The big political event in Europe over the weekend was a speech given in Marseilles by Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s interior minister and the right’s standard-bearer for the French presidency in next year’s elections. Arnaud Leparmentier of Le Monde thinks that Sarkozy’s speech marked a sharp move to the right, in the response to the emergence of a moderate, Ségol ne Royal, as the likely Socialist candidate. Leparmentier cites, in particular, Sarkozy’s attack on the generation of May 1968. Foreign observers were very struck by the American-style razmatazz of the Sarkozy rally, complete with attendant pop stars. As Martin Arnold reports in the FT, Ségol ne Royal latched onto this and said stiffly: “My stars are the people of France.” Sarkozy is clearly self-conscious about being labelled too American, and devotes a considerable amount of space in his recent book to debunking the idea of “Sarko l’Americain” - while also, it must be noted, heaping praise on the United States for its social mobility and entrepreneurial energy. Perhaps Sarkozy has noted that the French are actually more ambivalent about the United States than they sometimes pretend. The most successful McDonald’s franchise in continental Europe is in France.

The great Walt/Mearsheimer debate continues to reverberate around Washington. For those of you who haven’t been following, the argument revolves around an article published this year by two eminent American academics - Steve Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of Chicago University - which argued that American foreign policy is dangerously in hoc to the “Israel lobby”. This kind of thing has often been said before. But it is an unusual argument to hear from an establishment figure like the former dean of the JFK school (Walt) - and it excited a firestorm of comment. Walt and Mearsheimer were lauded by some for their courage and - more often - trashed by others for everything from “pisspoor monocausal social science” (to quote their fellow academic, Daniel Drezner), to alleged anti-semitism (passim). But perhaps the most extraordinary hatchet job yet appeared in The Washington Post last week. The author, Dana Milbank, is remarkable in his willingness to throw almost anything that comes to hand to discredit the two academics: a mispronounced name, a lectern gripped too tightly, a willingness to appear on al-Jazeera. It seems particularly inappropriate for Mr Milbank simultaneously to hint continually that the two authors are racists and then to sneer at them for having German-sounding names and blue eyes.