Unrest had been brewing for a month, starting with firm but polite protests by schoolteachers at Lycée Saint-Exupéry in Créteil, south-east of Paris over grievances shared by teachers and families across the country. Three-quarters of French lycées are over 50 years old, and many are in a dire state of disrepair. Staff are thinly stretched, poorly remunerated, and often paid late.

Within two weeks — lightning-fast for the cumbersome, centralized Ministry of Education — some of the Saint-Exupéry demands were met. But a torch had been lit, and across the nation, further protests stirred.

The French secondary school system was long one of the best in Europe. Forty years ago, unless you were a devout Catholic, you would only send your child to a private school if they had flunked the state lycée. Yet standards have now slipped so catastrophically that, at baccalauréat level, when students are typically 18, many pupils make egregious spelling and grammatical mistakes, have not attained a high level of numeracy, and cannot understand novels or plays written half a century ago, let alone at the time of Molière. The teenagers who were soon to be marching in towns across the country knew they would struggle to find jobs, let alone homes of their own.

This generation has many more reasons to worry: not only today’s cost of living, but threats to France’s generous and unsustainable pay-as-you-go pension system, as well as the expensive ground war at the edge of a declining continent, the politics of resentment fostered by populists of the Right and the Left, and the ballooning national debt. Viewed by creditors as an increasing default risk, France is now borrowing at higher rates than even Italy. All these problems have whipped up a nation that was already fractured.

It was fracturing when, in 2017, Emmanuel Macron became president. He had appeared practically out of nowhere, brought into the cabinet of Socialist president François Hollande, despite not being an MP, to serve as economy minister. Macron then betrayed Hollande, running for the presidency as a charismatic wunderkind, but also a mandarin — as a graduate of the École nationale d’administration, he was perceived as someone who could fix things the French technocratic way. But, as it turned out, he couldn’t.

During the presidential campaign, Macron faced Marine Le Pen in a televised debate. She waded through binders of notes, lost in the hail of figures he was mercilessly lobbing at her. Macron destroyed her and won the election, thus overcoming, if only temporarily, the French public’s dislike of elites. Having created his own party, he found himself with a houseful of novice MPs who gloried in being “amateurs”, leaving him a free hand.

Macron has since been described by the commentator Daniel Foubert as “a man who thinks he’s Jupiter but governs like a McKinsey intern who accidentally became emperor”. In a crucial decade, this was exactly what the nation did not need. He spent time lecturing Europe from the grandest lecture hall at the Sorbonne, promising to turn France into La Start-Up Nation and birth a new generation of French tech “unicorns”.

It took barely 18 months for the first mass protests to erupt. They were led by the Gilets Jaunes, who objected to fuel taxes and new speed limits on the roads they used for work commutes and school runs. By the autumn of 2018, Macron’s effigy was hanging from roundabouts across the bleak industrial areas of a country he didn’t seem ever to have visited.

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His response was more long speeches. He delivered them to the nation on television, and to halls of “representative citizens” (assemblies weeded to exclude known troublemakers). He had also told an unemployed youngster that he, Macron, could “cross the street and find [him] a job immediately”; a remark as infamous as the occasion when, as economy minister in 2014, he told a group of textile workers from a factory in receivership that they were illiterate and therefore unemployable.

Increasingly violent marches threatened both provincial préfectures and the Elysée Palace in Paris. But in 2020, Covid froze the entire situation for long enough that people’s grievances were refocused on the new rules introduced to stop them spreading the virus. Eventually, the pandemic passed. Facing Marine Le Pen a second time, Macron won re-election in 2022.

But this background noise never disappeared, and that is what explains Saturday’s terrifying breakdown. Macron thought he had sailed through one storm after another: in fact they added up to a reckoning. The more he considered himself TINA — There Is No Alternative (to moi) — and cooked up the concept of the Front Républicain designed to prevent Le Pen (l’horrible fasciste) from ever coming to power through alliances between his party and just enough of the soft Left, the more he believed himself invincible.

Like every politico heady with the sound of his own voice, and bored with thankless domestic affairs, he recast himself as a foreign policy maven. But all his posturing on the world stage only broadcast to French voters that they had never really interested him. And it also signaled to France’s disenfranchised minorities that there was no man of iron will in the Elysée palace, only one of passing fancies.

The violence that erupted on Saturday was predictable; what was shocking was its concentrated intensity. Ever since a 22-year-old student of Algerian origin called Malik Oussekine died after a police beating during student protests in Paris in 1986 — triggering peaceful marches across France as well as violent demonstrations —  every interior minister, Left or Right, has restrained police action for fear that a fatality might trigger race riots.

It didn’t always prevent them. In 2005, when Nicolas Sarkozy was President Chirac’s interior minister, he had to contend with three weeks of riots after two adolescents from the banlieus, trying to escape the police, hid in an electricity substation and were electrocuted. In 2023, an adolescent driving without a license tried to evade a police check and was shot. The same banlieues erupted once more.

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French judges and civil servants, Left-leaning by habit and inclination, have learned little. They often refuse to sentence offenders, arguing the grotesquely overcrowded French prison system doesn’t “rehabilitate” anyone. They, like Macron, have read Michel Foucault, and can blame him for their skewed view of incarceration. The rioters and looters, who have not read Foucault, have been much cannier. They have learned that, by and large, they will be spared real punishment if they can pass themselves off as victims. The many shopkeepers and workers whose livelihoods were destroyed or stolen on Saturday are conveniently forgotten, wreathed in a cloud of compensation promises that can take years, and lawsuits, to materialize as actual payments.

Last night, both Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron spoke to the nation once more. She stole a march by going first, at 6pm. Gone were her binders of notes and her fluster: she sat behind a desk, a French flag behind her, president-like, and spoke with authority. She didn’t offer solutions, but she didn’t have to. While looting was still taking place on city streets, she talked of a “profound crisis of trust and authority posing a threat to democracy”, which was both true and deeply ironic (Macron had kept her out of power by portraying her as the threat to democracy). Then, two hours later, Macron began his personal struggle session, managing to sound utterly unrepentant, while promising to create an online “platform” where students and teachers could express their grievances — which rather suggested that he hadn’t really been listening to them at all.

While Le Pen called out Jean-Luc Mélenchon — he and his France Unbowed party had repeatedly told crowds of supporters in the very banlieues where they had been cultivating the ethnic vote that violence “could be legitimate” — Macron would speak only vaguely of “unrestrained violence”. Le Pen was the one sounding decisive and presidential, while he could only deploy that peculiar hollow diction of his, better suited to the Comédie-Française. After a decade of long and empty speeches, how appropriate that he should take his bow with another one. With only six months of this dilettante’s presidency left, he leaves France in flames, her streets echoing with the sound of shattering glass and the hooting of the mob. Emerging from the ruins, others are preparing to claim the future.

When Bill Clinton got elected in 1992, a newspaper dispatched me to Washington, where I followed his first two years in office. He had a lucky break during the election campaign, but did not owe his victory and political success to that. This was the new era of post-communist financial globalization. Many of the smart people at the time were on the center-left of politics, and Clinton was their man. He was a reactionary on law and justice, but his welfare-to-work policies were inspiring. The center-left of Clinton’s generation saw welfare as an insurance policy, but also as a poverty trap. As a result, they pushed for people to get back into work. Clinton committed his own share of policy errors, like the deregulation of the financial industry. But he started off with an intelligent agenda.

Clinton was also a politician with a keen interest in macroeconomics. He was not an economist, but shortly after he got elected, he assembled a group of experts to help him draft his program for his time in the White House. His strategic goal was to reform welfare and the health system while at the same time eliminating the fiscal deficit.

Today, 34 years later, Andy Burnham will become Britain’s latest prime minister. What do we know about him? It is true that he did not have a lot of time to prepare his agenda. The time between a US presidential election to the inauguration is a little over two months — with a Christmas and New Year’s break in between. This is a little, but not much more, than the time between Burnham’s victory in the Makerfield by-election and his arrival at No. 10. Certainly, it does not take years to formulate an economic strategy.

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It is the implementation that takes longer. Clinton did not have it all worked out, but he set goals and intermediate targets, and developed a clear idea of the political and real-world obstacles that would stand in the way. Burnham has expressed a lot of ideas about British society. He has policies — but I’d struggle to identify an overarching strategic objective beyond the usual platitudes of social justice.

Burnham inherits a problem that his predecessors failed to address. Productivity growth in the UK collapsed directly after the global financial crisis in 2008 and never recovered. Until then, the City of London was the gift that kept on giving. In Germany, it was the car industry. One European country after another lost its business model. What happened in all of these countries, including the UK, is that more and more people become dependent on welfare. It became normal. Germany renamed its welfare program a “citizen’s income”, as though it were a basic human right. But the shift from welfare as an insurance policy to a welfare as a personal choice has trapped European societies in a vicious circle. The greater their welfare dependency became, the more they fell behind in investment and innovation.

Burnham has not given us any plan to fix this problem, let alone one I could disagree with. There are socialist ways of raising productivity growth, and libertarian ways. But let’s not get hung up on ideology. The fall in productivity growth is not about who gets what. It’s about investment, and most investment comes from the private sector. Companies invest to become more productive and innovative.

What does Burnham think about private-sector investment? I haven’t the foggiest, and nor does anyone else. I don’t get a sense that this is a question that keeps him up at night.

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He has, however, thought a lot about public-sector investment. But the two are not the same. About 80% of all investment in the UK is from the private sector. So if Burnham pushes ahead with his public investment plans by raising taxes, what I’d expect to see is a fall in private investment that exceeds the rise in public investment. It’s basic math.

Granted, we’d all like to have better trains. But fixing the trains has nothing to do with productivity. The US is a country with a terrible railway network, and with high private-sector productivity. France has Europe’s best railway system, but the trains have not stopped the French economy from becoming increasingly dysfunctional. Everybody needs to get to work, but the comfort and speed of the journey is at most marginally related to our productivity.

The productivity problem can only be solved through strategic action — just like Clinton addressed structural fiscal deficits and welfare dependence. Emmanuel Macron, too, was a welfare reformer, but he had no fiscal strategy. This is what has rendered his presidency a failure. A recent estimate from the French High Commission for Strategy and Planning found that France’s debt could rise from a current level of 118% of economic output to between 186% and 245% by 2050.

The center-left used to be good at strategy. Clinton was. So were Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. To be clear, I am not endorsing anyone here. This is not about whether we agree or disagree with their policies. My point is that these people had some strategy. But since Burnham has not told us what his strategy is, we can safely assume that he does not have one. Macron had one, but as I say it failed the fiscal test. This is a bit like going to war and being shocked that the enemy fights back, which is what happened when the US and Israel attacked Iran.

As for Starmer, he clearly was not a reformer, but at least Rachel Reeves imposed fiscal rules that kept the show on the road. But, again, have no clear idea where Burnham really stands on those rules. He said he would follow them, but this is easier said than done unless you have a clear idea of what to do when the numbers no longer add up.

So rather than leaking the names of Cabinet ministers, maybe Burnham should have told us about how he intends to fix the productivity problem while keeping the country solvent. At this point, we don’t need details. We need direction.

Burnham has lots of policies, for example on devolution. I am not against this. It is possible that local governments spend money more wisely than central government. The other way around is also possible. Either way, there is no link between the degree of decentralization and innovation. Silicon Valley is not where it is because of Californian politics. It is there because of Stanford University, and because some of its most brilliant entrepreneurs, like Steve Jobs, grew up there.

Burnham knows local politics better than most politicians do: and maybe it is easier to fix some problems locally. But it borders on delusional to think that you can draw lessons from the governance of Manchester for the UK as a whole. Cities don’t have bond markets, nor currencies that can devalue. And the mayor of Manchester does not have to put up with Donald Trump. The idea of a Northern No. 10 is a nice publicity stunt; but it is about appearances, not substance. I therefore make one specific and confident prediction: Burnham will not solve the UK’s underlying economic issues.

That said, he may still succeed politically. Elections, after all, are zero-sum games. Someone has to win. Starmer got his whopping majority not because he had a brilliant plan, but because people preferred his lack of a plan to the Tories’ version of a lack of plan.

Electoral success and problem-solving are not the same thing, of course. Margaret Thatcher would probably have lost the 1983 elections had it not been for the Falklands War. Angela Merkel managed to win four elections in a row and yet failed to address her country’s economic problems.

But the importance of problem-solving (or lack thereof) does not mean that you should keep ignoring the economy. The persistent failure of the previous generation to address the problems of a permanent decline in productivity has made European countries harder to govern. And the longer people are trapped in the welfare system, the harder it will be to get them out again. If you fail to solve a problem for long enough, eventually it catches up with you.

The odds of a successful Burnham premiership are shortening precisely because previous prime ministers have prioritized short-term expediency over long-term strategic action — and because it looks like he will do exactly the same. But we are already living in the long-term. The fact that politicians like Cameron or Johnson succeeded politically without solving the country’s deep-seated problems does not mean that the current generation of politicians will enjoy the same luxury.

In politics, as in football, outsiders can win, and favorites can lose. But we should not fool ourselves about Burnham. He does not have a strategy to fix the British economy. Those who are hoping he will do it by chance will be disappointed.

This is hardly a surprise. The EU has shown an utter disinterest in hard-nosed diplomacy. If the bloc had really wanted to be a strategic actor during the Russia–Ukraine war, it would be orchestrating the peace talks rather than leaving Trump and his team in charge.

Diplomacy was a state art the Europeans themselves invented. It was the Americans, however, who transported it into the modern age. During the Yom Kippur war in 1973, Henry Kissinger, who was Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor and Secretary of State at the time, maintained close contact with Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to the US. The US supported Israel while the Soviet Union sided with Egypt and Syria. According to records later released by the US, Kissinger warned Dobrynin in a telephone conversation that he had received intelligence that Egypt and Syria were about to attack Israel. Then he said: “The President believes that the US and USSR have a special responsibility to restrain our respective friends.” It was the kind of thing that neither he nor Nixon could have said in public. Diplomacy often sounds very undiplomatic. Keeping channels open is not about being polite. It is about preventing accidents and finding solutions.

