French Politics with Amine Zidouh

Amine Zidouh
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French Politics with Dr. Amine Zidouh is a public-education podcast and digital project on the parties, elections, alliances, conflicts, and ideas shaping contemporary France. Each episode combines historical context, official electoral and parliamentary data, party documents, academic research, and critical analysis. It follows politics beyond headlines: how parties build power, speak to voters, govern, fracture, and redefine the French Republic. Visit https://www.frenchpolitics.fr for interactive visual analysis, maps, timelines, charts, sources, and further reading.

Episodes

  1. Oct 14

    France’s High-School Protest - Ep. 3 - A Philosophy Lesson from the Streets (continued)

    In this episode of French Politics, we follow France’s high-school protest movement from the classroom to the street, the screen, and the halls of power. Through political artwork and the ideas of Rousseau, Étienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière, Pierre Bourdieu, Immanuel Kant, Fatima Mernissi, Mohamed Abed al-Jabri, Ibn Rushd, and Martin Luther King Jr., the episode asks who is recognized as a political voice and who is dismissed as noise. From unequal schools and student blockades to media framing, polling, institutional listening, and the politics of waiting, the episode looks at what democracy means when the people most affected by public decisions feel unheard. Visit frenchpolitics.fr/protest for the visual archive with the artworks and frenchpolitics.fr/highschoolmouvement for The 2026 lycée movement cahier. Amine Zidouh

    France’s High-School Protest - Ep. 3 - A Philosophy Lesson from the Streets (continued)

  2. Oct 10

    France’s High-School Protest - Ep.2 - Philosophy Lessons from the Street

    France promises its children education, equality, and protection. Its high school protesters are asking the country to live up to those promises. In part two of our series on France’s high school protests, Amine Zidouh turns the streets into a philosophy classroom. Through protest art, political cartoons, and ideas from Kant, Hobbes, Rawls, and Camus, this episode explores the questions behind the confrontation: who the state is supposed to protect, what schools owe their students, and how a demand for education becomes a struggle over dignity and democracy. What makes a police response “proportionate,” and who bears the cost of that calculation? Can an education system call itself fair when some students have missing teachers and leaking classrooms while others can pay for help navigating university admissions? Where does violence begin: with a burning bin, or with the conditions that brought students into the streets? Moving between injured bodies, neglected classrooms, and the artwork that makes these contradictions visible, this episode/ asks us to look beyond the familiar opposition between order and protest. A legitimate grievance does not justify every act of rebellion. A duty to maintain order does not justify every use of force. Rather than offering ready-made answers, we use philosophy to think through the anger and examine the promises being made in our name. Explore the artwork discussed in the episode at frenchpolitics.fr/protest

    France’s High-School Protest - Ep.2 - Philosophy Lessons from the Street

  3. Season 1, Episode 99 Trailer

    Trailer - What if looking beyond our own borders was a way to understand ourselves? - French Politics with Amine Zidouh

    What if looking beyond our own borders is not just a way to understand others, but to understand ourselves, making visible the political assumptions we’ve learned to take for granted? I’m Dr. Amine Zidouh, I specialize in French and Francophone Studies, Political Science and Discourse Analysis, and this is French Politics. This show is for American and English-speaking audiences who want to understand French politics and unpack the ideas, assumptions, and power relations behind it. Looking at another country can also help us see what we take for granted in our own. We start with the political parties: what they stand for, wherethey come from, and whose interests they serve. But politics extends beyond parties and elections. We’ll also explore political concepts, cultural debates, and contemporary issues in French society. Everyone is open to critique here. That’s not a claim to neutrality. It’s a commitment to sincere, consistent criticism: making my perspectives clear, questioning my own assumptions, and applying the same critical standards to every political force. That doesn’t mean reaching the same judgment about everyone but rather giving no one an exemption. The goal is not to tell you whom to support, what to believe, but to give you the context and tools to think critically about French politics, and perhaps see your own political world differently. Follow French Politics with Dr. Amine Zidouh wherever youget your podcasts.

    Trailer - What if looking beyond our own borders was a way to understand ourselves? - French Politics with Amine Zidouh

  4. Oct 4

    France’s High-School Protest - Ep.1 - We’re Missing Class to Teach You One

    Visit the website: www.frenchpolitics.fr/protest to visually experience signs from this movement while listening, as well as to find our sources. - A student slogan becomes the starting point for an urgent examination of France’s unfolding high-school protest movement: “Nous manquons les cours pour vous en faire une” in English: “We’re missing class to teach you one.” Across France, lycée students are mobilizing around absent teachers, overcrowded classrooms, deteriorating buildings, unequal access to education, Parcoursup anxiety, and a public-school system shaped by deep territorial and social divides. But as their demands spread beyond the banlieues and into cities nationwide, the state’s response has increasingly centered on police intervention, arrests, surveillance, and the language of “urban violence.” This episode asks what happens when young people are told that education is the Republic’s highest priority, yet experience the state through shortage, inequality, police custody, and force. It examines the political meaning of protest signs, the escalation trap of confrontational policing, the media narratives that make student demands disappear behind images of disorder, and the contradiction at the heart of official discourse: students are treated as dangerous enough to arrest, yet supposedly too immature to speak for themselves. From le bac (baccalaureat) to the BAC (anti-crime police), from the promise of republican equality to the realities of unequal schools, this is an analysis of education, policing, political language, and who gets to define a movement while it is still being written.

