France Faces Colonial Reckonings, Media Suspension in Niger

France spent Sunday looking outward at the Sahel and inward at how its political class wants to talk to allies, opponents and the heirs of its empire. The single hardest fact came from Niamey, where the junta suspended nine French media organisations — AFP, France 24, RFI, France Afrique Media, LSI Africa, TV5 Monde, TF1 Info, Jeune Afrique and Mediapart — without citing examples of the broadcasts it deemed unacceptable. Reporters Without Borders called the order "abusive" and based on "fabricated charges" and tied it to a coordinated press-freedom rollback across the Russia-aligned Alliance of Sahel States, days after Burkina Faso made a parallel move against TV5 Monde. The decision lands days before Emmanuel Macron travels to anglophone Kenya for a summit on a postcolonial Africa policy that none of the AES governments will attend, and arrives as Mali's junta and its Russian auxiliaries continue to lose ground to a Tuareg-Islamist offensive that has already cost Mali its defence minister.

At home, the National Rally's foreign-relations rebrand became visible. Bardella met the German ambassador in February; Le Pen sat down with the Israeli ambassador last month — the party's first such meeting — as the RN tries to shed its antisemitic legacy ahead of 2027 with the polls running in its favour. The pivot was answered, in a different register, by Renew MEP and Horizons national secretary Nathalie Loiseau, who told Franceinfo it would be "imprudent" to believe Vladimir Putin's claim that the war in Ukraine is winding down — pointing to a May 9 parade she called "cut-rate," with little hardware on Red Square and the audience visibly thin.

Domestic politics ran a parallel economic track. La France Insoumise coordinator Manuel Bompard argued on Sunday that nationalising TotalEnergies is "perfectly conceivable" and would be "extremely profitable" for the state at an estimated €70 billion against a €174 billion market capitalisation, citing €100 billion in dividends paid out over the past decade and a record company profit at the centre of the French cost-of-living debate.

On Paris streets, the prefecture's first ban on a Comité du 9-Mai far-right march since 2008 — upheld by the Administrative Court — produced 47 arrests as both the C9M group and an antifascist counter-demonstration tried to take ground in central Paris and clashes with riot police followed.

Parliament closed the day on a longer-running file. Both chambers unanimously adopted legislation removing the requirement for an individual statute on each restitution, enabling faster returns of artworks and artifacts looted during the 1815-1972 colonial era to states including Algeria, Mali and Benin. The law makes good on a 2017 Macron pledge and gives the executive a tool that aligns, tonally if not substantively, with the postcolonial pitch he is bringing to Nairobi later this week.