The Kissinger–Dobrynin exchange is a quintessential example of backchannel diplomacy. Effective diplomacy does not have to happen at the official level. Kissinger and Dobrynin were not even direct counterparts. If Kissinger had insisted on only talking to the Russian foreign minister, he would not have got as far as he did.

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In the first few weeks of the Ukraine war the Europeans tried top-level diplomacy through a series of progressively frustrating meetings. Four days after Russia’s invasion on 24 February, 2022, official delegations from Russia and Ukraine met for talks in Belarus, in a place close to the Ukrainian border. After three rounds of discussions, the talks moved to Antalya, Turkey, where the foreign ministers met on 10 March. The two sides then held talks in Istanbul on 29 March, after which they exchanged draft texts for a few weeks. The Russians insisted that Ukraine become a permanently neutral state and end its plans for EU membership. In exchange, Ukraine would receive security guarantees from a group of countries, including the UN Security Council members. The status of Crimea would be addressed through talks over 10 to 15 years. That was a better deal than what is on the table today.

The process stalled around mid-April and never resumed. Around that time, contact between the Europeans and the Russians also came to a close. Neither the Biden administration, nor the Europeans, maintained a Kissinger–Dobrynin style backchannel.

One of the important questions for historians to address is the extent to which European governments pushed Ukraine towards rejecting a peace deal four years ago. My reading has always been that the Europeans did not want to settle for anything less than a total Russian withdrawal from the occupied Ukrainian territories. They wanted to see Russia defeated — for their own security too — and were happy to let Ukraine fight on their behalf. But they had no strategy for a Ukrainian victory. And since they ended all diplomacy, they had no strategy for peace either. This, in a nutshell, is why Ukraine is losing the war.

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Recently, Emmanuel Macron and Giorgia Meloni have suggested that Europe resume diplomacy with Putin. Neither France nor Italy can afford an ongoing war, now that the bloc cannot fund its support for Ukraine by sequestering the frozen Russian assets. Meloni and Macron are right. The Europeans made a monumental error of judgment when they ended the communication that still happened in the early phase of the war. To be fair to Macron, he tried harder than others.

It would, however, be unwise to resume diplomacy at the level of heads of government or even foreign ministers. The stars of the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which laid the ground for one of the more peaceful centuries of modern European history, were four diplomats: Klemens von Metternich from Austria, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand from France, Viscount Castlereagh from Britain, and Karl August von Hardenberg from Prussia. With the exception of Russian Tsar Alexander I, Europe’s emperors stayed in the background. Peace is hard, detailed work.

Today, by contrast, Trump’s much-maligned emissary Steve Witkoff is a businessman, with no previous experience in diplomacy. I recall a scene in the Elysee Palace where the German ambassador to Paris laughed at him for comparing the grand ornaments in the Salon des Ambassadeurs to those of the Mar-a-Lago beach club. The President’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who has played a key role in the peace talks, is much the same. They are the kind of Americans who bring out the worst in Europeans, but the former have ultimately been more successful than the latter. If there is a deal, the Americans will have been the one to have prepared it. When Witkoff went to Moscow, he spent hours in detailed negotiations with Kirill Dmitriev, who heads the Russian sovereign wealth fund. Business can unlock problems that are not solvable through classic diplomacy.

So, who is Europe’s Witkoff? Given that Kissinger was a morally compromised person who was excellent at his job, I would probably pick one of the many morally compromised Germans. Perhaps Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor who knows Putin, but maintains loyalty to his home country. You do not want to give that job to Kaja Kallas, the EU’s chief diplomat. She loses no moment to tell us that Putin must be defeated but has never given us a convincing plan on how to do this.

A politician who is sometimes mentioned as a potential interlocutor is Alexander Stubb, the President of Finland, who is more of a political realist than Kallas. The EU might be a place in which politicians from small countries play important roles, but that doesn’t mean they can suitably represent Europe in geopolitical power battles. Just look at Vivian Motzfeldt, the Greenland foreign minister, who broke down in a live TV interview after meetings with JD Vance and Marco Rubio. The EU sometimes likes to think of itself as a big country, but when it comes to foreign policy, it really is a collection of minions.

The restoration of diplomatic ties would be an opportunity for the UK to offer leadership, but the four prime ministers since the start of the war have shown no interest. Yvette Cooper, the current foreign secretary, has thoroughly rejected the idea of reestablishing talks with Putin. “I think what we need is evidence that Putin actually wants peace and at the moment, I’m still not seeing that,” she recently proclaimed. Is it not the whole point of backchannel diplomacy to get people to create the evidence? Diplomacy is not about sitting back and waiting for things to happen.

War and diplomacy are two sides of the same coin as the German military historian Carl von Clausewitz reminded us. You talk. You fight. Then you talk some more. The Second World War was the exception, not the rule. The Western allies did not maintain backchannel diplomacy with the Nazis. They did, however, have a strategy for victory, and they won. It is unfortunate that the Western commentary continues to draw so many parallels today with a war that could not be more different.

Based on the imperfect information we have today, the best outcome for Ukraine would have been a deal based on the draft that circulated after the meetings in Istanbul. The second best outcome would be a deal based on what Witkoff and Kushner are currently negotiating.

Yet it is possible that the peace process fails. Russia is seeking to gain full control of the Donbas region, including land in the east it does not occupy. Ukraine is unwilling to hand it to them on a platter. We could be looking at some really bad scenarios. Russia may seize more Ukrainian territory than it currently claims. Ukraine may lose its independence or be reduced to a small rump state surrounded by Belarus in the north, Russia in the east and the south, and cut off from the Black Sea. This is not the most likely scenario, but it’s more probable than glorious victory. Without some dirty diplomacy, I don’t see a good outcome of the Russia-Ukraine war.

Remember, though, the Kissinger–Dobrynin channel was arranged within a few weeks of President Nixon’s inauguration. That was almost five years before the Yom-Kippur diplomacy was masterminded. Even if the Europeans started to regrow a diplomatic brain, it would take time. We should not expect miracles. But if they don’t start now, they will forever stay where they are today: out of the reckoning.

 Gérard Araud, France’s former Ambassador in Washington, and current president of the distinguished Société des Amis du Louvre, reassured its members (philanthropists, art collectors, socialites, auctioneers, mandarins, social climbers, the bored and the beautiful) that he understood “their sadness” — especially as four of the missing pieces “were acquired with the help of [our] Society”. But fear not. Le président (a Frenchman of his social class is always le président of something) also stands in “full support” of the institution “and its teams”, and does not “doubt for an instant” that “everything is being done” to “find the criminals and recover their loot”. Today, “more than ever, we stand with the Louvre”.

It’s worth quoting this sorry missive at length, because it exemplifies the polite, bone-deep self-satisfaction of the French elites. This explains, more than anything else, how the largest and arguably best-known museum in the world could be robbed in broad daylight, in the presence of visitors and guards, by four men (two of them in yellow hazmat vests) using an ordinary disk-cutter and a cherry-picker they’d stolen earlier from a construction site. It took the thieves seven minutes to break through a first-floor window, smash through three recently installed modern display cases that supposedly featured the latest in reinforced glass, grab the jewels, and flee on souped-up scooters.

We know these details not because of the Louvre’s security cameras — but because at least one visitor filmed the thieves smashing into the glass display cases on their phone. Laurence des Cars, the President-Director General of the Louvre, has spent the last few explaining that she had commissioned a “comprehensive security overhaul” shortly after being nominated for the job four years ago, and suggested that cameras would be part of it. Since then, a little over a hundred have been installed. But, on average, only a third of the museum’s rooms have been outfitted, mostly with a single machine.

In an appearance before French senators on Wednesday, a distressed-looking des Cars emphasized that no one is protected from such “brutal criminals”, not even an institution like the Louvre — and the security personnel are “really upset” about the robbery.

But equally, the “nothing to do with us, mate” is strong among representatives of the five major unions for the Louvre’s 2,000-strong staff. They have called over 20 strikes over the past two decades that either completely or partially closed the Louvre, as well as forcing numerous partial closures of entire galleries, including the Mona Lisa room’s, for alleged “understaffing” in the same period. The Communist CGT union in particular has been denouncing “chronic underfunding, building maintenance issues, and lack of personnel for surveillance” while praising “the guards’ professionalism during [last Sunday’s] incident”.

Laurence des Cars, 59, was named at the head of the Louvre four years ago, with the decisive support of Emmanuel Macron, making her the first woman to helm the Louvre in the museum’s 228 years’ history. (That she was the scion of a famous writing French dynasty played a part in the president’s choice.) Last year, she appointed another woman as the Louvre’s Head of Security: Dominique Buffin, 46, a former police officer specializing in art theft.

On paper, Ms Buffin, who has been accused of being a “diversity hire”, has the qualifications for the job. What she probably does lack, however, is the political, administrative, financial and social clout to (metaphorically, mostly) walk into meeting and bang on the table to make the point that the security situation at the museum is untenable.

Des Cars herself does have such clout. However, she chose to please her real boss, the President (the arts were always the prerogative of the King in France, and not much has changed since). She staged, at no small effort or expense, the kind of glittering events he likes best (haute couture shows, a chic new museum entrance and café, Olympic and sports-themed “animations”, fund-raising gala dinners and balls) while seeming to attach far less urgency in the boring upkeep of the actual galleries.

“As in so many cultural establishments in France, the money goes to highly visible glitz,” a board member of a couple of smaller Paris and provincial museums explains. “Redoing the electricity circuitry is always postponed. The lack of cameras in rooms full of priceless and largely uninsurable treasures [the stolen pieces of Imperial jewelry are reportedly not covered] is typical. Why should museums be different from schools, universities, train tracks, state buildings? It’s no secret that France’s vaunted infrastructure, our 20th-century pride, is near collapse.”

It is significant that even when the National Court of Audits recently leaked wide-ranging, highly critical excerpts of a forthcoming report on the Louvre’s operations from 2019 to 2024 — detailing delays, misspending, security black holes, conceptual flaws and general complacency —neither Buffin nor des Cars seized the occasion to make an unholy fuss. There were few incentives to do so and many reasons not to. France is a country of institutional and personal conformism. It hates tall poppies, whistleblowers, disruptors, lone riders, and dynamiters of the hallowed status quo. Not only would they lose their jobs; they wouldn’t find another, ever, as they would be viewed as “personnes à problèmes”, i.e. capable of independent organizational thought.

This, incidentally, applies doubly to Frenchwomen in positions of power. The country certainly has its share of image-savvy diversity candidates promoted far beyond their intellectual and technical capacities (Ségolène Royal, the former socialist presidential candidate, springs to mind, as does the former Minister for Education, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem). Yet it also furnishes many instances of competent women isolated from networks of power often, but not always nurtured in male-dominated domains — from the higher reaches of the football world to the oldest-established Freemason manses, say. An understanding of unspoken ties, sometimes decades-old; powerful support networks created at post-graduate level in the better application courses following ENA or Ecole Polytechnique, for instance, is key to holding one’s own. The result is increased fragility, and higher risk to constantly weigh against possible rewards.

The publication of the Court of Audits report on the Louvre, which was slated to come out in January, has now been brought forward to the end of November. It may put an end to des Cars and Buffin’s careers — assuming they haven’t been tripped and fallen on their swords by then. (Macron flatly refused des Cars’s offer to resign on Wednesday.) All the same, in the ongoing French political crisis, the Louvre situation suddenly “fait désordre”.

But even the reappearance of Empress Eugénie’s and Queen Hortense’s tiaras in the Louvre’s gilded Galerie d’Apollon is unlikely to make much of a change to the downward spiral of French state competence. At best, it will ring-fence the theft as an anomaly, rather than what it is, an indicator of the general state of the country. The French will keep being drip-fed news of discrete scandals, one after the other, seemingly unrelated, and witness the breakdown of the world they once knew, wrought by elites who don’t want them to connect the dots.

Charles de Gaulle’s new constitution and the foundation of the Fifth Republic in 1958 were designed to sweep all that away. The most significant powers were given to the president (elected for seven years) rather than a prime minister (dependent on the whim of parliament). In any case, parliament now had less power.

All of this has now fallen apart. François Bayrou was the second person to have been prime minister of France since President Emmanuel Macron unwisely held parliamentary elections last summer. Bayrou had to be sustained by a rickety coalition, a delicately balanced house of cards that he has now upset by calling a vote of confidence in his government. In doing so, he transformed a debate about a particular measure (a budget) into a decision on Bayrou’s government, the President, and the whole state of France.

Bayrou’s hero is a Fourth Republic prime minister, Pierre Mendès France, whose own government lasted for eight months. Modeling oneself on a man who never again held office after his resignation as prime minister in 1955 sounds like an odd strategy. But Mendès’s now famous phrase “to govern is to choose” underpinned Bayrou’s insistence on a confidence vote: it would force the political parties to make hard choices about public finances. A devout Catholic, Bayrou made a moral argument: piling up public debt places an impossible burden on future generations and creates a vicious circle as baby boomers are supported in their dotage by young taxpayers who cannot afford to start families. Mendès, too, was ostentatiously moral and, though he was a secularized Jew, he attracted particular admiration from progressive Catholics.

Yet the comparison with Mendès does not always work to Bayrou’s advantage. Mendès was serious and brave. He jumped from the window of a Vichy prison and made his way to London to join the Free French air force. This gave him a reserve of moral credit that no present-day politician can match. Mendès was a conservative (a liberal in the French sense of the word) in his attitude to public finances but progressive (a liberal in the Anglo-American sense of the word) in his attitude to other matters. The great achievement of his short-lived premiership was to extract France from Indo-China. And so even the student protestors of 1968 admired Mendès — rather as if stoned teenagers at Glastonbury were to chant “Oh George Osborne”. Bayrou has all the unpopularity that derives from his fiscal conservatism without the prestige that goes with a resistance record or support for decolonization.