    France’s High-School Protest - Ep.1 - We’re Missing Class to Teach You One

  5. Sep 22

    France’s Far Right: From Jean-Marie Le Pen to the Gates of Power - Dr. Amine Zidouh

    For decades, France’s far right was treated as a political force that could provoke, frighten, and disrupt but never govern. That assumption no longer holds. The National Rally now dominates major elections, has its largest-ever parliamentary presence, and is closer to the presidency than the French far right has ever been. In this episode, we trace the movement’s evolution from the founding of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front in 1972 to Marine Le Pen’s strategy of dédiabolisation, making the party appear more respectable without necessarily abandoning its core politics. We examine the party’s origins in postwar far-right networks, its rise through elections, and its transformation from an openly provocative fringe movement into a credible contender for national power. We also look at why people vote for the National Rally; how economic insecurity, distrust of mainstream parties, immigration, identity, and media ecosystems shape its support; and how Jordan Bardella has helped give an old political project a younger, more digital image. Finally, we explore the stakes of the 2027 presidential election. Can France’s democratic parties still build a coalition strong enough to block the far right, or has the process of normalization already changed French politics too deeply? -- Visit www.frenchpolitics.fr to explore the show’s visual atlas of French political parties, elections, movements, ideas, and public debates, alongside episode sources and further analysis.

    France’s Far Right: From Jean-Marie Le Pen to the Gates of Power - Dr. Amine Zidouh

  6. Sep 22

    The French Socialist Party: From Mitterrand to the Fight for the Left - Dr. Amine Zidouh

    For decades, the Parti Socialiste was the central governing force of the French left. It elected presidents, transformed daily life through shorter working hours, paid vacation, decentralization, abolition of the death penalty, and marriage equality, and then gradually lost much of the electorate it once claimed to represent. In this episode, we trace the history of the French Socialist Party from Jean Jaurès and the SFIO to François Mitterrand’s victory in 1981, the turn to austerity, Lionel Jospin’s reforms, François Hollande’s presidency, and the party’s spectacular electoral collapse after 2017. We examine how a party built around social transformation became associated, for many voters, with privatization, labor-market liberalization, and compromise with European economic constraints. The episode also looks at the PS today: Olivier Faure’s effort to preserve a place for the party within a united left, Raphaël Glucksmann’s attempt to build an autonomous pro-European social-democratic alternative, and the continuing conflict over Jean-Luc Mélenchon and La France Insoumise. Can the Socialists rebuild a broad coalition of workers, public-sector employees, young urban voters, rural communities, minorities, and climate-conscious progressives? Or has the center of gravity of the French left shifted permanently away from the party that once dominated it? From Mitterrand to Mélenchon, this is the story of power, reform, compromise, collapse, and the unresolved future of French social democracy. -- Visit ⁠www.frenchpolitics.fr⁠ to explore the show’s visual atlas of French political parties, elections, movements, ideas, and public debates, alongside episode sources and further analysis.

    The French Socialist Party: From Mitterrand to the Fight for the Left - Dr. Amine Zidouh

  7. 06/01/2025

    The Far Center: Macronism and the Myth of Centrist Ideology

    French political discourse often frames the present conflict as a choice between two dangerous extremes: the far right on one side, the radical left on the other. In this narrative, the center presents itself not as one political choice among many, but as the reasonable, responsible, and supposedly non-ideological alternative the only option capable of governing. This episode begins a series that will critically examine France’s major political parties and currents across the spectrum. The purpose is not to claim that they are all the same, but to question their narratives, policies, and relationship to power: who benefits, who pays, who is heard, and who is treated as a problem to manage. In this first episode, I examine Emmanuel Macron and Macronism through the idea of the far center a concept I have been developing in a book project. The episode asks what happens when the political center turns its own program into “reality,” dismisses alternatives as irresponsible or extreme, and treats democratic conflict as a failure of public understanding rather than a legitimate disagreement. From labor reform and policing to immigration, pension reform, education, and the post-2024 political crisis, this is a critique of the myth of "neutral" power. By Amine Zidouh, Lecturer at Dartmouth College. ---Visit ⁠⁠www.frenchpolitics.fr⁠⁠ to explore the show’s visual atlas of French political parties, elections, movements, ideas, and public debates, alongside episode sources and further analysis.

    The Far Center: Macronism and the Myth of Centrist Ideology
  • 1 Trailer
    6 Episodes

Trailer

About

French Politics with Dr. Amine Zidouh is a public-education podcast and digital project on the parties, elections, alliances, conflicts, and ideas shaping contemporary France. Each episode combines historical context, official electoral and parliamentary data, party documents, academic research, and critical analysis. It follows politics beyond headlines: how parties build power, speak to voters, govern, fracture, and redefine the French Republic. Visit https://www.frenchpolitics.fr for interactive visual analysis, maps, timelines, charts, sources, and further reading.

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