Après moi, le Déluge
Like its neighbor across the English Channel, France is stumbling into a mess just in time for the Olympics
For my second installment in the July election series, I will only be traveling a short 21 miles or 34 kilometers across the English Channel to France. Like the United Kingdom, the land who birthed scientific, cultural, and historical icons such as Napoleon Bonaparte, Louis Pasteur, Claude Monet, the Lumière Brothers, Charles De Gaulle, and Christian Dior is a nation whose Belle Epoque has receded into a memory. Now, nothing encapsulates France’s decline more than the decline of La Ville Lumière, Paris. Paris, of course, has been preparing for nearly a year to host the world in the 2024 Summer Olympics. Before serious preparations for next month’s Olympics began (thus necessitating their removal), Paris developed a reputation for being an epicenter of homeless camps, particularly among immigrants with limited job prospects or knowledge of the French language. Without the upcoming games, the camps would most certainly still exist. In March 2023, large-scale labor unrest against the French government’s pension reforms led to long lines at gas stations and even piles of trash blighting Parisian sidewalks. Worst of all, considering my fear of the creatures, Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, has openly admitted defeat in the city’s notorious battle against rats.
Into this recipe of decline, a familiar affair on the continent which once dominated the globe, steps Emmanuel Macron, France’s brash, quasi-authoritarian president with a Mrs. Robinson wife who also happened to be his former teacher. With that story, I apologize for drawing any unseemly images in your brain which may give you a poor night’s sleep. Anyways, for a man who once claimed the right to govern the country like the Roman god Jupiter governed the heavens around Mount Olympus, recent months have proven his mortality. One of Macron’s many flaws has been, like the despotic Bourbon Kings of centuries past, his tendency to isolate himself from the news media and the general public, thus cementing his image as an aloof, all-powerful monarch in a theoretically democratic system. For a country with a history of revolutionary upheaval, any ruler who flies too close to the sun is likely replicate the grim fate of Icarus and crash into the sea. Similar to the ill-fated Rishi Sunak, Macron suffers with an approval rating of 26%.
Rather than the British tradition of expressing frustration with their political class by writing witty political satire, the French prefer more crude methods of dealing with unpopular rulers. While so far, the guillotine has been kept in storage, the French have sent a major message of protest to Emmanuel Macron. In this month’s elections to the French National Assembly, Macron’s allies have lost their majority, dramatically increasing political and economic uncertainty. Clearly, le Tiers-État is unhappy. Along with a major cost-of-living crisis spurred by the Russian attack on Ukraine and subsequent energy war with Europe, the French have been squeezed by a problem many Americans can relate to: mass migration. I have no need to go into detail about the insecurity mass migration has built within the French psyche, since we as Americans are currently enduring similar difficulties on our own shores with no end in sight. Sadly, France is no exception to this grim trend in the Western world. Paris’ homelessness crisis is just a microcosm of a more serious disease.
Against Macron’s Renaissance Party (which he prefers to label as a “movement”) are two strong opponents, the right-wing, anti-migration Rassemblement National (National Rally) led by Marine Le Pen and the left-wing New Popular Front, an awkward grouping of moderate socialists led by Raphael Glucksmann and radical socialists led by rabble-rousing anti-Semitic firebrand Jean-Luc Melenchon. Both factions promised a radical break with the status quo, with the National Rally promising a crackdown on migration and foreign (in particular American) influence and the New Popular Front promising the de facto end of the free market. Despite many dire warnings of grim and doomsday consequences of voting against Macron and his political allies by foreign leaders, geopolitical experts, financial analysts and Macron allies, French voters have largely ignored what they feel are obscure elite concerns which have no bearing on their daily lives. With daily life becoming more expensive and more unsafe, these ordinary Jeans and Pierres feel their future slipping away to the point where drastic action is necessary. Questionable ties with Vladimir Putin are simply a price worth paying to right the ship. For proof, just look at this survey.
In the end, France’s odd two-round electoral system means that no political faction has a majority in the French National Assembly, ensuring a state of deadlock and uncertainty. I will avoid making the mistakes of so many pundits of speculating wildly of potential outcomes ahead. If you are so inclined, I am sure you can find other writers. But here on Waitt, What? I prefer to stick with the facts and let you, the reader, decide. However, I will make one final comment. While I have not heard reports of France suffering the same sort of health system collapse we find in Britain, France, like both Britain and Germany as well as the rest of Europe, seems to be locked in a cycle of irreversible decline. Even a successful olympics will do nothing to stop it. No doubt Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are pleased. Thank God I still live in the United States of America.