Gentle readers, afoe’s backend has been updated to the latest wordpress. So far, the transition seems to have worked well. Over the next couple of days, the frontend will also receive a little facelift - and make the site a little faster. So, in case you’ve got the feeling that something doesn’t work as it [...]

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The French are still making up their mind [Update - they have made up their mind: Nicolas Sarkozy has been elected President - more soon]. Once again in record numbers - the only official figures released so far estimate the voter turnout at noon at 34,11%, the highest number since 1974, apparently. One winner of [...]

Style is clearly more important than substance in Presidential debates. Unfortunately, after 45 minutes of speaking time for each candidate, I was, quite frankly, very disappointed on both accounts. Neither Ségolène Royal nor Nicolas Sarkozy were able to present coherent arguments of their respective programmes. Instead, they kept constantly interrupting each other, Royal more so [...]

If the weather in France is even remotely as warm and sunny as it is here in South-West Germany today, I have doubts tonight’s televised debate between Ségolène Royal and Nicolas Sarkozy will be able to get 86% turnout yet again. Still, if you would like to tune in to the debate, but you don’t [...]

The first issue of a new pan European magazine - Indigo - is available online in English, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Polish, and Italian. According to the German VISDP magazine, Indigo’s publishers want to put the magazine’s content on paper eventually. Collaborating with CafeBabel, the magazine is apparently primarily targeting the twenty/thirty-somethings of “Generation RyanAir”. [...]

The Globalist’s Stephan Richter weighs the pros and cons, difficulties and opportunities of an increased German military involvement in Southern Aghanistan and comes to the - in my opinion correct - conclusion that increased combat participation is much less a domestic policy problem than it is usually thought to be.
It’s a tricky question because [...]

It’s too bad that Wordpress seems to break HTML in the title field - so I can’t use a modest Roman numeral to indicate that it’s you! Yes, you, reader from pol.co.uk, who clicked on a link in your google reader at 2:32 am CET, who is the one millionth sitemetered unique visitor to A [...]

History is an important participant in French politics. As, for example, François Hincker, notes, the lasting impact of the French Revolution on the contemporary French polity can never be underestimated - „[c]ertes, [...] que l’essentiel de la France con¬tem¬poraine sortit d’elle est une idée dont la banalité n’efface pas la vérité.“ (François Hincker, La [...]

It’s interesting that Emmanuel’s remarks about biased statistics about the French economy in Anglophone publications led to some comments trying to asses the extent to which France is perceived as “the other”, at least as far as “the West” is concerned. There have always been claims about a natural rivalry of the two main “universalist” [...]