Back in November 2023, Benoît Bréville traced the way France was aligning its Middle East policy with that of the US. The jubilation in Syria at the time of Assad’s fall, documented by Akram Belkaïd in January, has given way to a fragile transition. A year has passed since Keir Starmer’s hollow victory, and Labour has done nothing to replace Britain’s broken economic model. In Germany, unions are succeeding in negotiating pay rises, despite the economy being in crisis — though some companies ‘nearshore’ industrial production to lower-paid workers in Eastern Europe, as Rimbert wrote in 2018. Every month, we give ‘the longer view’ on the topics explored in the latest edition of the paper.