Ed Markey wins his Senate primary — fending off a challenge from Joe Kennedy

Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) waves as he arrives on stage during Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) event announcing her official bid for president on February 9, 2019, in Lawrence, Massachusetts. | Scott Eisen/Getty Images

Markey ran on his longstanding environmental policy record in a heated campaign.

Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) has won his primary, successfully holding off a challenge from Rep. Joe Kennedy, a scion of the famous Massachusetts political family.

Markey, a longtime US lawmaker, is known for being a stalwart champion of environmental policy including cosponsoring the Green New Deal, as well as landmark House legislation on cap and trade 11 years ago.

There had been a limited ideological case for Kennedy’s run since the two lawmakers both identify as progressives, and Markey leaned heavily into his legislative work on both climate and tech to carve out an advantage. A robust digital presence bolstered by his social media team and some of his younger supporters on TikTok and Twitter also played a role in rebranding him as an accessible policymaker, despite his age. (Markey is 74.)

The race between the two men was competitive, though Markey ended up leading in surveys taken the week ahead of the election, perhaps buoyed by endorsements from progressives including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, as well as the Sunrise Movement.

Markey has said he’s eager to continue serving in Congress to keep fighting for the Green New Deal and ambitious proposals that address climate change. “We’ve got to absolutely crush Trump in November, but if we’re going to end this era of chaos, that won’t be enough. We gotta make sure President Biden signs the Green New Deal. We can’t wait,” he’s said in a campaign ad.

The primary challenge marks the first time a member of the Kennedy family has lost a state-level political race in Massachusetts, and has pushed Markey to reintroduce himself to constituents in a place where he hadn’t previously been viewed as a high-profile lawmaker.

“It’s been a weird campaign and I think it’s surprised not just the candidates themselves, but everyone in the state,” Tatishe Nteta, a political science professor at University Massachusetts Amherst, previously told Vox.

With this primary win, Markey has raised awareness of what he stands for, and set up high expectations for what his leadership will bring in the next term.

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Five years on, is France still Charlie?

PARIS — A show trial opens in France today.

Fourteen people will be tried for their alleged part in the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris in January 2015 and the slaughter at the Hyper Cacher Jewish supermarket that followed the next day.

The 10 weeks of evidence and pleading will be filmed and the footage preserved for posterity — a first in French judicial history.

Only three of the defendants are said to have been directly involved in the 17 killings. They are being tried in absentia after fleeing to the now-defunct Islamic State caliphate in Syria and Iraq. They may well no longer be alive.

The 11 other defendants are alleged to have played minor parts in helping Chérif and Saïd Kouachi before they attacked the satirical magazine or assisted Amedy Coulibaly before his hostage-taking and murders at the Jewish supermarket. All three principal protagonists died at the time.

And yet, this 10-week televised trial of 11 minor figures is significant all the same. The court will try to unravel in public the often-confused ideological motivation of the killers and their helpers. It will also examine the blunders in the French security apparatus that failed to forestall the attacks.

It may be a show trial, but it’s a very welcome one.

It’s also an opportunity to look back five years and eight months and ask what, if anything, has changed in France.

The Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher attacks — followed within 10 months by the even more murderous assault at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris — were declared at the time to be “France’s 9/11.”

France would never be the same again, it was said. There would be a before January 7, 2015 and an after January 7, 2015.

More than 3.7 million people took to the streets of Paris and other French cities four days later. These people were not fulminating against Muslims or against radical Islamists. They were declaring themselves — white, brown and Black, left or right, Muslim, Catholic or Jewish — to be united in support of French republican values of tolerance and solidarity.

Their catchphrase was “Je Suis Charlie” — “I am Charlie.”

That slogan also came — for some of the marchers, not all — to mean support for the principle of freedom of opinion and for Charlie Hebdo’s right to publish cartoons representing the Prophet Mohammed. (It is important to stress that the drawings did not mock the prophet. They mostly showed him despairing at the behavior of some of his most radical followers.)

Many French people who had never read Charlie Hebdo regarded the assault on the magazine —  which killed several celebrated cartoonists and 12 people in all — as an attack on the French and Western way of life.

To them, Charlie Hebdo represented not just freedom of speech but France’s love of vituperative wit; its truculence; its sense of permanent rebellion.

Five years on, what remains of the two strands of “Je Suis Charlie”?

First, free speech.

The magazine has brought forward its publication date to publish once again on Wednesday the cartoons of Mohammed that provoked the attack. Its editor “Riss” (Laurent Sourisseau) said that he had not done so this time to lampoon radical Islam but to mourn the decline of freedom of speech in France — and the West generally — in the last five years.

He said the magazine’s front-page headline — “Tout ça pour ça” (“All of this for this”) was an attack on the “tyrannical associations and navel-gazing minorities” who had brought cancel and no-platforming culture to France.

“We’ve seen universities cancel conferences, plays boycotted, all sorts of attempts to prevent divergent views on social media,” he said. “It’s astonishing to see how popular censorship has become.”

Riss is right. The free-speech strand of “Je Suis Charlie” is in poor shape in France in 2020 — and especially on the radical Left.

The other strand — support for French republican values of tolerance and solidarity — seems to be doing just fine.

