If you want to understand what lies behind the rise of Reform and its consistent – indeed, deepening – lead in the polls, I have a suggestion: French air conditioning.

To be more specific, if you want to understand the difficulty Reform’s opponents have in tackling it and why the party’s rise seems inexorable, the row going on at the moment in France over air conditioning offers a guide.

When you insist that wanting cool air is ‘far right’, you are in the same sphere as those who say that protecting borders is pandering to the far right

The New York Times reports how Marine Le Pen has said, with her typically incisive populist touch in the middle of a heat wave, that if she became president she would introduce a ‘major air-conditioning equipment plan’ around France. She was backed by

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