Mendès was the real deal. The novelist François Mauriac admired both him and de Gaulle but suggested that the more uncompromising of the two when it came to hard choices was Mendès. Bayrou, by contrast, comes across as calculating and false. Some think that he knew that he could not win a vote of confidence and preferred a spectacular confrontation on an issue of principle that would allow him to present his defeat as an honorable one. More cynical observers point out that Bayrou has run for the presidency three times and suggest that he wishes to run again when Macron comes to the end of his second presidential term in 2027. Defeat now allows Bayrou to say “I told you so” about the economic state of France in two years’ time.

Bayrou’s demise reflects broader changes — some of them peculiar to France and some of them significant for most Western democracies. One major shift is in the nature of the French presidency itself. Since 2002, presidents serve five-year terms rather than seven, which has diminished their power to impose long-term stability. While De Gaulle and Mitterrand cultivated a monarchical mystique around their office, François Hollande ran in 2012 promising to make the presidency “normal” and fulfilled this banal ambition so well that he did not even try to run for a second term. Since 2017, Macron has worked hard to restore the prestige of the presidency — he has a taste for political theatre that owes much to de Gaulle. However, more than at any point since 1958, the presidency now seems a political office like any other. Some of those who voted against Bayrou were really voting against Macron and hope to force the President to resign before the end of his mandate.

Changing political communications have also contributed to a crisis in governance. Mendès used radio addresses to appeal directly to the French people over the heads of parliamentarians. Today, with no state monopoly of broadcasting and, even more importantly, since radio and television have lost their grip on public information, politicians like Bayrou resort to launching their own YouTube channels. Unsurprisingly, a 74-year-old man in a tie did not match the appeal of skateboarding cats or the Gen Z media-fluent president of le Rassemblement National, Jordan Bardella.

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Macron’s own decision to found a new party — at first called En Marche and now called Renaissance — has disrupted the party system. En Marche enjoyed a period of spectacular electoral success, but its subsequent precipitous decline has not restored the fortunes of the parties that it displaced. The 577 deputies in the French parliament include members of 11 different groupings. No party comes close to commanding a majority of deputies and no politically feasible coalition could command such loyalty either.

In a strange way, bitter political hostilities were what once made France governable. In the Fourth Republic, there were times when the Communist Party got more votes than any other party — but the understandable desire to ensure that a group expressing unqualified admiration for Stalin should be kept out of power underwrote electoral alliances that brought the other parties together. More recently, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National aroused uncomfortable memories of Vichy and antisemitism. When Le Pen got into the second round of the 2002 presidential election (with just under 20% of the vote), other parties united to support the Gaullist Jacques Chirac under the unappealing but effective slogan “better the crook than the fascist”.

But today, some leaders of the mainstream Right — including the Gaullist former president Nicolas Sarkozy — treat the RN as a party like any other and say that they would not rule out an alliance with it. If there is a political untouchable in France, it is Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-Left La France Insoumise. Mélenchon is often denounced for allegedly flirting with Islamism or antisemitism — though, in truth, his party’s policies would have seemed unexceptional on the French Left just a couple of decades ago. Mélenchon’s political isolation is attenuated by an unspoken alliance with the far-Right. Marine Le Pen and Mélenchon benefit from having each other as enemies and from a general sense of political crisis. There will be a kind of general strike — an attempt to “block everything” — on Wednesday. It seems to have originated with social media posts from the far-Right before being picked up by Mélenchon. Revealingly, the Rassemblement National, now torn between a desire to bring down the system and a desire to pose as a potential party of government, has slightly distanced itself from the upcoming protests.

All this means that France is getting dangerously close to the point at which protest parties that trade on denouncing the “system” have attained a level of support that means that the system cannot function without them. None of this would matter if the financial problems to which Bayrou alludes were not real. His opponents say that France’s problems are hardly more serious than those of some other countries (which is not saying much) or that France can still service her debt (which is obviously true until it stops being true). The stability of the Fifth Republic was founded partly on the rapid growth of the Trente Glorieuses. De Gaulle was never a great one for financial rigor (Mendès resigned from his provisional government in 1944 because of their disagreements on this) but he avoided awkward fiscal choices because state finances floated on rapid economic growth. It is unlikely that any future French government will get such an easy ride.

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What happens now? Macron could dissolve parliament, but he is unlikely to repeat a stratagem that proved so disastrous for him last time. His numerous enemies want him to resign. But a Fifth Republic president has a right, some would say a duty, to serve until the end of his elected term. Only de Gaulle resigned before this. Pompidou died in office; Mitterrand served two full seven-year terms, though he was often in agony from the cancer that killed him just months after he left the Elysée Palace. In spite of his unpopularity with both the political class and the electorate, Macron has many strengths. He is still only 47 years old — more than a quarter of a century younger than Bayrou and younger than de Gaulle was in 1940 — and is possessed of extraordinary vigor and self-confidence. The very fact that the constitution prevents him from serving a third term gives him a kind of freedom: he does not have to care about opinion polls or maintaining alliances. However chaotic France’s domestic politics become, the president still controls a domaine reservé of foreign and defense policy, matters that have special importance because of Gaza and Ukraine.

When Italy faced similar circumstances in 2021, Mario Draghi formed a government of technocrats. Things are more complicated in France. The president who chooses the prime minister is himself both a technocrat (like most recent presidents, Macron is a graduate of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration) and also, unlike his Italian counterpart, a party politician, who would find it hard to present himself as the arbiter of an apolitical solution. Probably Macron will find a prime minister who will stagger through government — obtaining a majority for particular measures without risking an overall vote of confidence. This will suit the centrist parties in the short term — because they defer a parliamentary election in which they would probably do badly. It will suit la France Insoumise and the Rassemblement National in the long term — because they will go into the next presidential election with all the advantages of being the anti-establishment parties.

The British should not be smug when surveying events across the Channel. Prime Minister Keir Starmer faced his Bayrou moment when his government proposed benefit cuts. Unlike Bayrou he did not dare make the vote into one of confidence, but this has not made the problem go away. Starmer seems to enjoy a large parliamentary majority, but the most striking novelty of the last election was the arrival of small protest parties — one of which might conceivably be the largest party in the next House of Commons. Labour looks less like a party than a sprawling alliance of political factions of the kind that would be familiar to students of Fourth Republic France.

It is hard to see how any prime minster, on either side of the Channel, can succeed with an electorate that rejects both public spending cuts and tax rises and with such a fissiparous party system. I suspect that the most pronounced political trend in the next decade or so will be the near certainty that incumbent parties cannot win elections. To paraphrase Mendès France, “to govern is to lose”.

Before the Europeans endured the Vortex, they believed they could fight Donald Trump over his tariffs. They thought they could organize their own defense to fight against Russia should that ever become necessary. Immediately after he won the German elections in February, Friedrich Merz declared that Europe would have to become independent of the US. When he became chancellor, he swiftly realized the impossibility of his statement.

The photo released by the White House last week, with Donald Trump sitting behind his desk and the European leaders arrayed on chairs before him, tells us how the attempted insurrection of the European minions ended. Perched uncomfortably on their chairs, the politicians look like unruly school children called in for a dressing down. Alexander Stubb, the Finnish president, took notes like a pupil eager to write down what the headmaster was saying. Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister, arms crossed, looked like she had been given a detention. Friedrich Merz and Emmanuel Macron tried to look important — like the head boys. All you can see of Trump is his fist.

I cannot imagine François Mitterrand, Helmut Kohl, or Margaret Thatcher squirming on their seats before the US president’s desk. But, then, no former president would have dared do to them what Trump has just done to their successors.

Things were to only get worse for the Europeans. Last Thursday, America confirmed the final version of the EU trade agreement — though it was more diktat than settlement. The US imposes 15% tariffs on all European goods, and 50% for steel and aluminum. In turn, the EU agrees to eliminate all tariffs on US goods, and open up its markets to all American cars and agricultural products. The EU also agreed not to apply its anti-trust policies to US digital companies. That’s what you get when the other side has put a gun on the table.

It is not true, as some people say, that the EU negotiated badly. Indeed, as the British can testify, they are good negotiators. But you can’t unleash a trade war against the country on which you rely for your nuclear umbrella. The US has always been the imperial power in the transatlantic relationship and now they are using that power against us. Europe has no choice but to acquiesce.

And yet, the EU has always considered itself to be the envy of the world — morally and intellectually superior, and cultured. The EU supports multilateral institutions. It pretends to support human rights whenever this is expedient. It has a customs union, a single market. and a single currency.

But this image doesn’t sit easy with the political and economic reality of modern Europe. France has a dysfunctional government that does not know how to pass the budget; it sits on the precipice of a sovereign debt crisis. Italy has been on that brink for even longer. The best thing you can say about Meloni is that she successfully managed to stay off the radar screens of the bond market vigilantes. But the Italian economy today remains fundamentally weak. Germany’s industrial model has collapsed. It relied critically on five events not happening: Donald Trump getting elected for the first time, Brexit, the Ukraine war, China’s aggressive industrial policies, and Trump getting elected for a second time. Spain’s growth looks better superficially, but this is only because of immigration. Productivity growth is as low as everywhere else in Europe. The UK, too, languishes under the same problem.

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We have to remember, though, that Europe’s collective weakness has been a choice, not something forced upon us by adverse circumstances, or foreign powers. When the EU started the monetary union in 1999, it squandered the various opportunities it presented. It could have taken the path towards fiscal and capital markets union. That would have allowed the euro to become a competitor to the US dollar. They did not even try. On defense, a very practical step would have been the creation of a procurement agency to eliminate the wasteful duplication of weapons systems amongst Nato countries. No dice.

The EU could have expanded the single market, which was only seven years old in 1999, into services. Here they tried but failed. Fearful of the Polish plumber, France managed to kill the project. In each case, national politics intruded and ultimately prevailed. Angela Merkel rejected a common sovereign debt instrument because she feared a rebellion by conservatives in her party. Italy and Germany were keen to protect their fragile banks from takeovers from abroad. The EU we have today is a lowest common-denominator union — unfit for a world dominated by aggressive powers.

There were plenty of times Europe could have changed direction, and addressed its weaknesses. The euro crisis was one such moment. So was Trump’s first election and the Brexit referendum, both in 2016. But instead, each time, the Europeans chose complacency. They did the minimum needed to keep the euro afloat and failed to correct the imbalances in the European economy. After the Brexit referendum, they thought the British would hold a second one because that is what happens in Europe when they get the wrong result. And when Trump got elected, they decided to sit it out, and wait for better times.

For me, and a few others, the advent of a monetary union was not about money, but geopolitical power. The EU would never match the US in its military capabilities. But it was an opportunity to become the largest global economic power.

Again, they choose the path of weakness. I am not criticizing Trump for exploiting this. He was elected on an agenda that puts his country first and his allies second. He is clearly setting Europe adrift. The Europeans cravenly crawl to him and plead for mercy. While he enjoys the attention, it won’t change his politics. The imbalance in trade policies is worse now than it was on April 2, when Trump announced the Liberation Day tariffs. The Europeans bought into this “Trump always chickens out” nonsense. In the end, it was the Europeans who chickened out.

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I have been a pro-European all my life. But a Europe of coordinated subservience is not one worth having. The whole idea of European integration was to address collective action problems. The EU no longer does that.

Instead, it set out on a path of no return. This has led it a place of low growth, high debt, and a lack of political majorities that support change. Large and increasing portions of European citizens live off welfare. They have no interest in reforms that will invariably lead to a cut in their income. Demography plays havoc with democracy. In Germany, for example, I cannot identify a single political party with a coherent agenda for reform. In the UK, too, there is not one political party that has given serious thought to a post-Brexit economic model. In their decline, European countries are astonishingly similar. The UK, France and Germany are all currently discussing wealth and property taxes as a last and desperate measure. If, and when, this is implemented, they will end up with even less growth. They are running out of ideas.

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Europeans once believed that if the crisis were big enough, they would do the right thing. Recent history has shown that this is not so. We have had the euro crisis, Trump, Brexit, a pandemic and Ukraine. As each crisis hit, Europe got weaker.

Of course, Europe is still cultured and beautiful. It will remain one of the world’s favorite tourist destinations. But a museum can’t feed 500 million people who take free education, and a high standard of living for granted.

So here we are, stuck in the Total Perspective Vortex, and not enjoying the experience. In the book, there was one survivor of the torture instrument. Zaphod Beeblebrox, who considered himself to be the most important being in the universe, came out smiling. I suspect that Trump, too, would emerge with his view of his own importance confirmed and reinforced.

But as for the Europeans, they were always smaller than they thought they were.

In recent times, however, these brotherly bonds have been placed under severe strain. For the last year, France and its most-cherished former possession, Algeria, have been locked in a diplomatic cold war. And perhaps the most prominent figure to be caught in the dispute is none other than Chems-Eddine Hafiz, the rector of the Grand Mosque.

Over the past few days, Hafiz, a native of Algiers who pledges support for the French Republic, has been accused of playing a shady double game. On the one hand, the Left-wing (and pro-Republican) newspaper Libération has called him “Algeria’s secret Ambassador to France” or the “eye of Algiers” in France: in other words a spy. All the while, the Algerians increasingly suspect him of working for the French secret services, while also sympathizing with the Muslim Brotherhood and other enemies of Algeria’s secular regime. Hafiz’s dilemma, then, is a neat encapsulation of the challenge facing both France and Algeria: how to dovetail two very different realities — grounded not on fraternal affection but in long years of mutual contempt?

In April this year, the French government announced that relations with Algeria are at their worst since 1962, the year Algiers gained its independence from Paris following a bloody and protracted war of liberation. That same month, the French ambassador was recalled from Algiers while 12 Algerian diplomats were expelled from France: after Paris accused them of espionage. The immediate cause of these tit-for-tat expulsions was a French police investigation into the involvement of an Algerian official in the temporary abduction of a TikTok influencer called Amir Boukhors. A vociferous critic of the Algerian president Abdelmadjid Tebboune, the man known as “Amir DZ” boasts over a million online followers. For its part, the Algerians have accused Boukhors of fraud and what they call “infractions terrorists” — though his supporters argue he’s being targeted for supporting the Algerian version of Hirak, a youth movement that’s flourished in several Arab countries since the Arab Spring. Boukhors had been in France since 2016, and was given asylum status in 2023. During this time, Algeria issued nine international arrest warrants against him, but the French consistently refused to extradite him.

