America is not alone in going haywire. What is it with the French? Such a great cultural history — but when it comes to politics — Mon Dieu!
They’re now on their Fifth Republic. That tells us something. The first, after the 1789 French Revolution, removed the king, which was good. But then removed thousands of other heads, not so good. Followed by more kings interspersed by more republics and more revolutions.
The Fifth Republic (since 1958) has so far managed to avoid electing some grotesque president. (Unlike a certain other country.) But long stalking France has been a nasty racist right-wing party started by Jean-Marie Le Pen. His reaching a presidential run-off in 2002 occasioned moral panic, but he was soundly beaten.
Then daughter Marine Le Pen took over the party, rebranded it, cancelled her dad, and has striven to sane-wash it. She too has made it into presidential run-offs.
Enter Emmanuel Macron. A centrist technocrat and outsider, elected president at 39 in 2017, a breath of fresh air. He’s tried to get to grips with what chronically ails French governance. Headlined by his efforts to raise the pension age, so necessary for economic sanity, and to otherwise tame an out-of-control budget. Naturally, the bloody-minded French would have none of it.
No politician is ever a perfect package, and Macron exemplifies that. Casting himself as a “Jupiterian” president — not a good look for a nation of cynics. He got re-elected in 2022 because France wasn’t ready for a President Le Pen. However, in the parliamentary election soon after, Macron’s new centrist party fared only so-so against Le Pen’s rightist RN and the “Unsubmissive France” party of “left-wing firebrand” (The Economist always so labels him) Jean-Luc Mélanchon.
Macron might have muddled along with the resulting stroppy parliament, for the five years of its term and his. However, in mid-2024, he opted for a snap parliamentary election. What an unnecessary rash blunder. Was he clueless about the public mood? His party took a drubbing, producing a parliament with a paralyzing three-way deadlock among the center, left, and right, the latter two groups being irreconcilable extremists.
So one Macron-appointed prime minister after another has failed to survive parliamentary votes. The latest lasted less than a month; his cabinet literally only hours. Now Macron has reappointed him. Neither left nor right in parliament sees much reason to help out, leaving Macron politically impotent, his approval ratings at rock bottom. Calling another parliamentary election would wipe out his party.
He can’t run for a third term in 2027. Le Pen has been barred due to conviction for embezzlement. We’ll see if that holds. Her RN party’s candidate may be her slick 30-year-old protege, Jordan Bardella, without the baggage of the Le Pen name. They evidently now see power within their grasp.
French voters seem to be losing their horror at what that could entail. Increasingly disdainful of responsible conventional politics — the romanticized cry “To the barricades!” beckons. And throughout Europe, a rightward political wind has been blowing.
Meantime in Great Britain, after the 2016 Brexit vote, elections in 2019 gave a big win to Boris Johnson’s fully brexitized Tory party. Then the system spit out that disreputable chancer. But the Tories couldn’t shake the stink of fecklessness. The next election, in July 2024, gave Sir Keir Starmer’s opposition Labour party a giant parliamentary majority — though on only 37% of the vote, the rest splintered among several parties.
Already Starmer’s government (like Macron’s) is the most unpopular ever. Unable to manfully bite any bullets as public services crumble and so do the public finances to pay for fixing them. Economic growth is stifled by nimbyism, which Starmer pledged to smash through, but he backs down at any hint of resistance.
Now leading the polls is the new “Reform” party of Nigel Farage — Britain’s Le Pen. Even though Brexit, which he’d championed, is today seen as a huge mistake. But Farage nevertheless rides that rightward political wind, promising, basically, to re-whiten Britain.
Watching such sagas unfold, over time, on the world stage, beats anything in fiction. Being, of course, more consequential besides. And happy endings are still possible. Brazil’s Bolsonaro will spend the rest of his life in prison, with his Trumpy political movement sinking. And a massive Kremlin effort to subvert Moldova’s election failed, voters seeing through it and giving Maia Sandu’s pro-European party a decisive victory.
Yet I’ve learned that there are never final chapters. The story, with twists and turns, always continues.
