The Latest Breaking News from De Gaulle

Top French officials, including French President Charles de Gaulle, sought to conduct atmospheric nuclear tests in the Algerian Sahara following the former French colony’s independence in 1962. These plans, described in recently declassified French documents, never came to fruition. If they had, they would have violated a request made several…

Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said geopolitics today requires “Nixonian flexibility” to help defuse conflicts between the U.S. and China as well as between Russia and the rest of Europe.

The French election showed how electoral systems shape politics. In the UK, abandoning first past the post could be transformative, says Guardian columnist Martin Kettle

Rising in the polls, the French election’s dark horse Jean-Luc Mélenchon has promised a reboot of the French Republic, vowing to overhaul a presidential regime that he blames for mounting abstention, disillusion and increasingly violent protests.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has pushed world affairs to the forefront of France’s presidential race, upending a campaign in which three of the five leading candidates are staunch critics of the US-led transatlantic alliance.

In the history of French presidential elections under the Fifth Republic, no candidate has ever managed to gather more than 50% of the votes in the first round of voting and accede to power without having to get through a second round.