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In truth, though, the spat over Amir DZ is part of a far wider dispute. The current crisis arguably date back to July 30, 2024, when President Emmanuel Macron, in a letter to the King of Morocco Mohammed VI, wrote that “the present and future of the Western Sahara were part of Moroccan sovereignty”, even as he backed Rabat’s 2007 plan to take control of the region. This was partly to reward Morocco’s developing and successful business relationships with France. This was an unexpected and direct affront to the Algerians, who have long supported the pro-independence Sawhari Polisario group, which claims the desert territory as its own. No formal ceasefire in the Western Sahara conflict has ever been announced — the French, then, had jumped the gun, swerving ongoing negotiations over the territory and offending Algiers in the process. Algiers, for its part, then took the offensive and recalled its ambassador from Paris.

Since then, the Algerians have refused to back down, accusing the French, among other things, of “destabilizing” Algeria via the DGSE (its equivalent of MI6). At the same time, France has said Algeria had refused to repatriate citizens suspected of terrorism. For this, France threatened to drastically reduce the number of visas given to Algerians, the largest immigrant population in France. Tensions have been further heightened by Macron’s call for Algeria to free the 71-year-old Franco-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, who has been condemned to five years in prison on dubious charges of “undermining the integrity” of the nation.

In a further provocation, the 36-year-old French football journalist Christophe Gleizes, a specialist in African football, was arrested in Tizi Ouzou in the Kabyle region of Algeria, and has recently been given a seven-year sentence for “supporting terrorism”. His “crime” was interviewing a local football manager who was also known to be associated with the pro-Berber MAK (the Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylie), which the Algerian government proscribed as a terrorist organization in 2021. Despite the intervention of the French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, and the pro-Muslim Left-winger Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Algerians have so far refused to free the unfortunate Gleizes.

For many observers on both sides of the Mediterranean, there is a wearying familiarity about the current conflict. Journalists in the Algerian media have necessarily been unable to voice their criticisms of their government publicly. El Watan, the distinguished French language newspaper in Algiers, has been strikingly neutral on the issue, fearful that funding cuts from the government will finally drive it into the ground. Online, however, there is a consensus among Algerian dissidents, at home and in France, that this overseas bickering is merely a distraction from Algeria’s deep domestic crisis.

Worse still, Algeria looks like it is being left behind by its Moroccan rival. At roots, the country’s woes are economic: which is why the government faces such fierce opposition from Hirak and other dissidents, who can plainly see from France and elsewhere that for all its beautiful beaches and historical wonders, Algeria remains a poor and isolated state stuck in last century’s anti-colonial mindset.

No wonder, then, that the philosopher André Comté-Sponville, writing recently in the pages of the business magazine Challenges, argued it was easier for the Algerians to “surf the wave of anti-French resentment than to modernize the country”. Comté-Sponville also pointed out that the French had largely moved on from their war with Algeria, and that the legacy of the pieds-noirs (French settlers forced to leave Algeria in 1962) and the harkis (Algerians who fought for the French and either settled in France or were killed in vast numbers back home) were now part of history.

But this is apparently not the case for the Algerians who, argues Comté-Sponville, have been caught up in a post-colonial fantasy of “hysterical” revenge against their old enemy. Citing Freud, the philosopher describes the Algerians as trapped in their own neurosis, refusing to see reality.

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Certainly, it is true that the complicated love-hate relationship between France and Algeria has as much to do with psychoanalysis as with politics. To an extent, this has its tangled roots in the poisoned soil of Franco-Algerian history. Soon after the French occupied Algeria, they turned the country into a département of France. This had the effect of immediately disenfranchising the Muslim majority population: which did not qualify for French citizenship, or otherwise couldn’t reconcile their faith with the demands of a secular state (something that’s still true in contemporary France). The result was a deeply divided society whose tensions defined the cruel and bloody tactics used by both sides during the War of Independence.

This has remained true since 1962. Most significantly, however, neither the Algerian government nor France has ever admitted their murky complicity during the so-called “black decade”, between roughly 1992 and 2002, when the Algerian authorities fought an insurgency of well-armed and well-organized Islamists. It is estimated that more than 150,000 people died during this period, though in many of the massacres it wasn’t always clear who was doing the killing: Algerian security forces and the French DGSE were both alleged to have been involved in secret operations.

While the eyes of the world have lately been on the Middle East, meanwhile, France and Algeria have found themselves once again in a Mexican stand-off, where further aggression on either side is liable to tilt dangerously. In geopolitical terms, the strategic stakes for France could not be higher, as the country has withdrawn from Burkina Faso and Mali and needs to keep Algeria onside to strengthen its hand in the Maghreb. There is a wider European dimension here too: the Maghreb is a kind of international buffer against migratory flows from sub-Saharan Africa, to say nothing of the instability and chaos of the Sahel region.

In the meantime, few French presidents have ever done as much as Macron to curry favor with the Arab world. It was no surprise, therefore, that the Elysée Palace pledged at the end of July that France would join Spain, Ireland and Norway — and now possibly the UK — in recognizing a Palestinian state. In the meantime, France has begun encouraging other European and Middle Eastern states to recognize Palestine too, working tentatively with Saudi Arabia on a two-state solution to the deadly stalemate in Gaza.

Macron’s deference to the Arab world is unsurprising: he wants to leave a legacy as a world statesman and peacemaker, as well as placate his own restive Muslim population — the largest in Europe. It is also in line with one of France’s oldest objectives in foreign policy: to be “une puissance musulmane” (“a power in the Muslim world”). This is an ambition which dates back to Napoleon’s ill-fated invasion of Egypt in 1798, and includes the occupation and division of Syria and Lebanon, protectorates in Tunisia and Morocco, and the annexation of Algeria. But as France tries once again to make its mark in the Middle East, it is Algeria, once France’s most prized jewel, which is proving to be the sharpest thorn in the French diplomatic side.

All the while, France’s economic presence in Algeria, long dependent on a shared history, is now been rivaled by China and even Italy — Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni warmly praised President Tebboune on an official visit to Rome and said that relations between Algiers and Rome were at an all-time high. At the same time, Algeria has been building links with Russia and Turkey, which have also been maneuvering aggressively against the French. They’re especially keen to take an interest in Algeria’s oil economy, which has flourished in the wake of the Ukraine war.

For its part, Algeria needs to reassert itself as the leader in the region after decades of retrenchment, which has seen it be overtaken by Morocco as the West’s most favored client. As it is, Algerian paranoia towards the West, and France in particular, has only hardened with a sense that the country is being surrounded by enemies. For the time being, then, there is no easy way out of the impasse, even if the Grand Mosque remains as charming and alluring as ever.

In reality, Trogneux is Brigitte’s older brother. The pair grew up in Amiens, in the north of France, with four other siblings and a family confectionery business which, to this day, turns out two million macarons d’Amiens each year. Among other things, the city is known as the home of Jules Verne, father of science fiction. But as fantastical as Verne’s writerly imagination may have been, even he would have struggled to conceive of a scandal such as this.

Owens is not the first to have disliked Brigitte Macron. The first lady, as we all by now know, was a teacher at Emmanuel’s Jesuit school and 24 years his senior. The couple have always maintained that their relationship remained “within the bounds of the law” during this period; in 2007, they wed when Macron was 30 and Brigitte, having recently divorced the father of her existing three children, was 54. It is this sex configuration, rather than the inherent issue of the age gap, which is viewed with queasiness — after all, Donald and Melania Trump are also separated by 24 years. That Brigitte is the elder party, that the couple met when Emmanuel was a school pupil and that the couple are French — a country whose sexual reputation, to Britons at least, still has the whiff of adulterous libertinism — meant the Macrons would always be easy targets for prurient speculation.

Coupled with his reputation for soft-touch liberalism and unfashionable Europhilia, this new Napoleon was never destined to woo conservatives. A lovers’ tiff caught on camera in May, as Brigitte pushed Emmanuel’s face away when the couple disembarked a plane, turned social media’s unease into full-blown distrust. A conspiracy theory is born.

The origins of the Brigitte Macron “transvestigation” — a depressing internet coinage for when people’s appearances are scoured for evidence of transsexualism — began with two strange French ladies. Amandine Roy and Natacha Rey, respectively a “spiritual medium” and a self-described “independent investigative journalist”, posted a YouTube video speculating about Brigitte’s birth sex in December 2021. Rey’s suspicions followed the classic transvestigation route: she noticed that Brigitte’s body shape seemed unexpectedly masculine in photographs and invented an elaborate personal history from there. Within hours, the video had amassed half a million views. Last September, Roy and Rey were compelled to pay Brigitte and her brother €13,000 in damages. This month, the verdict was overturned — not because the court ruled that Brigitte was in fact Jean-Michel, but because the threshold of defamation was not met. This case is now in the highest appeals court in France; another, concerning alleged online harassment by 10 individuals, goes to trial in October. Separately, Owens faces her own lawsuit in Delaware.

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In the conspiracy world, Owens is a breath of fresh air; in a rogues’ gallery of gammons, she is a canny, outspoken young black woman. She became famous by hosting Q&As with university gender goblins, precisely and without compassion dismantling their luxury beliefs. In one such viral video, she responds to an appeal on behalf of the trans students who felt “victimized” by her views: “Life’s tough, get a helmet man. I’m too pregnant for this. Next question.”

But sex realism only had so much mileage, particularly as it returned to the mainstream. Now, the Brigitte conspiracy theory opens a convenient new frontier in Owens’s truth crusade, a perfect confluence of culture-war claims which have become important to her personal brand. First, liberals compulsively lie. Second, those same liberals are sexual deviants, weaponizing their grip over a sleeping public to further shadowy homosexual/paedophilic agendas. And third, the cult of transgenderism has compelled normal people to disbelieve the evidence of their own eyes. The first and third of these claims are difficult to dispute in the sense that all politicians necessarily lie, and that part of 2020s politicking has until now involved avoiding obvious truths about biological sex. The transvestigation reflex has not been helped by the fact that those who to the general public appear obviously male, like the Olympic boxer Imane Khelif, have been defended in the name of kindness as put-upon non-conforming females. Gender suspicion is a consequence of institutional dishonesty, and Brigitte — verifiably a woman, though a slightly gangly one — is collateral damage.

As for Owens’s second crusade — uncovering the sexual deviancy of elites — revelations about the late financier Jeffrey Epstein’s activities and the successful circulation of the conspiracy theory QAnon have created a constituency of American truthers who want to believe in the existence of a global paedophile ring at any cost, and are continually emboldened by, among other things, the reticence of their own president. Of course, a simpler explanation for the flourishing of such theories is the platforming, via social media, of commentators who are verifiably stupid. So it is that Owens has been able to claim, in the past, that the Moon landings were fake, that Bill Gates is a “vaccine criminal” and that Emmanuel Macron’s presidency is the result of a CIA mind-control experiment.

Owens’s claims may be deranged, but they are no more so than the various conspiracy theories which have to some extent always been part of life at the French court. Then, as now, the political wife is central: a figure of both fascination and anxiety. The inference behind the Brigitte conspiracy is that Emmanuel is an effete liberal man under the thumb of his powerful wife. Lady Macbeth asked the spirits to “unsex me here” to wield power behind the throne; conspiracy logic does the unsexing for Macron’s first lady. Internet weirdos hunching over images of the First Lady in a swimming costume, desperate to locate a spectral todger, may seem exceptionally prurient and cruel — but as Hilary Mantel demonstrated in her celebrated essays for the LRB, royal bodies (an elision you must forgive with republican France) have always been subject to vengeful, woman-hating scrutiny — just look at the lascivious fixation on Marie Antoinette’s bedchamber.

Conspiracy theories prior to, and to some extent responsible for, the revolution were transmitted via the libelles, pornographic pamphlets comprising anonymous vitriol familiar to those on social media today. Mantel describes them as “a pantomime mix of scenes of copulation and conspiracy, endless unbuttoning and tupping and frotting and plotting”. They catalogued, with slobbering glee, the dauphine’s apparent vices: incest, orgies, Swedes. In the hands of pamphleteers, workaday political crimes like naivety and venality become chaotic scenes of promiscuity and buggery. In the rationale of the libelles, these speculative leaps are perfectly coherent. So it is that in the modern culture wars, “citizen journalists” like Rey are compelled to morph suspicion of power into pornographic, defamatory flights of fancy. After all, what better proof that leaders are “not like us” than exposing them as a caste of depraved sex pests?

In an absence of lettres de cachets — the bulletproof decrees beloved by his kingly forebears — Macron and his wife must navigate global legal systems in order to put down whisperings of the First Lady’s little lad. It seems undignified to even engage with such tattle, but I have no doubt that the dismantling of Owens’s brand will be satisfying to watch, and so I too will be bringing out le popcorn. But letting this debacle pass without reflection on the timbre of modern political commentary would be a mistake; a return to the fervor of 1780s pamphleteers might just be a portent of an impending period of political chaos. We should be wary of the desecration of public discourse, symbolized by the sordid Owens-Macron saga. The perpetrators of our modern conspiracy theories may be a league of mouth-breathers, but they have big, credulous audiences. The real problem is that such gossip muddies, rather than clarifies, the waters of legitimate protest, and disenfranchises believers by plunging them into alternate realities which make them sound like idiots. There are many sensible reasons to criticize Macron: his wife’s awkward gait and dodgy blow-dry is not one of them. All eyes on Delaware, then — the entire world will see Owens in court.

