France Projects Power Abroad as Political, Judicial Storms Hit Home

Macron's two-day visit to Nairobi was the day's outward face for France. Speaking at the University of Nairobi convention centre alongside Kenyan President William Ruto, the French president announced €23 billion of investment for Africa — €14 billion from French public and private entities and €9 billion from African investors — directed at energy transition, digital and AI, the maritime economy and agriculture, and projected to generate 250,000 direct jobs. He paired the package with a defence of a French law passed last week that allows the government to return colonial-era looted artefacts without piece-by-piece legislation, calling the shift "irreversible and unstoppable" and "about repentance." Commercial commitments worth more than €850 million were announced during the state visit on Sunday, headlined by CMA CGM's plan to invest €700 million in modernising a terminal at the port of Mombasa.

The legal pressure on a former president dominated the home agenda. At the Paris appeal trial over alleged Libyan financing of Nicolas Sarkozy's 2007 presidential campaign, Advocate General Damien Brunet asked the court to find Sarkozy guilty of criminal conspiracy, describing him as the "instigator of meetings with Libyan dignitaries" and saying the alleged conspiracy "places itself at the highest level of gravity that the Republic has known." The hearing follows last year's first-instance ruling and keeps Sarkozy at the centre of a case that has implicated several of his former aides.

In Parliament, the Senate gave final approval to a sweeping anti-fraud bill that grew from 27 articles to more than 100 during debate and that the government values at €1.5 billion in recoveries. The package suspends unemployment benefits in defined cases, tightens controls on social welfare fraud, and creates a new "flagrance sociale" procedure for in-the-act enforcement. It is the year's most consequential domestic-policy text and the first measure that explicitly bundles tax and benefits enforcement in a single instrument.

The 2027 presidential field opened earlier than it has in any recent cycle. Édouard Philippe, mayor of Le Havre and leader of Horizons, accused a National Rally mayor in the Vaucluse of having played a song nostalgic to Marshal Pétain at May 8 victory-in-Europe commemorations, telling Horizons cadres in Reims on May 10 that the incident showed the party "has not changed." Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella denounced the accusation as a fabrication. The Pétain dispute became the first public flashpoint between Philippe's centre-right Horizons and the RN ahead of the campaign proper. Clément Beaune, former minister and now High Commissioner for Strategy, used a separate interview to argue that the only way to keep the RN out of the Élysée in 2027 was for a single candidate to emerge from a coalition spanning the republican left — explicitly excluding La France Insoumise — through to the moderate right, breaking with the RN. He framed the choice as one of urgency rather than ideology.