With the death of Pope Francis, the world loses not only a church leader but also a moral compass
Can the French left unite to take on Macron?
La France Insoumise, the Greens, the communists and the PS are seeking to forge a broad alliance for next month’s parliamentary polls, hoping to force the president into ‘cohabitation’ with a left prime minister. NICK WRIGHT sizes up the political landscape

THE rough outcome of the French presidential election was the differentiation of the French nation into three distinct electoral blocs.
President Emmanuel Macron is the figurehead of the nominally centre right, wedded to neoliberalism, the Atlantic alliance and the EU, often socially liberal but invariably invested in the the property-owning myths and trickle-down idiocies of modern capitalist ideology.
Macron assembled a media-managed machine to incorporate the neoliberal elite and thus rendered both the traditional Gaullist party, now rebranded as Les Republicains, and the Socialist Party (PS) redundant as instruments for the rule of capital.
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