinched it, and Emmanuel Macron’s centrists had staged an unexpected comeback, pushing the far-right National Rally (RN) into third.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the veteran left-wing firebrand seen by his critics as an extremist, wasted no time in proclaiming victory. “The president must call on the New Popular Front to govern,” he told supporters in Stalingrad square, insisting Mr Macron had to recognise that he and his coalition had lost.
His alliance, drawn up in a hurry for President Macron’s surprise election, includes his own radical France Unbowed, along with Greens, Socialists and Communists and even Trotskyists. But their victory is nowhere big enough to govern.
France is going to have a hung parliament. None of the three blocs can form an outright majority by themselves of 289 seats in the 577-seat parliament.
As soon as he had spoken, Mr Mélenchon went off to a much bigger square, Place de la République, to celebrate his success with a crowd of 8,000 people, according to police numbers.
For National Rally’s supporters the champagne was fast turning flat at their celebration-gone-wrong in the Bois de Vincennes forest to the south-west of Paris.
Only a week ago all the talk had been of a possible absolute majority, and Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella were still talking up their chances a couple of days before the vote.
Marine Le Pen put a brave face on it. “Two years ago we had just seven MPs. Tonight RN is the first party in France in terms of MP numbers.” In the last parliament they had 88 MPs and now more than 140, so she was right. And no other party has more than 100 MPs, because the Macronists and the Popular Front are both coalitions.
Jordan Bardella complained that his party had been foiled by unnatural “alliances of dishonour”, forged by a “single party” made up of the Macron camp and the left. He wasn’t wrong about the unnatural alliance, but it is only a temporary one of convenience.
More than 200 candidates who saw themselves as part of a “republican front”, pulled out of the second round so that a better-placed rival could stop RN winning.
Not even Marine Le Pen’s younger sister, Marie-Caroline, was able to offer a glimmer of good news from her own election battle around Le Mans. Her bid to get into parliament failed by just 225 votes, defeated by Mr Mélenchon’s candidate, Elise Leboucher, after the Macron candidate dropped out.
Turnout, at 66.63%, was the highest in a parliamentary second round since 1997. Even if RN’s vote held up, this time it was having to contend with non-RN votes often being used tactically to create a “barrage” or block against them.
All over France, RN was losing run-offs it needed to win.
Some of their candidates were less than appealing.
There was the woman who promised to stop making racist jokes if she was elected in Puy-de-Dôme; and then there was the ill-equipped young man in Haute-Savoie in the south-east who took part in a TV debate with his centrist rival and made barely any sense on anything.
They both lost, but they reflected RN’s big advance in rural areas.
RN scored 32% of the vote – 37% with their right-wing allies – and for more than 10 million voters a taboo has been broken.
In Meaux, east of Paris, RN won but not by much.
After casting her vote, Claudine said people she knew tended not to admit to voting RN, unless they were with close friends.
Before the projected result at 8pm, there was fevered speculation about whether President Macron would come out and speak. Word spread that he had gone into a meeting 90 minutes earlier.
Gabriel Attal, his beleaguered prime minister, eventually appeared to give the government’s response.
Four weeks ago, he had sat stony-faced and arms folded opposite the president as Mr Macron revealed his election plan.
Now he announced he would be handing his boss his resignation in the morning, but he would stay on as long as duty called.
Mr Attal is supposed to fly off on Tuesday evening to a Nato meeting in Washington. It’s hard to imagine him being replaced just yet.
France has entered a period of political instability with no obvious way out. There had been talk of unrest on the streets, but only a handful of incidents were reported in Paris and cities including Nantes and Lyon,
All eyes are now on the president, who will have to navigate a way out of this deadlock.
The new National Assembly is due to convene in 10 days’ time, but the Paris Olympics starts on 26 July and France could do with a period of calm.
Left-leaning newspaper Libération summed up the whole night with the headline C’est Ouf.
“It’s crazy,” in colloquial French, but for them it’s also a relief that voters brought RN’s bid for power to a halt.
[BBC]
United States President Donald Trump has pledged there will be no tolls for passage through the Strait of Hormuz, unless they are collected by his own country.
Trump’s statement, made in a Saturday afternoon post on Truth Social, is the latest sign that a recently signed memorandum of understanding (MOU) may be unravelling.
“There will be NO TOLLS in the Hormuz Strait for 60 days during the Cease Fire Period, and there will be NO TOLLS after the 60 day period has expired,” Trump wrote, “unless they are imposed by and for the United States of America.”
Since the US and Israel launched a war against Iran on February 28, Iran has successfully used the Strait of Hormuz as a pressure point, closing the strategic waterway to traffic.
But under the terms of Wednesday’s ceasefire memorandum, the strait is supposed to reopen for an interim period of 60 days. During that time, Iran is barred from charging vessels for passage.
On Saturday, however, Iran’s joint military command said it had closed the Strait of Hormuz, citing a “clear breach” of the memorandum’s commitments.
US Central Command (CENTCOM), the agency that oversees military operations in the region, denied that report and maintained that the traffic continues to flow through the waterway.
The Strait of Hormuz has long been a flashpoint in the conflict between the US and Iran. Nearly 20 percent of the world’s oil and natural gas is transported through the strait, as well as about 30 percent of the global fertiliser trade.
Closure of the strait has caused global fuel costs to soar and has tested agricultural sectors across the world.
Trump had responded to Iran’s chokehold over the strait by imposing a US naval blockade on Iran’s ports in the region.
But that naval blockade was lifted under the terms of Wednesday’s memorandum. The deal also paused fighting on all fronts in the regional conflict, including in Lebanon.
The memorandum, though, was not intended as a long-term deal. It serves as a launching point for negotiations on key issues, including the future of Iran’s nuclear programme.
