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POLITICS

Truce or not? France and UK at odds after crunch talks

France and Britain offered wildly differing accounts after their leaders met Sunday to resolve a row over post-Brexit fishing rights that threatens to turn into a full-blown trade war.

(From L) Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the Trevi fountain in central Rome
(From L) Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the Trevi fountain in central Rome on October 31st, 2021. France and Britain's takes on the outcome of fishing rights talks between their respective leaders are poles apart. Andreas SOLARO / AFP

President Emmanuel Macron’s office was optimistic after the French leader met Prime Minister Boris Johnson one-on-one, without aides, for about half an hour on the margins of the G20 summit in Rome.

The leaders agreed to work on “practical and operational measures” to resolve the dispute in the coming days, the office said.

They were united on the need for a “de-escalation” with concrete action “as soon as possible” it added, a day after Macron and Johnson gave each other friendly pats on the back at the G20.

But Downing Street denied any such agreement, and insisted it was up to Paris to back down on a threat to trigger trade reprisals against British fishing catches and other goods from Tuesday.

As the leaders met, the threat of “proportionate and reversible measures” against Britain was reaffirmed on Twitter Sunday by French Europe minister Clement Beaune.

 “If the French government want to come forward with proposals to de-escalate the threats they have made, we would absolutely welcome them,” Johnson’s spokesman told reporters in Rome.

“Our position has not changed,” he said.

France is incensed that Britain and the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey have not issued some French boats licences to fish in their waters since Brexit took full effect at the start of 2021.

The dispute has taken time out of both leaders’ packed schedules when they are both working hard on the climate change agenda heading into the UN’s COP26 meeting in Glasgow.

Johnson will host more than 120 leaders at a COP26 summit on Monday and Tuesday, and has repeatedly said that Britain, France and the EU as a whole need to stay focused on the existential threat.

‘Not helpful’ 
“France is a longstanding ally. It was an open meeting. They had a lot to discuss,” Johnson’s spokesman said.

But he stressed the UK would continue to process applications by French and other EU fishing vessels to ply its waters based solely on technical data.

“We stand ready to work with the French government and individual fishermen if they have the requisite data. There’s no further work to be done.”

Johnson’s own focus in the Macron meeting was on persuading the EU to amend a post-Brexit protocol governing trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the spokesman added.

And he said a strongly worded letter from French Prime Minister Jean Castex, urging EU chief Ursula von der Leyen to punish Britain over Brexit, was “not helpful”.

On Saturday in Rome, Johnson complained to von der Leyen that the French threats were “completely unjustified”.

London is warning it could activate a Brexit dispute tool for the first time, exposing all of the EU to potential UK trade measures, if France executes its threatened actions on Tuesday.

Paris had vowed that unless more licences are approved, it would ban UK boats from unloading their catches at French ports, and even impose checks on all products brought to France from Britain.

For his part, Macron warned Friday that Britain’s “credibility” was on the line, accusing London of ignoring the Brexit trade deal agreed with Brussels after years of tortuous negotiations.

“When you spend years negotiating a treaty and then a few months later you do the opposite of what was decided on the aspects that suit you the least, it is not a big sign of your credibility,” he told the Financial Times.

Both the UK and French governments have been intensifying their angry rhetoric in recent weeks, and France last week detained a British trawler that was allegedly fishing illegally in its waters.

The two sides have also been at loggerheads over a nuclear submarine alliance involving Australia, Britain and the United States, dubbed AUKUS, that left France in the cold.

READ ALSO: ANALYSIS: Why the new fishing row between France and UK could get nasty

READ ALSO: EXPLAINED: Why are France and the UK fighting about fish?

Member comments

  1. It only takes one party to say there’s no agreement and there’s no agreement. Bit peculiar to pretend otherwise.

    1. Yet the other evening they were all gorging on a feast Louis XIV would be jealous of along, of course, with their hangers on whoops wives. Isn’t it about time people woke up to the fact all this bravado is being played out for the British guttersnipe press whilst the court jester and Macron are glad-handing and their wives are out shopping.