France and Britain have to work hard to make sense of each another, because in the manner of quarrelsome siblings, they are so different and yet so similar. They inherit roughly the same strategic cards — a modest nuclear arsenal; highly professional military forces, globally deployed, which are small in relation to the emerging Asian powers; and a Security Council seat which reflects the strategic realities of yesteryear. Sometimes these assets have been used for a common purpose, but often (as in the Gulf War of 2003) the strategic choices have been utterly different. Anyway, behind this week’s glitter and repartee, there is a quiet, anxious conviction shared by Downing Street and the Élysée. The ability to understand one another — which is the literal meaning of Entente — could once again, in the near future, become a matter of life and death for both countries. At least since the fall of communism, the probability of France and Britain fighting together in a hot war has never looked so high — so both governments have said. And even in scenarios well short of Armageddon, the two countries — as Western Europe’s principal military players — could well find themselves co-policing a fragile ceasefire on the eastern edge of Europe. 

As in 1904, France and Britain see an imperative to transcend their many differences because of the emergence in Europe of an expansionist power whose appetite for territory and strategic might seems to be growing by the month. In the early 20th century, the pair were often in competition over far-flung colonies. Since 1945, the biggest single irritant has been contrasting attitudes to the United States, with Britain eagerly cultivating its special American friendship, and France striking a pose, at least, of championing European independence. In recent months, Donald Trump’s behavior has removed that problem; like teenagers abandoned by a once-generous parent, officials in London and Paris are now united in their horror at possibly having to guard Europe’s peace without an American guarantee. 

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How, then, could France and Britain — and in particular their militaries — learn to understand each other better? Perhaps the first thing French and British defense chiefs might do is have a hard look at the most recent occasion when their forces found themselves side-by-side in the heart of a bloody European war. That was not in 1944 or in 1914 — but in the Bosnian conflict of 1992-95. The need for a solemn exercise in self-examination is particularly acute on this day, the 30th anniversary of the most horrific act of mass slaughter perpetrated on European soil since the war against Hitler. The massacre of 8,000 or more Muslim men and boys from the enclave of Srebrenica began on 11 July 1995 and unfolded over the following four of five days. This orgy of killing by Bosnian Serb forces has been recognized judicially as an act of genocide. It also marked the end — morally and strategically — of a UN peacekeeping effort of which Britain and France were the joint leaders. 

There are complacent and self-congratulatory stories that British and French officials, along with American counterparts, can tell one another about Srebrenica and its aftermath. They go something like this. Shocked and surprised by the brutal actions of the Bosnian Serbs, the leaders of all Western countries concluded that it was time for an abrupt change of policy. Instead of pig-in-the-middle peacekeeping, the powers involved in Bosnia should wage a short, sharp war against the Serb forces which (apart from their misdeeds in Srebrenica) had occupied and ethnically cleansed two-thirds of Bosnia and were keeping its capital, Sarajevo, in a cruel stranglehold. This duly happened; the multinational contingent in the war zone, led by the British and French, reconfigured itself as a rapid reaction force which turned its guns on Serb positions in Sarajevo and elsewhere, while Nato (led by American bombers, but with plenty of help from the British, French and other Europeans) strafed Serb military assets from the air. There was an upsurge of fighting and battle-lines were redrawn — with the result that the Serb-controlled share of Bosnian territory was cut to barely half, and a realistic basis existed for a peace settlement which Nato’s forces could police. All that unfolded over the final months of 1995 until the Bosnians found themselves under international tutelage and at peace; people in Sarajevo could go about their lives without fear of snipers or shells. 

This happy version of the Srebrenica story — stressing what happened afterwards, not what went before — will be rehearsed in Western countries today — especially in Britain which has stood out in its determination to have the massacre remembered and recognized as genocide.

Yet, even 30 years on, there are pressing questions about what led up to the Srebrenica massacre — questions for all the countries that were involved in Bosnia over the preceding three years, Britain and France in particular. If there is one country which has taken a hard look at its responsibilities in Srebrenica, it is the Netherlands, whose lightly armed contingent of less than 400 blue-helmets were tasked with protecting the enclave and manifestly failed. Judicial proceedings and government-sponsored investigations have pored over every detail of the Dutch contingent’s activities, and its failure to understand, in time, that the Serb forces were bent not only on seizing the enclave but on slaughtering its male population.

But excessive preoccupation with the Dutch responsibility only serves to obscure the role played by more powerful countries — above all, America, Britain and France. It is a story whose origins predate the massacre by more than two years. In March 1993, it was a French general and UN commander, Philippe Morillon, who took a personal initiative and promised the 40,000 people, mostly Muslim, who were holed up in Srebrenica that they would be safe from the Serb forces which dominated the surrounding territory. “You are now under the protection of the UN forces… I will never abandon you,” he declared, in one of the war’s most famous sound-bites.

Dutch officials insist that they accepted responsibility for guarding the enclave after receiving an absolute guarantee from the United Nations that in the event of a major Serb attack, air power would be called in to stem the advance. On 10 July 1995, Dutch commanders did call in air power — even though its use might have cost the lives of their soldiers who were being held as hostages. After a complex and still-murky set of international deliberations, it was decided not to use air power. Who exercised that veto is still not clear, but an important place in the decision-making chain was held by General Bernard Janvier, a Frenchman who was commander of UN forces in the region.

Over the preceding months, tension had been building between General Janvier and Britain’s General Rupert Smith, who had taken command of UN forces in Bosnia. Janvier generally hewed to the cautious, peace-keeping line which had been common currency between Britain and France as of the previous year. But Smith came to the view that the UN contingent’s mission of guarding a ceasefire line was untenable and destined to fail; Western forces, if they had any role to play at all, should go onto a war footing and be prepared to confront the Serbs.

One of the reasons why Smith was so convinced that war, rather than sputtering peace, lay ahead was that the Serbs themselves were telling him so. Their commander Ratko Mladic — later convicted of genocide in Srebrenica — had made clear his determination to overrun the UN-protected enclaves; in particular Srebrenica, where local Bosnian fighters were — so he grumbled — taking advantage of UN protection to make hit-and-run attacks on the surrounding Serbs.

As events in late May 1995 would demonstrate, both Janvier and Smith were right in their different ways. Janvier was right to say that the blue-helmets could not change their military posture (from peacekeeping to war) without putting themselves in deadly danger. Smith was right to see that renewed war was probably coming anyway. He called in air strikes against the Serbs to punish some egregious acts of misbehavior; the Serbs retaliated by taking hundreds of UN peacekeepers hostage and sharing pictures of them shackled to posts. The clear message was: bomb us any more, and your peacekeepers will be killed.

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What happened then is still a shady business. The documentary evidence suggests that the Americans, British and French cut an informal agreement to “pause” air strikes in return for the release of the hostages. American officials leaked to the press that General Janvier had played a leading role in parleying with Ratko Mladic and assuring him that air strikes would cease. Whoever gave those assurances, the three leading powers in Bosnia were clearly co-responsible for them; the one party which was not informed was the Dutch, who were still in the hapless role of defending an indefensible haven for tens of thousands of human beings. That bargain, whatever its precise terms, paved the way for the Srebrenica tragedy.

Questions about the Srebrenica massacre fall into at least three categories. Was it generally known that the Serbs were planning an attack on the eastern enclaves which were under notional UN protection — and were the Serbs given some encouragement to think such an attack could proceed with impunity? Second, could more have been done to stop the Serb advance immediately after its forces crossed the boundary of the enclave on 6 July? Thirdly, during the crucial days of 11-15 July, when the Serb forces machine-gunned almost all the men and boys under their control, could something have been done, even at that late stage, to interrupt the massacre? It is fair to assume that the two countries which were best informed, in real time, about what was happening were the United States and Britain — given the former’s uniquely powerful satellite and human intelligence and Britain’s privileged access to that information. So it might be said that France bears a particular responsibility because of Janvier’s doveish line; while Britain faces hard questions about what it knew and when.

Hundreds of documents relating to the Srebrenica massacre have been released, but many remain classified. Some of those documents — especially pertaining to the question of when exactly full details of the horror emerged — are to be found in very secret places in London and Paris, as well as Washington DC.

It would have been rude to raise this matter at a glittering banquet in Windsor Castle, but as part of their general rapprochement, shouldn’t British and French officials be making a renewed effort to understand why their cooperation in Bosnia initially went rather well — and then failed so tragically?

Yesterday, in the final hours of Macron’s visit, he and Starmer held a video conference at a British military base with other possible participants in a “coalition of the willing”, led by Britain and France, whose job would be to shore up a Ukrainian ceasefire. London and Paris have been talking about this project since last November, and they believe at least 30 countries could take part. But in a throwback to the Franco-British force in Bosnia, there are many unanswered questions about the new mission’s exact mission and rules of engagement. As of now, its very existence is hypothetical. Whatever happens, the French and British commanders will, in the end, be answerable to their national capitals, not to any multinational structure. Huge potential exists for tragic misunderstanding. That’s why a refresher course in Balkan history is well overdue.

But watch him with Jensen Huang, as I did recently, and you will observe an unusual dynamic. The Nvidia chief executive acts not just as Macron’s peer, but even, in brief glimpses, his superior. When the two men were on stage together at a tech conference in Paris, there was a telling moment almost lost in an animated conversation. Huang, wearing his usual leather jacket and t-shirt pairing, talked over the President.

It was as if Huang were a statesman of slightly senior rank, an idea that seems less illusory with every year of Nvidia dominance. Arthur Mensch, the 31-year-old chief executive of Europe’s leading frontier AI company, Mistral, sat on the fringe of the conversation. Quiet, well-dressed, and intermittently talked up by Macron, he gave a stronger impression than Huang of being the President’s junior.

Huang’s assuredness is justified. Macron is keenly aware of the predictions that advanced AI will usher in a period of wealth creation unlike any the modern world has seen. He is also aware that with creations of wealth come redistributions of power. The French believe that if they are to be on the right side of these developments, they will need homegrown companies such as Mistral to compete with giants like OpenAI. And if Mistral is to compete, then it will need the Élysée to secure the physical hardware on which the company’s computation will take place and its data transferred.

It is Nvidia, of course, which sells that hardware: the silicon chips at the heart of this revolution. Imagine that, at the dawn of the fossil fuel era, there was a single company that was central to the piping and other infrastructure required to transfer oil, gas and coal and to burn them. Sure, Google and Amazon have their own serviceable chips; other companies are trying to develop their own. But Nvidia occupies a dominant position.

It is no wonder, therefore, that the California-based company has the second-highest market cap of any company in the world. And it is no wonder that Macron has championed Mensch and has helped broker a deal between Nvidia and parties including Mistral. As Macron said: “This is our fight for sovereignty, for strategic autonomy, which is to say: we want to keep that.”

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The deal will ensure that Mistral is one of the beneficiaries of Nvidia’s Blackwell platform: the new generation of microchips on which high-level computation can take place. This will allow Mistral to handle the duties that will be increasingly outsourced to it by the French state: bureaucratic, logistical, even military. Blackwell will also be the training ground for forthcoming iterations of Mistral’s large language models. Sure, the Élysée could contract an American company — OpenAI has begun hawking its services to entire countries — but that would risk France’s independence. Such a deal could ultimately be the equivalent of filling a civil service with foreign nationals who could be recalled without warning.

Even using ChatGPT puts French consumers downstream of decisions made by American developers. It was American developers, famously, who were responsible for the Gemini model that gave the impression that Vikings and Nazis alike were black. That kind of overbearing cultural engineering, though accidental and swiftly retracted, is a poor fit for a country that has a heavy-handed cultural programme of its own. Take the Académie Française, whose role of language custodianship — did I say “role” again? I meant rôle — has no equivalent in the Anglophone world.

Sovereign AI, then, makes philosophical and pragmatic sense for a country that retains a defiant sense of selfhood. And as the data fed to AIs becomes increasingly voluminous and intimate, even as the AIs are given more comprehensive decision-making power in realms from utilities to the military, the task of implementing sovereign AI becomes ever-more urgent.

But is it really sovereign? There is an obvious irony in buying one’s sovereignty from an American company. Neither Macron nor Huang nor Mensch acknowledged that on stage. But the facts are plain: Donald Trump could, with a single executive order, prevent Nvidia from exporting chips even to Western allies such as Britain, France and South Korea. The world’s most powerful chips, those used within Nvidia equipment, are the product of near-superhuman manufacturing whose complexity and intricacy are unsurpassed beyond Taiwanese shores. Blackwell models include 208 billion transistors, each of which is smaller than a viral particle and etched by lasers with nanometre-scale precision. This is some of the most technically demanding engineering on the planet.

Very few countries, even with sustained national effort, could emulate the performance of those GPUs with an in-house substitute. So far, only China comes close. And the US and China are the only two countries that can already claim to be anywhere near AI sovereignty, developing both hardware and software either on their own shores or via domestically headquartered companies such as Nvidia. True AI sovereignty, for almost every other country, is therefore something approaching a mirage — at least within the current technological paradigm.

The same is true, though, of almost any given technology. Prosperity depends on trade; trade depends on interdependence. The pipework of AI, so to speak, happens to be accessible only via an unusually small number of vendors. But the impracticability of perfect sovereign AI does not mean that Macron and his peers should not strive for it. There are relatively few vendors of oil and gas, and total energy independence is very difficult, but it is still worth aiming for. Partial dependence is much more desirable than total dependence.

There remains the uncomfortable question of what will become of the countries that fail to secure any meaningful kind of AI sovereignty. They are likely to outsource some amount of decision-making to foreign tech companies, and this decision-making will be inflected by someone else’s values. The decision-making would be based on data that might be held in foreign servers. One can imagine President Donald Trump Jr, a couple of election cycles hence, demanding access to a third-world country’s cobalt mines, threatening to turn off this country’s access to its own data. More subtly, a leading power might use other levers: limiting, for instance, a rival’s speed of access to the latest AI models. No less significantly for such a country, its selfhood will inevitably be eroded if it is governed by algorithmic values that are not quite its own. As Nathan Beniach, an investor and the author of the “State of AI” report, tells me: “For countries that opt out of building strategic AI infrastructure, the risk isn’t immediate subjugation but progressive loss of agency, what I’ve called a form of AI colonialism. These nations will increasingly find their economies, healthcare systems, security apparatus, and political discourse shaped by foreign models they neither control nor fully understand.”

