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Euro Political Revolt Teaches Asia a Lesson - Paul Donovan, Jakarta Post

Elections should not be viewed as votes on a single issue. Greece has not voted to reject the Euro. France has not voted to change its relationship with the rest of the eurozone....

France Is in Worse Shape Than It Seems - Globe and Mail

Less than 12 hours after taking office, President François Hollande, France's first Socialist leader in 17 years, headed to Berlin and his first meeting with conservative Ge...

For Iran 'Breakthrough,' Coalition Must Survive - Vali Nasr, Bloomberg

To Iran, this is all welcome news: The international alliance against its nuclear program is losing focus and may unravel. Almost certainly, there will be no further sanctions, and...

Iran Mulling Reset of Relations with West - Kaveh Afrasiabi, Asia Times

In the current tumult of diplomatic maneuvers ahead of the crucial Baghdad talks on Tehran's nuclear program between Iran and the P5+1 nations scheduled for May 23, reflected in m...

How Hollande Should Handle Merkel - Charles Grant, CER

The election of François Hollande as French president has excited some of those who blame Germany's emphasis on fiscal austerity for many of the eurozone's ills. Holl...

France's Gaullist Foreign Policy - George Friedman, Stratfor

Although Sarkozy went as a committed ally of Germany, Hollande will not necessarily be predisposed to German solutions for Europe's problems. This is somewhat startling in post-C...

France Can't Go Back to Utopia - Guy Sorman, Project Syndicate

In Hollande’s case, the rare glimpses of a comprehensive vision recall France’s successful social democracy of the 1960’s: a strong welfare state, together with...

Will Hollande Change France's Europe Policy? - IRSN

Although the new French president, Socialist François Hollande, will not introduce great changes in France's European policy, his election may lead to its re-evaluation. Whe...

President Hollande's Great Expectations - The Economist

The new French president may be more open to austerity, and less able to bring a change of course in Europe, than his public expects....

Euro Failing Because It's a Stupid Idea - Tim Worstall, Daily Telegraph

The euro is doomed to fall apart: no, not because I'm some nasty man in UKIP but because the basic idea was such a terrible one. Our chart above (from JP Morgan Asset Managemen...

Hollande and Putin: More Headaches for Obama - Nikolas Gvosdev, TNI

The election of François Hollande as president of France on Sunday and the inauguration of Vladimir Putin as Russia’s “new-old” president on Monday present the Obama admini...

Will Socialists Reshape France, Europe? - Michel Rocard, Project Syndicate

PARIS – France has now conducted its ninth presidential election under direct universal suffrage. And, for the first time in 17 years, after three consecutive defeats, the left ...

Can France's National Front Move to the Middle? - Marco Vicenzino, Forbes

Re-branding the NF at some stage during this evolution is key to expanding the party's base and attracting more mainstream voters. From a policy perspective, the NF's main challe...

New Documents Shine Light on Euro's Birth Defects - Der Spiegel

It was shortly before his departure to Brussels when the chancellor was overpowered by the sheer magnitude of the moment. Helmut Kohl said that the "weight of history" would becom...

Economic Bloodbath Looms for France - George Walden, Daily Telegraph

When the last French socialist president, Francois Mitterrand, was preparing for victory, it was my job as a diplomat to accompany him on a trip to London to call on Jim Callaghan....

Death of Europe Is America's Opportunity - Arthur Herman, Fox News

Elections Sunday in France and Greece prove once and for all that the European Union is headed off the cliff, and its voters don’t care. In the short term, that’s going to m...

What Hollande Must Tell Germany - Martin Wolf, Financial Times

What might Mr. Hollande do? First, he is going to have to forget almost all of his domestic promises, not only because they are not going to help France, but also because German ...

Europe Reaches for Simpler and Uglier Solutions - The Guardian

Democracy matters. When Brussels or Berlin loses sight of that simple fact, voters reach for simpler and uglier solutions....

Hollande Must Betray Supporters to Save Them - Clive Crook, Bloomberg

French voters are deluding themselves if they think the man they just elected president offers a viable alternative to the departing Nicolas Sarkozy. Francois Hollande’s soci...

French Vote a Symbol of Europe's Decline - Nile Gardiner, Daily Telegraph

Nicolas Sarkozy’s defeat at the hands of French Socialist leader Francois Hollande has sent shock waves throughout Europe, and will significantly challenge the fragile austerity...

Greek Crisis Will Expose Hollande - Gideon Rachman, Financial Times

Faced with a choice between supporting Greece and supporting Germany, the French are almost certain to go with supporting the Germans....

Obama: Pay Attention to Europe - Christopher Dickey, The Daily Beast

As this weekends elections showed, mainstream parties are losing ground to extreme politicians....

Can a Pragmatic Socialist Save the Euro Project? - The Guardian

The arrival of a pragmatic pro-European socialist could be the last chance to save the euro and the European project....