In hindsight, it appears that the January 2015 attack was not really France’s 9/11. The country was not changed radically in the way that, arguably, the U.S. was changed radically by the fall of the Twin Towers.

From 9/11, you can follow a thread that winds through the Patriot Act, the Iraq way, Guantánamo Bay, the polarization of opinion and politics, and then, after a detour through Barack Obama, to Donald Trump.

After the Charlie Hebdo killings, France followed a thread in which the failed Socialist François Hollande was replaced by the centrist Emmanuel Macron.

There has been no radical turning away from tolerance and democracy — no widespread or systematic backlash against France’s 5,000,000 Muslims. Support for Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally remains strong (at around 23 percent) but no stronger than it was in 2014 before the attacks.

To be sure, there has not been any continuation of the “Je Suis Charlie” spirit — the spirit of common values — of the 3.7 million-strong marches of January 11, 2015. French political life rapidly returned to its ill-tempered normality. Hollande’s favorable ratings, which doubled after January 7, 2015, fell so far and so fast that he decided not to run in 2017.

But while politics in the Macron era may be sharper and more polarized and have a more negative edge than before, that can be explained in several ways — the power of social media, the perils of being a centrist.

France’s annus horribilis, 2015, produced neither a deeper intolerance nor a lasting new sense of common purpose. For good or ill, France, five years after Charlie Hebdo, remains, for the most part, stolidly France.

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French president’s expectations clash with reality as Lebanon commits to reforms

BEIRUT — Emmanuel Macron's close-contact diplomacy paid off on Tuesday, when the French president succeeded in getting Lebanon's embattled political parties to commit to a roadmap of reforms tied to concrete deadlines, but early elections and the disarming of Hezbollah were left out of the plan.

"They all, without exception, committed to a goals-oriented government to be formed in coming days," Macron said at his closing press conference at the end of his two-day visit to Beirut.

The new government will have political buy-in and support to empower it to undertake the needed reforms, but won't be formed by members of the political parties that have been the focus of consistent protests since October 2019.

The reforms are to be carried out over the next three months. The first deadline is in 15 days, Macron said, by which time parties are expected to form a government. That process is usually arduous and drawn-out in Lebanon, and can take several months. The new government will then have a month to deliver on a range of pre-agreed reforms, as a way to prove good faith and avoid a repeat of past prevarications.

"We cannot go back to business as usual, that would be folly," Macron said.

If Beirut doesn't deliver, Macron repeated his threat of punitive measures, starting by withholding a vital international financial bailout.

French authorities will regularly follow up on the implementation of the reforms, having set concrete dates Beirut must work toward.

Macron said he would return to Lebanon in December — which would be his third trip to the country since the port blast — enshrining his unusual level of personal investment in this initiative. French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian will visit the country in November. And France will organize two Lebanon-related conferences in mid-October: one focused on reconstruction aid (with a location to be confirmed); the second, more political one (to be held in Paris), on "building international support" for the reform agenda and "shielding Lebanon from regional power plays."

Lebanon has long been vulnerable to regional and international meddling and score-settling, particularly by Iran, Saudi Arabia and the U.S.

Expectation vs. reality

But while some welcomed the political parties' commitment to the reforms roadmap as concrete progress and a step in the right direction, critics were disappointed that demands for early elections and the disarming of Hezbollah, the Iran-backed armed group that has a significant block of seats in parliament, were not included.

While on Monday, Macron told POLITICO early elections to be held within six to 12 months would be part of the reform roadmap, he walked back on that commitment at Tuesday's presser.

Macron said it was more "useful" to focus on ensuring Lebanon gets closer to having a reliable power supply and conducting a rapid-fire financial audit to enable the country to start stemming the financial meltdown that has sent it spiralling into hyperinflation and severely limited depositors' access to their cash.

"There is no consensus today among the political parties" for a snap poll, Macron said, adding: "Holding early elections shouldn't be a prerequisite to implementing reforms, because that would postpone reforms for a few years."

It was a tacit admission of the profound political deadlock over any overhaul of Lebanon's electoral law.

The French president also said Tuesday that he had discussed Hezbollah's weapons with the head of the party's parliamentary group, Mohammad Raad.

"I told him very clearly that there is a problem of articulation between military presence and a political representation and that [Hezbollah's weapons] aren't part of this reform program of the next three months, but that it's a topic that needed to be discussed," Macron said, adding: "He agreed."

Know your audience

Also on Tuesday, Macron marked the centenary of the creation of modern-day Lebanon under the French mandate.

In honor of the occasion, planes from the French air force performed aerobatics in the Beirut sky, painting it with the colors of the Lebanese flag. The gesture was meant as a celebration, and authorities had publicized the event ahead of time. But it still startled some in the capital.

The roaring of fighter jets was a reminder of recent conflicts; the trail of red smoke used to draw the flag was reminiscent of the pink fumes that billowed from the Beirut port the day of the explosion, which killed at least 190, injured 6,500 and left 300,000 people homeless.

It was something of a metaphor for what may still lie ahead: Regardless of Macron's efforts and vigilance, the deeply ingrained Lebanese political system may yet prove unreformable.

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