The classical nation-state model, says Benaich, will struggle to adapt to these conditions. What emerges from the “sovereign AI” sales pitch, he suggests, is “a kind of neo-mercantilist compute empire, whereby Nvidia occupies the position of upstream monopolist, extracting rents across multiple national industrial strategies”.

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Along the way, Huang, who is already worth $93 billion, will become even wealthier. Nvidia, whose stock price jumped on the day of the Paris event, is on course to become even more dominant than it is already; Apple and Microsoft will have to innovate rapidly in order to keep up. Anyone fearing an eternal monopoly, though, should note the rapid outmoding of the Google search engine, once seen as unassailable, by today’s youthful cadre of large language models. It is conceivable that, even without the advantage of Chinese IP theft, someone will make cheaper versions of Nvidia hardware.

And so the scramble for digital sovereignty begins. Last week, the British government called for “high-ambition researchers” to come up with uses for its new supercomputer, combining AI with robotics, biosciences, materials discovery and national security. Meanwhile, the President of South Korea has announced a $735-billion investment plan that will keep the country’s AI South Korean, and has been harvesting leading tech executives to steward the project.

Richer and more assertive countries, such as France, will retain some level of independence, even if intelligence, power and wealth begin to concentrate more intensely than they do already. Britain has catching-up to do; having allowed Google, as it was then, to buy DeepMind, we have no home-grown frontier AI company to rival Mistral.

If the doomers are correct, the ongoing concentration of intelligence and power is freighted with danger. The big fish will get bigger, the small fish will get smaller, and Starmer and Macron have a limited amount of time in which to find their countries’ place in this precipitous new hierarchy.

Long ago, it was reasonable to hope that voters thinking of voting for a scary ultra-Rightist in order to annoy the centrists whose policies kept them down might come to their senses the moment that scary ultra-Rightist looked likely to win government. Something like that happened in France in 2002. Back then, middle-class socialists, young ecologists and working-class communists lined up at the polling stations alongside conservatives to give 82% of the national vote to Rightist Jacques Chirac so as to keep ultra-Rightist Jean-Marie Le Pen — the father of the French ultra-Right’s current leader — out of the Elysée. But this is not what happened in France 25 years later, or in Canada or Australia last week.

In 2002, six years before Western capitalism’s near-death experience, Chirac defeated Le Pen because the socialist and the communist parties directed their voters to him. Under the slogan: “We vote for you today, we oppose you tomorrow morning!”, voters who were at odds with the establishment voted for an establishment figure in order to keep a neofascist out. All the while, they retained their allegiance to parties of the Left. In contrast, Emmanuel Macron won by annihilating the parties of the Left.

Working-class voters, who were suffering the consequences of the centrists’ austerity policies, were incensed with Macron, a former banker determined to impose “green” taxes on them while giving tax breaks to his haute bourgeois mates. With nowhere else to go, these voters drifted en masse to Le Pen. Then something startling happened: Macron and Le Pen grew co-dependent, their mutual antipathy notwithstanding. The more austerity he imposed on the many, the deeper their discontent and the higher her support. And the higher her support, the better able he was to appeal to anti-fascists to hold their noses and vote for him in order to keep her out.

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As this dynamic co-dependency grew, the ultra-Right won a staggering 40% of the national vote in the June 2024 parliamentary elections. There is nothing on the horizon to suggest that this trend is unravelling. In this light, history may well remember Macron more as the liberal center’s gravedigger than its redeemer.

Cut to last week and the decisive defeat of the Rightist Canadian and Australian parties that tried, and failed, to ride the Trumpian wave. Mark Carney and Anthony Albanese won because President Trump made it impossible for them to lose. By threatening to annex Canada, and by slapping tariffs on an Australia that not only has never missed an opportunity to bend over backwards to accommodate Washington’s every whim but also runs a trade deficit with the United States, it is as if Trump was determined that his Canadian and Australian copycats lose last week’s elections. Nevertheless, under the surface of Carney’s and Albanese’s victories, it is not difficult to discern social trends similar to those that rendered Macron’s victory decidedly Pyrrhic.

In Canada, after 11 years of ruling, the Liberals failed to appeal to the large sections of the working-class who either abstained or voted for the conservatives. When the Liberals nevertheless secured a razor-thin majority, they did so by cannibalizing, Macron-style, the Left-of-center (the NDP and the Parti Québécois). In Australia, Labor’s landslide victory obscured the fact that it won with a historically low percentage of the primary vote. Although it won most seats in the working-class suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne, Labor did so on second preferences, while continuing to bleed first preferences — especially amongst the immigrant communities which used to be the party’s most reliable vote reservoir. As in Canada, Australia’s centrists won by feeding off the only Left-of-center force, the Greens, but had no luck in unseating a significant number of Right-leaning independents (the so-called Teals).

So far, so very similar to the political dynamics in France. What makes these similarities so fascinating is that they have taken place in such different countries. France’s economy is joined at the hip to that of Germany and the rest of the European Union. Australia and Canada, on the other hand, are resource-based economies integrated into the energy-industrial-military complex of the United States.

Because of its location, Canada sells 75% of its exports to America, while also directly investing more of its capital in the US than the US invests in Canada. As for geographically isolated Australia, its economy is also deeply intertwined with US conglomerates, albeit indirectly. While Australian mining companies have long been in the business of extracting fossil fuels and digging up gargantuan volumes of the country’s red earth before shipping it all to Japan and China, this roaring trade with Asia’s two superpowers is predicated on the US sourcing two crucial resources from China and Japan: manufactured goods and savings.

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This is why the political trends in Canada and Australia are similar to those in France. Despite their vast differences, the three economies are hooked into the same US-centric global surplus-recycling mechanism, whose deep crisis is steering their politics in a direction inimical to the centrists’ medium-term prospects. Politicians like Macron, Carney and Albanese may score impressive victories, but they have no plan for stemming the secular decline of their influence over their increasingly restive electorates. For years now, these electorates have been pummeled by the undercurrents of the global recycling mechanism — a mechanism that once drove their countries’ growth and stability.

The essence of this global mechanism (which I once labelled the Global Minotaur) is simple. Since the Seventies, America’s deficits have provided East Asia (first Japan, then China) and Europe (primarily Germany) the demand for their factories’ manufactures. In return, the European Union, Japan and later China sent their accumulated profits to Wall Street to be recycled into US private and public debt, some equities, and real estate. A Chinese official once described this mechanism to me as a “dark deal”. “Our Dark Deal with the Americans,” the official explained, “turns on the US trade deficit, which keeps demand for our manufactures high. In return, our capitalists invest the bulk of their dollar superprofits into America’s FIRE”. (The acronym stands for “Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate.”) “Once this process got underway, America shifted much of its industrial production to our shores.”

The problem with this global recycling mechanism was that, to function smoothly, it had to generate larger and larger imbalances: greater trade deficits for the US and more accumulated savings for Northern Europe and East Asia. But there are limits to how large imbalances can grow. Ruptures are inevitable. The longer they are delayed, the greater the pain they inflict — a truth that centrists never acknowledged, not even when it was tearing down their houses.

Trump’s greatest strength comes from asking the pressing question that the centrists refuse to countenance: what comes after the Dark Deal? What comes after the imbalances built on the US trade deficit have proven unsustainably massive? Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury Secretary, put it succinctly in a recent speech at the IMF: “Everywhere we look across the international economic system today, we see imbalance… This status quo of large and persistent imbalances is not sustainable… The persistent over-reliance on the United States for demand is resulting in an evermore unbalanced global economy.”

Their proposed solutions may be wrongheaded, half-baked, even crazy, but at least Trump’s team has identified the problem. Voters may not understand that these unsustainable imbalances are at the root of their plight, but enough of them have the sixth sense to intuit that Trump’s people are on to something, unlike the centrists who act like King Canute ordering the tides of discontent to reverse course.

Inexcusably, centrists treat Bessent and the rest of Trump’s economic team as Neanderthals. They forget that the people they celebrate as the architects of the globalized capitalist order, an order which they now mourn, had warned them in good time. On 10 April 2005, when no one was interested in bad news stories, Paul Volcker, the man who had helped design the devastating Nixon Shock and later headed the Federal Reserve during the formative years of the Dark Deal, foreshadowed everything Bessent is now saying:

“What holds [the US economic success story] all together is a massive and growing flow of capital from abroad, running to more than $2 billion every working day, and growing… As a nation we don’t consciously borrow or beg. We aren’t even offering attractive interest rates, nor do we have to offer our creditors protection against the risk of a declining dollar… We fill our shops and our garages with goods from abroad, and the competition has been a powerful restraint on our internal prices. It’s surely helped keep interest rates exceptionally low despite our vanishing savings and rapid growth. And it’s comfortable for our trading partners and for those supplying the capital. Some, such as China, depend heavily on our expanding domestic markets. And for the most part, the central banks of the emerging world have been willing to hold more and more dollars, which are, after all, the closest thing the world has to a truly international currency… The difficulty is that this seemingly comfortable pattern can’t go on indefinitely.”

Three years later, Wall Street crashed. Two decades of centrist denial followed, bought at the price of gigantic money printing for the few and harsh austerity for the many. With Volcker and his ilk sidelined by the governing centrists, the political center began to fragment across the West — with deficit countries like France, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom (not to mention my country, Greece) closer to the eye of the storm. It was only a matter of time before someone like Trump would rise up, the inevitable outcome of the centrists’ refusal to acknowledge that the global surplus recycling mechanism, the Dark Deal, was dead in the water — just as its predecessor, the Bretton Woods system, was before President Nixon killed it in 1971.

Sure enough, Trump’s policies are unlikely to rebalance the world economy. While some manufacturing will return to America, automation will render this a jobless growth surge. Big Tech’s burgeoning cloud rents will further undermine any actual rebalancing. China will probably move on, gradually transforming the Brics into a Bretton Woods-style system anchored by the yuan. The European Union will fail to rebalance its internal macroeconomy, sinking deeper into stagnation. The planet’s climate will go haywire.

But, though Trump’s policies may not work in the US, France, Australia, Canada or anywhere else, his willingness to upend a broken global system is enough to garner political support for, at home, unprecedented authoritarianism; and abroad, a confrontation with China that casts doubt on our species’ long-term prospects. Meanwhile, centrists stuck in their delusion that the Dark Deal can be sustained are condemned to keep losing even when they win.

It’s rare to meet relaxed French police at a political event, even rarer when a good chunk of them are CRS (Compagnies républicaines de sécurité), the baton- and taser-wielding riot police. The latter are here in case of an Antifa attack, which is unlikely. Far from the French capital, where she’s never managed to poll above single figures, and exactly one month after a Paris court sentenced her to four years in prison (two suspended), a €100,000 fine, and a five-year ban from running for public office, Marine, as everyone here calls her, has come among her own people to fight for her political life.

Three hours before kick-off, cheerful queues are already forming. Since last year’s snap election, all three Aude MPs belong to the National Rally, part of the 125-strong intake that made the Rally the largest single-party group in the French National Assembly. The maps published after the runoff showed the entire Mediterranean coast of France, from Perpignan at the Spanish border to Menton next to Italy, as one almost solid block of navy blue (“bleu marine”). Three red islands (Marseilles, the university town of Montpellier, posh Avignon) and a single Macronista yellow speck (half of Toulon) were all that remained of legacy parties.

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Even though the two-round electoral system ultimately disappointed Rassemblement ambitions nationwide, when a hastily-cobbled Front Républicain alliance between the Left and Macron’s centrists beat back many of the Rally candidates who’d been in the lead, similar Rally blue areas structure the new map of France: in the northern rustbelt where Le Pen herself has held her Pas-de-Calais seat for eight years; in Lorraine and other once-prosperous north-eastern mining and steelmaking towns; even in places such as Burgundy and Corsica, where they won unheard-of tallies of close to 40% of the vote. The Marinisation of the country seems proof of Le Pen’s achievement in “detoxifying” a brand that was once embodied by her fire-breathing, provocateur father.

My driver and Languedoc-whisperer, an Anglo-American friend who’s lived here for two decades, says the jolly queues and party atmosphere reminds him of MAGA rallies. One difference is that nobody starts insulting us once we’ve collected our press badges. On the other hand, the minute people recognise Yoann Usai, a reporter from CNEWS, the conservative all-news channel, derided by Parisian progressives, they crowd him affectionately for autographs and selfies. “Thank you! You’re speaking for us! You’re defending us!”

As in America, the mood is against “le steal”. “C’est une décision politique!” insists the first person we ask about the judicial condemnation in Paris — and the second, and the third. Le Pen, a barrister by trade, earned herself the solid enmity of her judges, as well as a harsher sentence, when instead of admitting that she’d wilfully broken European Parliament rules (and French political party financing laws) by paying, for almost two decades, Rally officials in Paris with salaries supposed to go to Brussels parliamentary assistants, she claimed she was singled out for political censure. But victimhood plays well among the faithful here. “They all do it and get a rap on the fingers, she gets jail and a ban from running”, says Josette, a 68-year-old former shoe shop assistant. “Ils ont voulu nous faire un sale coup!” (“They’re trying to pull a fast one on us!”), say Linda and Christelle, 20-somethings in crop-tops and ripped jeans, hoping they will be able to get within selfie-reach of the handsome Bardella.

It’s true that both France’s current PM, the centrist François Bayrou, 73, as well as the hard-Left France Unbowed firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon, also 73, have also been targeted by judges for similar rule-breaking. But neither Mélenchon, nor those of his party’s Brussels parliamentary assistants currently being investigated for alleged misappropriation of some €500,000 over 9 years, have yet been formally indicted. (France Unbowed denies all charges.) While nine of Bayrou’s Modem Party assistants were condemned last year (to fines and suspended sentences), he himself was acquitted, although the public prosecutor has appealed against “excessive leniency”, and Bayrou will have to stand trial again. In both cases, the sums involved are one-third of those siphoned off by Le Pen’s party; and the practice is “less systematic” (than regular payments into Rassemblement coffers for non-existent jobs for over twenty years). But that’s far too much detail to dispel this crowd’s belief in the fix.