  2. how do i ensure that i am registered to continue receiving The Local please. I am being told regularly my membership has expired but not able to renew.

    Richard Bill
    363 Promenade de Coty, 46000 Cahors, France 33 565212007

    [email protected]

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FRENCH ELECTIONS

French election breakdown: TV clash, polling latest and ‘poo’ Le Pen

From the polls latest to the first big TV election clash, via a lot of questions about the French Constitution and the president's future - here's the situation 17 days on from Emmanuel Macron's shock election announcement.

French election breakdown: TV clash, polling latest and 'poo' Le Pen

During the election period we will be publishing a bi-weekly ‘election breakdown’ to help you keep up with the latest developments. You can receive these as an email by going to the newsletter section here and selecting subscribe to ‘breaking news alerts’.

It’s now been 17 days since Macron’s surprise call for snap parliamentary elections, and four days until the first round of voting.

TV debates

The hotly-anticipated first TV debate of the election on Tuesday night turned out to be an ill-tempered affair with a lot of interruptions and men talking over each other.

The line of the night went to the left representative Manuel Bompard – who otherwise struggled to make much of an impact – when he told far-right leader Jordan Bardella (whose Italian ancestors migrated to France several generations back): “When your personal ancestors arrived in France, your political ancestors said exactly the same thing to them. I find that tragic.”

But perhaps the biggest question of all is whether any of this matters? The presidential election debate between Macron and Marine Le Pen back in 2017 is widely credited with influencing the campaign as Macron exposed her contradictory policies and economic illiteracy.

However a debate ahead of the European elections last month between Bardella and prime minister Gabriel Attal was widely agreed to have been ‘won’ by Attal, who also managed to expose flaws and contradictions in the far right party’s policies. Nevertheless, the far-right went on to convincingly beat the Macronists at the polls.

Has the political scene simply moved on so that Bardella’s brief and fact-light TikTok videos convince more people than a two-hour prime-time TV debate?

You can hear the team from The Local discussing all the election latest on the Talking France podcast – listen here or on the link below

Road to chaos

Just over two weeks ago when Macron called this election, he intended to call the bluff of the French electorate – did they really want a government made up of Marine Len Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party?

Well, latest polling suggests that a large portion of French people want exactly that, and significantly fewer people want to continue with a Macron government.

With the caveat that pollsters themselves say this is is a difficult election to call, current polling suggests RN would take 35 percent of the vote, the leftist alliance Nouveau Front Populaire 30 percent and Macron’s centrists 20 percent.

This is potentially bad news for everyone, as those figures would give no party an overall majority in parliament and would instead likely usher in an era of political chaos.

The questions discussed in French conversation and media have now moved on from ‘who will win the election?’ to distinctly more technical concerns like – what exactly does the Constitution say about the powers of a president without a government? Can France have a ‘caretaker government’ in the long term? Is it time for a 6th republic?.

The most over-used phrase in French political discourse this week? Sans précédent (unprecedented).

Démission

From sans précédent to sans président – if this election leads to total chaos, will Macron resign? It’s certainly being discussed, but he says he will not.

For citizens of many European parliamentary democracies it seems virtually automatic that the president would resign if he cannot form a government, but the French system is very different and several French presidents have continued in post despite being obliged to appoint an opponent as prime minister.

READ ALSO Will Macron resign in case of an election disaster?

The only president of the Fifth Republic to resign early was Charles de Gaulle – the trigger was the failure of a referendum on local government, but it may be that he was simply fed up; he was 78 years old and had already been through an attempted coup and the May 1968 general strike which paralysed the country. He died a year after leaving office.

Caca craft

She might be riding high in the polls, but not everyone is enamoured of Le Pen, it seems, especially not in ‘lefty’ eastern Paris – as seen by this rather neatly crafted Marine Le Pen flag stuck into a lump of dog poo left on the pavement.

Thanks to spotter Helen Massy-Beresford, who saw this in Paris’s 20th arrondissement.

You can find all the latest election news HERE, or sign up to receive these election breakdowns as an email by going to the newsletter section here and selecting subscribe to ‘breaking news alerts’.

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