France's Left Turn - National Review

Francois Hollande has become the newly elected president of France more by luck than by any quality he might possess. Almost anonymous, he has no ministerial experience. His plat...

France Takes the Easy Way Out - Timothy Smith, Globe and Mail

By electing a president who asks nothing of them, the people of France have again absolved themselves of responsibility for a broken social model, this time with global implicati...

Extremism in Europe - Jerusalem Post

Extremist parties on both the far-Left and the far-Right are on the rise, apparently exploiting the economic turmoil that has swept across the debt-ridden continent....

No Easy Alternative to Austerity in Europe - Daily Telegraph

Resolving the eurozone crisis is dependent on the continuing willingness of Germany to bail out struggling economies. That in turn depends on the austerity measures that are ...

Zzzzzzz, Hollande - Danielle Pletka & Gary Schmitt, American Enterprise Inst.

As predicted, Francois Hollande, Socialist, ousted French incumbent President Nicolas Sarkozy Sunday in French elections. In the larger sense, France, like the rest of Europe's...

France Braces for Round Three - Amir Taheri, New York Post

Now to the third round! This was the battle cry across the French political spectrum yesterday, even as the threat of months of uncertainty loomed. The third round, of course, is...

France, Greece and the End of the Euro - Jeremy Warner, Daily Telegraph

In France, and in Greece, the anti-austerity backlash has achieved a double victory this weekend, bringing closer the point at which the euro breaks asunder. Continued German sup...

Hollande: An Uncommitted Socialist - Guy Sorman, City Journal

The French have just confirmed their political creativity. In other Western democracies, a presidential election leads to the clear-cut victory of one candidate over another, along...

France Votes for Years of Decline - Richard Waghorne, Daily Mail

Flags of the French Communist Party were visible in numbers at Place de la Bastille on Sunday night, the symbolically-charged location of Socialist François Hollande’s victory r...

The Challenge for Hollande - Roland Hsu, Le Monde Diplomatique

The French have voted for François Hollande as their next president. Behind their choice was the important question of trust. In the US, opinion polls often ask voters wheth...

The Change France Needs - The Guardian

François Hollande won a stunning victory, not just for himself, as a man who spent much of his career in the shadow of others, nor for France, but for the left in Europe, to...

End of the Franco-German Partnership? - Max Fisher, The Atlantic

This is not to say that France and Germany are moving, or will move, anywhere near their historic depth of enmity. The world has changed too much in the last 70 years; the end of c...

Hollande's Stimulus Alternative - Council on Foreign Relations

Socialist candidate Francois Hollande handily defeated the incumbent president, Nicolas Sarkozy, in yesterday's French election. The Socialists have reclaimed the presidency after ...

Don't Strangle Europe with Austerity - Gerhard Schroder, CS Monitor

The emergence of a united Europe is a process that has been going on for decades, characterized by progress but also by setbacks. There have been crises again and again in the hist...

Europe's Extremists Go Mainstream - Anne Applebaum, Slate

Another week, another European government falls by the wayside — and in each recent case the center was defeated by the extremes, or by what used to be the extremes before they c...

Will End of Austerity Break Up Eurozone? - Patrick Smith, Fiscal Times

With the elections in France and Greece Sunday, both supercharged by debt, deficits, and economic desperation, Europe is about to take a dramatic new direction. The eurozone is ...

U.S. Will Have to Rescue Europe, Again - Arthur Herman, The Corner

Europe is dying, right along with socialism and Obama-ism. The election results yesterday prove that Europe’s voters don’t know they’re committing suicide — or don’t ca...

Pragmatic Merkel Will Work with Hollande - Philip Oltermann, Guardian

Angela Merkel isn't due to meet François Hollande for the first time until next week, but she must think she already knows him fairly well. Otherwise her senior diplomats wouldn...

French Are Globalizers, Not the Globalized - Doug Saunders, Globe and Mail

I’ve spent the week in cobblestoned squares, listening to French presidential candidates argue that their country’s way of life is threatened by forces from beyond its ...

France's Turn for the Worse - Yacha Mounk, Slate

On Sunday, by almost every indication, François Hollande, who has been leading in the polls for months, will defeat Nicolas Sarkozy and become France’s next president....

Joy of French Socialists Will Be Short-Lived - Ben Brogan, Daily Telegraph

Fear of the mob drives French politics, and has done since 1789. Tomorrow night the French Left will gather in their thousands at the Bastille to celebrate what they are certain wi...

Hollande's Dangerous Exceptionalism - Josef Joffe, Financial Times

Will French exceptionalism live on past May 6? Here is a scenario built around a Hollande victory. As a young staffer for Mitterrand, he witnessed what his mentor wrought. Makin...

France

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Seeds of EU's Crisis Sown 60 Years Ago

Europe Needs a Global Rescue

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Europe's Latin Bloc Is in Revolt

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