Cole stangler biography

French right-wingers don’t yet have a leader like Donald Trump. One of the biggest social movements in years, it has a chance to deal a decisive blow to attacks on welfare.

Filmmaker François Ruffin has become a leading critic of the destruction of France’s welfare model.

But ahead of April’s election, the liberal president and his far-right challengers are all obsessing about what they call an “Islamo-leftist” threat to French national identity.

Biden and European Union officials continue to help Big Pharma prevent the distribution of intellectual property rights to fight COVID.

Next year’s French election looks like it’ll be dominated by right-wing discourses around identity and immigration.

But there’s a familiar foe mobilizing to scale back the legislation: lobbyists for corporate polluters.

Next year’s French presidential election looks set to be dominated by Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, with the Left struggling in the polls. It’s paid off: now key European power brokers oppose suspending global vaccine patents to fight the pandemic in the Global South.

No one on the French left wants the 2022 presidential election to be another contest between Macron and Le Pen, yet its own forces remain deeply divided.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s strong presidential bid has placed him at the heart of the Left — and an alliance that could deny Emmanuel Macron a majority.

France has always had right-wing thinkers — but they are more prominent now than any time since World War II. A decades-long counterrevolution against the Left has led to reactionary provocateurs reshaping French intellectual life.

Emmanuel Macron has often warned that France shouldn’t imitate US-style culture wars.

But in recent decades, public aid to firms has almost tripled as a share of GDP — showing how state interventions increasingly prop up private profits.

This summer’s French riots were a rebellion against police violence and the targeting of working-class men of color. CGT union leader Philippe Martinez told Jacobin how organized labor can lead the fight against the rising cost of living.

After years of division, left-wing parties are in talks to run together in June’s French parliamentary elections.

He is represented by Sandra Pareja at Massie, McQuilkin & Altman Literary Agents.

He is frequently interviewed about French and US politics on media outlets like the BBC, Deutsche Welle, Al Jazeera, Democracy Now, Radio France, France 5 and TV5 Monde. His reporting has also appeared in The Nation, VICE, The New Republic and International Business Times.

Cole is a graduate of Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and has a masters’ degree in contemporary social history from the University of Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne. Today an MP, Ruffin told Jacobin how the Left can rediscover its purpose — and again rally the discontent of rural and peripheral France.

It’s easy to think of French public life as more highbrow than its US counterpart.

He is the author of Le Miroir américain (Les Arènes, 2025), Paris Is Not Dead (The New Press, Saqi Books, 2023) and La solidarité et ses limites : la CFDT et les travailleurs immigrés dans les années 68 (Arbre bleu, 2022). He is also a professor of communications at the American College of the Mediterranean in Aix-en-Provence, where he teaches classes on the media and French politics.

A left-wing alliance for the Hauts-de-France regional election is making parties like the Greens and France Insoumise put aside their differences — but also highlights the difficulties of forming any common strategy for national politics.

Last June, France’s second city voted for the “Marseille Spring,” a left-wing coalition that put an end to two decades of conservative rule.

Cole also worked at France 24 in Paris, serving as a business editor on the English channel from 2019 to 2022.