Volunteers empty a ballot box at a polling station in Belfort, eastern France at the closing of vote in the second round of the French municipal elections on March 30, 2014. France’s governing Socialist Party has suffered heavy losses in municipal elections, early results indicate. President Francois Hollande’s party and its allies garnered 42 percent of the votes, while the opposition conservatives... 

Three hundred thousand people took to the streets of Paris to oppose plans by Socialist President Francois Hollande to enact a same-sex marriage law by June. Several hundred thousand demonstrators filled the streets of Paris during a protest against President Francois Hollande’s plans to legalize gay marriage later this year. The proposed law would allow same-sex couples to adopt children. The protesters,... 

“Anti-white racism is growing in our cities.” It’s a statement that the French have heard several times over the past few years, during TV and radio interviews; debates; perhaps from their neighbor. But never before has it been heard publicly by a politician who isn’t affiliated with the far-right National Front (FN) party. So when Jean-François Copé, secretary general of France’s center-right... 

Banned: A woman wears a burka in Brussels, but she could be jailed if a new law is brought in later this year Belgium became the first European country to impose a full ban on wearing a burka last night. Its parliament approved a draft law which states women can be jailed for hiding their faces in public. The bill – which must be rubber-stamped by the Belgian senate – is set to become law... 

France’s extreme-right National Front is poised to win its first town council in a decade after gaining ground in the north’s former mining heartlands of Pas de Calais, far from the party’s traditional southern base. The far-right party, led by Jean-Marie Le Pen, has reached record popularity in Hénin-Beaumont, a depressed former coalmining town struggling with high unemployment,...