Several points of divergence also went unaddressed in the memorandum. Nowhere does the memo say that future tolls cannot be collected from the strait after the 60-day period expires.
Before the war, there was no charge for passage through the strait. Trump himself said in an interview with The New York Times that the waterway should remain “permanently toll-free”.
But he appeared to reverse course in Saturday’s post, once again floating the possibility that the US could extract tolls in the strait, while barring Iran from doing so.
No fees should be levied, Trump wrote, “unless they are imposed by and for the United States of America, should the deal not be completed”.
He explained that such a charge would compensate the US “for services rendered as the Guardian Angel to the countries of the Middle East for purposes of both past, present, and future reimbursement of costs”.
Trump used similar language in his New York Times interview earlier this week, floating the US becoming “the guardian of the Middle East” in exchange for 20 percent of its revenue.
Saturday’s post is not the first time Trump has mused about the US imposing tolls in the strait, either.
In April, for instance, he discussed the idea with reporters, saying, “What about us charging tolls? I’d rather do that than let them have them. Why shouldn’t we? We’re the winner. We won.”
There has been no indication that Trump’s plans have been officially presented to countries in the region, many of whom have struck a careful balance in their dealings with both the US and Iran during the war.
Iranian officials, meanwhile, have repeatedly said they will not rule out imposing tolls in the strait, framing the issue as a matter of sovereignty and regional negotiation. The strait sits between Iran and Oman.
Further discussions are expected on the matter in the coming weeks.
But such negotiations have been thrown into jeopardy amid ongoing Israeli military operations in Lebanon, which threaten to violate Wednesday’s ceasefire memorandum.
Iran claimed that Saturday’s closure of the strait was a result of new Israeli attacks in southern Lebanon, which killed dozens of people after the ceasefire was announced.
[Aljazeera]
The US government says it will stop funding programmes in South Africa intended to tackle the spread of HIV and Aids.
More than eight million South Africans are living with HIV – the highest number of any country in the world.
The US State Department appeared to link the decision to South Africa’s alleged failure to protect the white-minority Afrikaner community – an allegation the South African government has repeatedly rejected.
South Africa’s health ministry responded by saying that though it had not been informed of this decision, it had “long been working on a self-reliance plan”.
Until 2025, the US was supporting South Africa’s efforts to deal with the virus with an estimated $400m (£300m) a year through the President’s Emergency Fund for Aids Relief (Pepfar).
But since the inauguration of President Donald Trump, relations between the two countries have increasingly soured.
Shortly after he came into office, Trump issued an executive order alleging that “countless” South African policies dismantled equal opportunities and fuelled violence “against racially disfavored landowners”.
This is disputed by the South African government, which says its Black Economic Empowerment policy is needed to correct economic inequality dating from the apartheid era.
The executive order also highlighted South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice and its links to Iran.
The White House said that given these “unjust and immoral practices”, further aid to South Africa would not be provided.
Trump has also falsely alleged that there is a “white genocide” taking place in South Africa, which has led to the administration setting up a refugee programme for Afrikaners – descendants of western Europeans who settled in southern Africa in the 17th Century. They are now just about the only refugees being allowed into the US.
The genocide claim has been widely discredited.
Pepfar funding, which had been providing about a fifth of South Africa’s total spending on HIV programmes, got a reprieve last October with what was called a “bridge plan”.
But a US State Department official has confirmed that a “phased drawdown” of Pepfar funding would now start.
This was because of “South Africa’s failure to make demonstrable progress on policy requests by the administration”, the official said.
The intention of the US government was to “foster self-reliance” and reduce dependency on American funding, they added, pointing out that “South Africa is a middle-income country and is more than capable of supporting its own health programs”.
South Africa’s health ministry has said that while Pepfar contributed to the country’s HIV programme, the provision of life-saving antiretroviral drugs was funded entirely separately, with most coming from the government.
Attempts to mend US-South Africa relations have floundered. These include a high profile White House meeting between Trump and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa just over a year ago when the US president confronted his counterpart with his claims of white persecution.
The US also boycotted the G20 meeting, a gathering of the world’s major economies, hosted by South Africa last November.
[BBC]
At least nine people remain in critical condition after two passenger trains crashed into each other and killed one driver near Bedford, about 56 miles (90km) north of London.
British Transport Police said on Saturday that more than 80 people had received hospital treatment on Friday night after the trains collided.
“As of this morning, 28 remain in hospital, and nine are in a critical condition,” Chief Constable Lucy D’Orsi said.
She added that “specialist investigators from British Transport Police are working with colleagues at the Rail Accident Investigation Branch (RAIB) to gather the facts and determine what has happened”.
Moreover, Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said that it was “too early to speculate” on the cause of the crash, and promised that “a thorough investigation … to ensure that lessons are learnt” would be launched.
Friday’s crash involved two London-bound trains on the same track, according to East Midlands Railway (EMR), which operates both services.
On Friday, police confirmed that the driver of one of the trains had died at the scene.
In a statement from Buckingham Palace, King Charles said he was “greatly saddened” by the incident and sent “his thoughts and sympathies” to the dead driver’s family and to those injured.
The East of England Ambulance Service said on Saturday that 11 people sustained “very serious” injuries, while a further 32 suffered serious wounds and 56 others had minor injuries.
EMR’s managing director, Will Rogers, also called the crash “a profoundly sad day for the railway community”.
“We are deeply saddened that our driver has tragically died, and a number of other people have suffered injuries,” he said, speaking at the scene alongside other officials.
He added that EMR was “fully supporting” the RAIB probe.
More than 20 ambulances, specialist hazardous area rescue teams and six air ambulances were dispatched to the scene of Friday’s crash.
While the investigation continues, officials have not said whether signalling issues played a role in the incident.
[Aljazeera]
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