With him, it’s a return to the lost paradise of the wide-open spaces of the American West. An armed sheriff leading his caravan, the Republican candidate surfs on the vertigo of a disoriented America.
From Joe Biden’s resignation on 21 July to the vote on 5 November: the Vice-President of the United States will have had just a hundred days to campaign. Kamala Devi Harris, 60, the daughter of a Jamaican economist and an Indian scientist, and a former prosecutor in California, is caricatured by her Trumpist opponents as “a leftist” and by the wokes as “a cop”. The reality is that of a pragmatic centrist, admittedly not very charismatic, but hard-working and honest. This, in the face of the freewheeling bulldozer that is Trump, can convince and reassure undecided voters….
When she was 20, Kamala Harris joined the Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA) sorority, which belongs to the vast black network of the Divine Nine. Little did she realise that, several decades later, this would be one of her major assets in her bid to defeat Donald Trump on 5 November.
The contrast between the slender, refined Kamala Harris and the imposing, temperamental and excessive Donald Trump is striking. It is the head-on collision of two Americas that nothing – or almost nothing – can reconcile.
At the end of the 1950s, Saïd Ramadan, the son-in-law of Hassan al-Banna (founder of the Muslim Brotherhood) fled Egypt and chose Geneva to set out to conquer the West. His son Hani has headed the Islamic Centre of Geneva (ICG) since 1995. His brother Tariq was the best-known French-speaking Muslim on the planet, before vice scandals toppled him in 2017. Even today, the city of Calvin is still largely under the thumb of the Ramadan family. But there was a dramatic turn of events on September 10, 2024. While Tariq Ramadan had been acquitted in May 2023 at first instance, he was sentenced on appeal to three years in prison, including one year in prison, for rape and sexual coercion.
Faced with the risk of a National Rally victory, which would have brought the far right to power, the salvation came from a republican mobilisation rallying all democrats. The tremendous public outburst on 7 July curbed the ambitions of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella. Except that the “glass ceiling” is coming up against an ever-increasing number of cleavages that are likely, in time, to hamper this “cordon sanitaire” designed to keep the far right out of the Republican arc.
They have taken hostage the beautiful rallying cry of the Spanish Republicans during the civil war from 1936 to 1939: “No pasaran” (“They shall not pass”). That’s the title a score of rappers dared to give to an infamous video intended to mobilise against the National Rally. Under the guise of calling young people to their duty as citizens, these brilliant artists, anxious – they tell the gogos – to “get back to the essence of rap”, pour out ten minutes of calls for hatred, murder, rape and pogroms. As unbearable as it is to even mention these rants, here are a few that are more akin to the courts than to a “rather exciting variety of angles”, as Libération swoons.
Abnousse Shalmani’s fifth book, based on her powerful speech at the Prix de laïcité held at Paris City Hall on 8 November, takes an in-depth look at her love of secularism.
20 months after a 33-year-old fatwa issued against him by Ayatollah Khomeini in February 1989, accusing him of blasphemy against Islam in his novel The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie is back. Stronger and more alive than ever. And, good news, he has lost none of his legendary sense of humour.
In his new book, Croire et agir (Plon, 2024), writer, aviator and sailor Patrice Franceschi invites us to put an end to what he calls “European impotence”. For the adventurous philosopher, our political future lies in a federal Europe.