Inside, rock music is blaring, of the unadventurous Radio 2 variety; Gloria Gaynor, Queen, Black-Eyed Peas, even Aznavour and Piaf: the vibe more rave party than political funeral. In addition to their parents and grandparents, there are crowds of young people in the wide pit, perhaps two-thirds of the 5,000-strong throng. They are the ones who form the bulk of Bardella’s two-million-plus TikTok followers, but they shout “MA-RINE, PRÉ-SI-DENTE!” at the top of their voices until Le Pen shows up, and is greeted with wild applause. Earlier, with the clever analyses of Paris political pundits in mind — the aristocracy of established newspaper and magazines columnists variously billed this “last-chance rally” as the moment when Bardella would “commit matricide” (Le Point), “cast himself as the Crown Prince” (Challenges), “put her to pasture” (Libération) — I had tried asking as many people as possible for favourites: who would they ultimately prefer to give their vote to? Nobody would play. “They’re inseparable.” “They go hand in hand.”

“You don’t understand,” Josette told me. “We love him, but she’s family.” “She understands us,” her husband said. “She does all this for us. Yes, if it comes to that, I will vote for Jordan; but that’s because I know she will be at his side, she’ll advise him.” Jean-Marc, the owner of a local garage, who for years voted for what was then called the Front National, headed by the old Jean-Marie Le Pen, said he tended to favor Bardella’s more pro-business policies. “Marine is sometimes too Left-wing, she would spend more on benefits when the country can’t afford it. If he’s her prime minister, he’ll bring balance.”

Often disappointing in television debates — Emmanuel Macron, the ultimate class swot, destroyed her twice, in 2017 and in 2022, pushing even the most faithful of her supporters to predict that she’d never make it to the Élysée — Marine Le Pen is never better than when cornered. A week after stalking out of the court that had apparently killed her political prospects for good, she gave a one-hour interview to the respected parliamentary journal “L’Hémicycle”. As she pointed out, applying to her a specific disposition that enforced her ineligibility immediately, even though she was appealing, and therefore presumed innocent, meant she was being put into the category of dangerous gangsters and terrorists, and deemed a risk to society. “I don’t suppose anyone really believes I shall flee abroad?” she asked. It was a fine performance, one of her best, and at the party that followed, in a Michelin-starred Champs-Elysées restaurant that once belonged to Referendum Party founder and press maverick Jimmy Goldsmith, she was crowded by the exact kind of people ­— political journalists, society types, business leaders — who supposedly want to keep her out of the game.

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Strangely, in Narbonne, Le Pen chose to speak first, unconcernedly leaving Bardella to deliver the finale. The grandson of Italian immigrants, born in France’s poorest département north of Paris, and a university drop-out, Bardella doesn’t threaten her — though he is probably the fastest learner in French politics. “They’re instinctive personalities, no book-readers, so neither will try intellectually snubbing the other, and they have an almost filial relationship,” says a Rassemblement MP.

I spot a candidate for the mayoralty of a large provincial city in the 2026 municipal elections. The candidate is standing for UDR: Union des Droites Républicaines, the Les Républicains rump that seceded last year to ally themselves with the Rally, and were damned accordingly. Marine Le Pen runs a surprisingly relaxed shop, I’m told. “It’s such a relief after the constant backstabbing at Les Réps. One of our leading MPs went to her to explain our group couldn’t support the Rally in a coming parliamentary vote of no-confidence on pensions reform, because it went against stated policy. It meant 16 fewer votes. She said, ‘Yes, I understand; that’s not what your voters want from you.’ No drama! No recriminations! Well, that’s how you explain her relationship with Jordan. She promoted him several times, because she liked what she saw. Of course he’s ambitious; of course he realizes younger voters connect to him. But it’s easier for him to wait, because there’s no resentment; he’s been far better treated than her own niece Marion Maréchal, who left the Rally to join Eric Zemmour.

Marion, the wife of the former Fratelli d’Italia MEP Vincenzo Sofo, is a gifted but temperamental maverick. Once a Zemmour MEP, she recently created her own mini-party rather than altogether re-joining the Rassemblement. She is a Le Pen, which used to be everything in the party — but the new message is now that loyalty is more prized than family. When Bardella recently produced a best-selling (200,000 copies) autobiography, “Ce que je cherche” (What I Seek), which he had very little hand in writing, she immediately agreed to rally side-events in which he was mobbed for signed copies. At Narbonne, you could see dozens of young people clutching their copies like a fashion accessory, with their hero’s black and white cover photo well in evidence.

This pair know their audience. And they know the sure-fire way to get an entire hall to boo on cue is only to utter: “Monsieur Macron…!” In Narbonne, both Le Pen and Bardella grab the opportunity at regular intervals. (“Madame von der Leyen!…” works too.) Le Pen is strong and fluent, talking about the economic crisis, lack of jobs, de-industrialization — far more than on immigration and insecurity, as if, to this audience, that was already a given. Bardella is punchier: using precise figures, against the Green Deal and the costs it meant for the less well-off; on zero tolerance on crime; on France’s “humiliation” by her former colony, Algeria, (whose the 79-year-old president, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, has directed French-Algerian influencers to stir up their communities against the French state, and imprisoned an 80-year-old French novelist on trumped-up charges.) The crowd, who applaud Marine from sheer affection, roar at Bardella’s arguments, including a well-crafted sentence on rising knife murder. “No crime can be tolerated, no one should walk into a mosque to kill a young man with impunity.” (He is referring to the killing of Aboubakar Cissé, 22, in La Grande Combe, 90 miles north-east of Narbonne, which Mélenchon immediately grasped as an instance of “Islamophobia.”) But even if you could feel the excitement Bardella, a strong speaker, generates, it wasn’t strong enough that Le Pen could feel slighted.

If now were truly the time for the fight for leadership that analysts predict, it would have put Bardella one step further to so-called victory. But even if this “ideal son-in-law” of mesmerizing poise were tempted to unseat his mentor, he knows perfectly well that any hint of disloyalty would spell his end with Rassemblement voters, a bloc who feel, rightly or wrongly, that every government and politician in France has betrayed them. Loyalty is all they have, and all they prize. Besides, even if Bardella only were to run in 2032, he’d still be the exact age of Emmanuel Macron when he won the presidency in 2017.

Winning is now realistically in the Rassemblement sights. Emmanuel Macron, who cannot run again, is so detested that his probable successors have little hope of victory on his negative coat-tails. The most interesting is his 36-year-old former PM Gabriel Attal, who had 240 days in the job before last year’s disastrous snap election; but he suffers from being perceived as a Macron clone. The Left is irretrievably split between half a dozen parties, from Mélenchon’s France Unbowed to a shattered Socialist Party whose best hope is a comeback of François Hollande, still smarting from his minister Macron’s betrayal. On the Right, what’s left of Les Républicains cannot hope to be in the runoff. If Mélenchon gets there, the Rassemblement will win easily, possibly with 60%. If Hollande’s dream of a comeback catches on (and that’s a big if) on the Left, he still may not be able to benefit from another Front Républicain.

That leaves the oft-discounted, even more often derided Marine Le Pen. Her appeal should be heard next year. Even if she cannot stand a fourth time, she will have shaped the next French presidential race.

The strategy draws inspiration from Poland, where housebuilders are now legally obliged to include bomb shelters in new builds, and Germany, which is reviving Cold War-era civil defense schemes with a bunker geolocation app. Meanwhile, Norway is advising people to stock up on iodine tablets in the case of a nuclear attack.

The EU wants its citizens to be self-sufficient for at least 72 hours, recommending households stockpile food, water, medicine and — why not? — playing cards and power banks. Because, of course, should nuclear war break out, a good round of poker and a fully charged phone will see us through.

Yet, as ludicrous as these preparations might seem, they should worry us all. The Preparedness Union Strategy is only the latest layer in an architecture of control that has been building for decades. It rests squarely on the shoulders of the EU’s recent defense policy reboot, ReArm Europe, now renamed less ominously, “Readiness 2030”.

The core narrative behind this push is simple and endlessly repeated: the idea that Russia is likely to launch a full-scale attack on Europe in the coming years, especially if Putin isn’t stopped in Ukraine. The European Parliament resolution in favor of the ReArm Europe programme warned that “if the EU were to fail in its support and Ukraine were forced to surrender, Russia would then turn against other countries, including possibly the EU member states”. As Macron recently put it, Russia is an “imperialist” country that “knows no borders… it is an existential threat to us, not just to Ukraine, not just to its neighbors, but to all of Europe”.

But the notion that Russians are massing at the borders, with designs on Paris or Berlin, is a fantasy. Indeed, when we’re told to prepare for war by packing a power bank and a waterproof pouch for our ID, it’s hard not to be reminded of Cold War absurdities like “Duck and Cover”, the “preparedness strategy” of the time designed to protect individuals from the effects of a nuclear explosion by instructing people to crouch to the ground and cover their heads. That campaign, too, sold the illusion of safety in the face of annihilation. And beneath the clownish veneer of the push lies a calculated aim: the EU’s attempt to further consolidate power at the supranational level, elevating the Commission’s role in security and crisis response — domains traditionally under national control.

The EU’s preparedness plan is based on the recommendations of a report from the former Finnish president Sauli Niinistö, which calls for the establishment of a central operational crisis “hub” within the European Commission; greater civilian-military cooperation, including by conducting regular EU-wide exercises uniting armed forces, civil protection, police, security, healthcare workers and firefighters; and developing joint EU-Nato emergency protocols.

When considered alongside the EU’s rearmament plans, it suggests a comprehensive, society-wide militarization, something which in the years ahead, will become the dominant paradigm in Europe: all spheres of life — political, economic, social, cultural and scientific — will be subordinated to the alleged goal of national, or rather supranational, security.

Western governments have been resorting to fear as a means of control for a very long time. Indeed, it’s a telling coincidence that the EU’s announcement coincides with the fifth anniversary of the Covid lockdowns, which ushered in the most radical experiment ever attempted in fear-driven politics.

The pandemic response used a totalizing narrative that wildly inflated the threat of the virus to justify historically unprecedented policies. As the Director-General of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, put it, it was everyone’s moral duty to “come together against a common enemy” and “wage war on the virus”. In this struggle for the greater good — public health — virtually any action was justified.

From the perspective of “crisis politics”, the widespread use of the war metaphor to frame the Covid pandemic was no coincidence: war is, after all, the emergency par excellence. Across the globe, we saw an authoritarian turn as governments used the “public health emergency” to sweep aside democratic procedures and constitutional constraints, militarize societies, crack down on civil liberties and implement unprecedented measures of social control.

Throughout the pandemic, we witnessed — and populations largely accepted — the imposition of measures that would have been unthinkable until that moment: the shutdown of entire economies, the mass quarantining (and enforced vaccination) of millions of healthy individuals and the normalization of digital Covid passports as a regulated requirement for participating in social life.

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All this prepared the ground for the collective reaction of Western societies to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — a real war at last, after years of rehearsing metaphorical ones. In terms of communication, we immediately saw the emergence of a similarly totalizing narrative: it was Western societies’ moral duty to support the Ukrainians’ fight for freedom and democracy against Russia and its evil president.

However, as it becomes increasingly apparent that Ukraine is losing the war, and as the world is faced with Trump’s attempt to negotiate peace, European elites are recalibrating their narrative: it’s not just Ukraine’s survival at stake — but that of Europe as a whole. The threat is no longer over there but right here at home: not only is Russia preparing to attack Europe, but, we are told, it is already waging a wide array of hybrid attacks against Europe, ranging from cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns to election interference.

All this suggests that Western elites learned an important lesson during the pandemic: fear works. If a population is made anxious enough — whether about disease, war, natural disasters or some polycrisis cocktail comprising all of the above — they can be made to accept almost anything.

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The EU’s Preparedness Union Strategy could, therefore, be read within this broader context. It is not really about water bottles and power banks. It is a continuation of the Covid-era paradigm: a method of governance that fuses psychological manipulation, militarization of civilian life and the normalization of emergency rule. Indeed, the EU explicitly talks of the need to adopt, in case of future crises, the same “whole-of-government” and “whole-of-society” approach first spearheaded during the pandemic.

This time, though, the attempt to engineer yet another mass psychosis seems to be failing. Judging from the social media reaction to a cringeworthy video by Hadja Lahbib, EU Commissioner for Equality, Preparedness and Crisis Management, there appears to be widespread skepticism about the bloc’s fearmongering. But while this is good news, the worry is that as propaganda falters, those in power are increasingly turning to repressive tactics to muzzle political rivals — evident in moves like the electoral ban on Le Pen. This strategy of mounting authoritarianism, though, is untenable in the long run: fear and repression are no substitute for actual consensus, and in the latter’s void, new forms of resistance are bound to emerge.

The world of February 2014, when Vladimir Putin’s “little green men” began popping up in Crimea has now — beyond doubt — irrevocably disappeared. That was the world of Barack Obama and Angela Merkel, European demilitarization and global interdependence. Back then, Russia provided Europe its gas and the United States its defense, while China provided the entire world with the raw materials needed for the technologies which would drive the future. All these assumptions now lie in tatters; that era finally brought to a cataclysmic end by Russia’s attempt to finally subjugate Ukraine in February 2022.

Three years on from that fateful decision, a million men at arms are still battling it out in trenches, hunted by drone armies powered by artificial intelligence. Imperial carve-ups are taking place in the marbled halls of Saudi Arabia while the transatlantic alliance teeters on the brink of collapse. And a new trade war is threatening to send the world economy into recession, risking not only the future of NATO but Europe’s entire social-democratic model. Yet behind the scenes in Europe’s capitals, a dispiriting refusal to abandon the dogmas of old still lingers. And among the worst offenders are those who are performatively leading Europe’s response to Donald Trump: the British and French.

