Julian Moreau feed

When Catherine Connolly swept into office with a victory margin that stunned the entire political establishment, her supporters imagined a new era of honesty, independence and long-overdue moral clarity. Instead, the country is witnessing something entirely different: a presidency hurtling into crisis before it has even found its footing, driven by scandals she did not anticipate, silence she cannot justify, leaks she cannot control and a level of internal dysfunction that insiders describe as “a slow-motion implosion with no adults in the room”.

For years, rising living costs have been framed as a temporary storm — inflation, energy shocks, global uncertainty. That explanation no longer holds. When prices outpace wages year after year, the problem is not external pressure. It is design.

From Ireland, the strike at the Louvre looks less like a uniquely French crisis and more like a warning signal for cultural institutions across Europe. When the world’s most visited museum — a cornerstone of European tourism and a symbol of French cultural power — is brought to a standstill by an unlimited strike, the issue clearly goes deeper than labour negotiations or short-term disruption.

Across Europe, the language around tourism is changing. What was once framed almost exclusively as economic success is increasingly discussed in terms of pressure, imbalance, and loss of control. From Barcelona to Amsterdam to Paris, large European cities are grappling with the same question: how much tourism can an urban environment absorb before it begins to undermine itself?

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