Beyond the warm words over the past few weeks, London and Paris are largely sticking to the tired national strategies they have clung to for much of the past 50 years: the French talking of European autonomy but in reality pursuing national autonomy; the British pretending they are a mini America but, instead, becoming an ever cheaper imitation. The irony is that, as much as it might pain either side to admit, each would be stronger if it became a little more like the other.

As the former French ambassador to the US, Gerard Araud, has repeatedly pointed out, the Gaullist insistence to retain some national independence from America has proved more farsighted than Britain or Germany would like to admit. While the British military has long prioritized obtaining the latest shiny piece of American military kit available — even at the cost of becoming ever more dependent on the States — the French have prioritized retaining national autonomy, even at the cost of paying more for less.

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One such example is the French insistence on a sovereign space policy. They spend around three times more than we do on space programs, but end up with an inferior product to the one we access courtesy of the Americans, according to those I spoke with. Another example is the French satellite communications operator Eutelsat, which now wants to replace Elon Musk’s Starlink in Ukraine in order to protect European autonomy. But Eutelsat has far fewer satellites operating at far higher altitudes resulting in slower connections. European autonomy, in other words, means paying more for a worse product — at least in the short term.

The upside of this French insistence on national resilience is that in the event of a genuine American withdrawal from NATO — and, perhaps, even an alliance with Russia — the French would at least have the foundations upon which to construct a genuinely independent military. Britain, in contrast, has built its entire strategy around the principle of interoperability with the United States, and so would be sent into a crisis, forcing it to question everything from scratch.

Yet, the corollary of the French insistence on national resilience is that, for all their talk of European autonomy, they cannot bring themselves to do what is necessary to genuinely move in this direction — since it would inevitably undermine their own independence. The most obvious example of this paradox is the fact that in Ukraine’s great battle for survival against Russia — a war Emmanuel Macron has held up as an existential test of European security — France has fallen far behind the UK and Germany in supplying the necessary arms for Kyiv to prevail. Why? The answer, it seems, comes in two parts: first, France continues to prioritize national self-reliance over European solidarity; and, second, as one analyst put it to me, France appears “more genuinely broke” even than Britain.

In total, Britain has contributed around €10 billion in military aid to Ukraine, compared with just €3.5 billion from France. As part of this, Britain has been prepared to run down its military stocks. “We’ve given it all away,” said one official I spoke to. By one estimate, Britain has just 14 pieces of heavy artillery left in Estonia, I was told. The French would never entertain this level of exposure. The result, however, is that in the fight for Ukraine’s national survival, Britain has shown more European “solidarity” than France.

Talking European but acting French is the straitjacket Paris seems unable to escape, limiting its ability to lead the Continent into the European revolution it has long championed. Again and again this conundrum plays out. Twenty EU states — including Germany — have called for greater coordination with the UK defense industry to boost the Europe’s resilience, but the French rejected the proposal. Britain has sought a defense pact with the EU in recent months, the process has been held up by the French insistence on negotiating access to Britain’s fishing waters. The inevitable result: French autonomy, European weakness.

A similar story has played out on the biggest question of all: nuclear weapons. In France, the independence of the country’s deterrent is sacrosanct. There is understandable pride — especially today — that it is less dependent on American cooperation than British equivalent. Yet, for this very reason the French have proven unable to move beyond the Gaullist doctrine which states that its nuclear deterrent serves only its vital national interests. Yet, this means it cannot be extended to Europe. And so it is stuck.

Britain, in contrast, has always been much more willing to be dependent on American cooperation, but also to place its deterrent at the service of NATO. In the event of full-scale American isolationism, the cost for Britain of maintaining its nuclear deterrent would be prohibitive. As such, the lack of interest in strategic national autonomy has left it in the similarly invidious position of being tied to a superpower that increasingly fails to hide its contempt for its supplicant partners. Whatever happens over the coming months and years, Britain will at some point be forced to confront the question it does not want to answer: what will it do when the Americans are gone and there is no NATO?

The costs of real independence from the United States, then, remain too high for either Britain or France to seriously entertain. The scale of our dependence was revealed by the former head of British intelligence, Alex Younger, this week when he said there were “no circumstances” under which European troops could be sent to Ukraine without a peace deal — and that even with an agreement it would be “irresponsible” to do that without strategic support from the US. According to one senior military adviser I spoke with, Europe needs to spend around 3.5% of its GDP for the next decade simply to get its armies into a position to independently deter Russian aggression. Until then, Europe’s collective forces would be vulnerable to a Russian incursion into the Baltics without the Americans.

Yet, even at this level of spending, Europe would still have to remain under the American nuclear umbrella. Without it, military advisers believe, Europe remains vulnerable to nuclear coercion. “We don’t have the answer to tactical nukes,” as one official put it to me, bluntly. An answer would cost Britain and France more like 4.5% of GDP — unless the Germans finance it. But while nuclear autonomy remains “the big play” for France and Britain in the coming years — the grand offer reshaping the continent for the 21st century — neither seems capable nor willing to make it.

In Ukraine, as many as two million drones are now produced each year, an increasing number of which are being controlled by artificial intelligence. Ukraine now trains its soldiers to launch combined operations with drone armies at land and sea, while its traditional military is dependent on high-end American intelligence and technology that Europe does not have. The nature of war itself is changing, which in turn, will force the armies of Europe and the United States to revolutionize themselves irrespective of the outcome.

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In turn, both Ukraine’s drone production and America’s military might are dependent on the supply of critical minerals — including rare earths — which are sourced via an extraordinarily complicated global network which must be protected, in the end, by military power. Strip away everything and there is a Leviathan holding a sword and a scepter — the only question is who that is.

If Europe is serious about its autonomy, then, it will need not only its own militaries, but its own supply of critical minerals, artificial intelligence, semiconductor plants and reliable sources of energy. It is for all these reasons that neither Britain nor France today is rushing to grasp the opportunity presented by Trump of “independence” from the United States. Neither can afford it.

Here is the rub. Britain and France are far too poor to play the role they want. Last year, the French government ran a deficit of more than 6%, far outside the limits demanded by the European Commission. Yet it has so far proved impossible to assemble a majority in the National Assembly to pass a budget to bring this under control. Instead, Paris has relied on constitutional powers to enact the budget without a parliamentary vote. In Britain, meanwhile, which has similar levels of national debt, the Government has a large majority, but is gearing up for a Spring Statement which most analysts believe will contain fanciful forecasts of undeliverable spending cuts.

The painful truth facing both London and Paris is that while Britain will need to become more French to thrive in a world of American withdrawal — and France will need become more British in its willingness to rely on others — both countries will need to become something new if they are ever to become truly independent in this new world. Henry Kissinger did note that Donald Trump may be “one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences”. The trouble is, neither Britain nor France seems willing to stop pretending.

When Barnier was appointed Prime Minister after the long summer of indecision, Bayrou theorized that it would be better to come after Barnier’s downfall, because surely the parliament would find it harder to censure a government a second time. But this week, as the Assembly musters against him already, he may yet have to eat his words.

Bayrou’s nomination a month ago came as something of a surprise to the public, given how long he has been around without ever securing the top jobs. This time, though, Bayrou had left no one in any doubt that he wanted Prime Minister and President Macron was running out of options. The story his supporters tell is that he was summoned to the Elysée only for Macron to tell him he wanted someone more pliable and likely to take orders than Barnier had been. But after Bayrou threw a furious tantrum, threatening to withdraw his support in the national assembly, Macron backed down.

Just as Bayrou carries the whiff of angry desperation about him, then, so too does his government — some of whom have been hauled out of the political deep freeze. One is the former socialist prime minister, Manuel Valls. After resigning from the Socialist Party, Valls briefly sat as an MP for Macron’s party after the 2017 legislative elections, only to quit in an attempt to become the mayor of Barcelona. Another is Elisabeth Borne, a recent Prime Minister, whose reappearance was an unpleasant surprise for all those who took to the streets to oppose her pension reform bill.

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Most problematic for Bayrou’s government is that it hasn’t got a firm purchase in the National Assembly. This, after all, is what brought Barnier down. The appointment of Valls is a red rag to the socialist bull. Borne is also a snub to the Left, embodying, as she does, the much-hated pension reform. Bayrou is clearly hoping that his relatively cordial relations with Marine Le Pen will help him avoid the fate she handed Barnier as she worked with the Left to bring the last prime minister down.

Bayrou symbolically offered Marine Le Pen his support back in 2022, when she was struggling to acquire the necessary signatures to run in the presidential campaign (candidates have to secure at least 500 signatures from mayors across France). Back then, Bayrou argued that democracies are nourished by ideological differences and that candidates such as Le Pen should not be prevented from standing by an alliance of anti-far Right mayors. Le Pen’s memory is short, however. Her response to Bayrou’s nomination was the same it was to Barnier’s: he will be judged by his actions.

And so, this week, Bayrou’s theory about it being hard to censure a government a second time around is being put to the test: he delivered his speech of political intent on the 14 January and deftly avoided making any firm commitments for fear of angering one of the camps in the parliament. Instead, he presented a vision of government that evolved through time, adjusting its actions in line with the compromises it must make. It was impressive in its ability to transform a significant lack of commitment into a noble principle of government. Perhaps this is how the wily politician has survived so long — he was, after all, education secretary when Emmanuel Macron was still a love-struck student.

Reactions to his speech, and to the censure motion put forward by the far-Left La France Insoumise, suggest that Bayrou may be sticking around for a little longer. It seems he has succeeded in undoing the unity on the Left, at least with regards to the censure motion. The Socialist Party decided, in extremis, not to support it, thus in effect splitting the New Popular Front alliance which has been in place since the legislative elections last year. The sticking point for the Socialists was pension reform. Bayrou took a classic middle-way position: he refused to suspend the reform but he did say he would organize a three-month consultation. When pushed, he said he would be inclined to support a new deal for pensions should there be agreement as a result of the consultation. This was just about enough for the socialists.

As well as all the parties of government, including the center-right Républicains, making it clear they will not support the vote of censure, the far-Right appears is also on side. Jordan Bardella lambasted Bayrou’s speech but the Rassemblement National as a whole has opted to hold its fire. Only days after the death of Jean Marie Le Pen, the party’s co-founder, Marine Le Pen and Bardella are playing a somewhat longer game. Thinking of their electoral prospects over the next two years, neither wishes to be seen as the harbingers of doom nor as needlessly reckless or radical.

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In essence then, Bayrou’s calculation may have been correct. Bringing down a government is an exhilarating and dramatic gesture and a month ago it sent a clear message to the president, holed up in the Elysée Palace with a few of his cronies. But bringing down a second government would tell the country, and the world, that France has become ungovernable. There would, too, be serious consequences such as the need to survive without passing a proper budget and to pay increasingly higher interest on the renewal of its debt.

It would be quite wrong, though, to present Bayrou’s survival as some kind of political triumph or success. The cost of his strategy is considerable. As the prime minister tries his hardest to prevent the parliament from censuring him, it is hard to imagine that his government will pursue anything like a coherent plan for France. His legislative outputs will end up being an aggregate of whatever can make it through the parliament unscathed. Peace in the national assembly is no longer the means via which the government can pursue its program; it has become an end in itself. His is a government that will be defined not by what it does but simply by its capacity to survive.

This is a low bar, particularly given the challenges France is facing, from a faltering economy to the need to determine Europe’s response to the imminent arrival of Trump at the White House. It is unlikely that history will treat the Bayrou government very favorably, even if he does last longer than his predecessor.

This year’s surrender of the crown has proved smoother than the contested handovers of 2016 and 2020: this time, neither side has summoned up their mobs. Broken, dejected, for the first time self-doubting, America’s liberal establishment has come to accept the extinction of its political order. Had they taken their project — or their right to eternal rule — as seriously as they claimed to, no doubt they would have chosen stronger candidates than Joe Biden and Kamala Harris: that they could not do so itself speaks of a certain exhaustion. Beyond the rhetoric, at least as messianic and civilisational in scope as anything the further reaches of the Right could dream up, Left-liberalism — the last of the great 20th-century ideologies — possessed very little of substance to fight for. Bereft of ideas and confidence, American liberalism died from the head down: all that is left of it is an entrenched caste of bureaucrats to be weeded out and replaced. The old order is dead: but what is struggling to be born?

For a time, in the 2010s, confused and frightened liberals cycled through a series of personality cults, latching onto populist avatars of its own — Trudeau, Merkel, Ardern, Macron – who promised, like King Arthur against the invading Saxons, to hold back the waves of history for a time at least. Yet all of these are now politically dead, having achieved little but accelerating the incoming power of the waves that would wash them away: in Macron’s case, characteristically the most interesting, seemingly by design. No doubt, this cult of personality took root due to the absence of serious policy: it is an obvious fact of our present political moment that anyone concerned with shaping the world they actually live in can only now engage with “the Right,” simply because “the Left” is both intellectually and politically defunct. We see this in the intellectual Left’s new engagement, part fearful but increasingly curious in its own right, with the ferment of ideas on the Right. What is the Left’s project, what are its big ideas now it has broken its political and intellectual power through its catastrophic self-derailment into identity politics? It is a difficult question to answer, but also a pointless one: it simply doesn’t matter, and is unlikely to for the next few decades at least. One might as well ask what is next for Baathism.

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Yet even still, “the Right” is, conceptually, an absolute mess. Much of what is novel in it is genuinely harmful, and presents huge risks of even worse political futures than those given to us by millenarian Liberalism. As Yeats saw it at a similar time of political flux, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” If it possesses any coherent, unifying purpose, the new Right consists merely of rolling back the liberal innovations of the Sixties onwards: and perhaps that is progress enough. Much of Trump’s initial appeal was that of the boy in the Emperor’s New Clothes, mockingly pointing out the nakedness of the West’s rulers. Had they taken the critique seriously — of their radical identity politics of race and gender, of their programme of economic self-destruction through a unilateral energy transition, of their commitment to an imaginary borderless Utopia in which the rest of the world dreams only of achieving its historic destiny as Western liberals — perhaps the destruction of their order would not be so total. The dying liberal order chose suicide through want not just of self-reflection but of pragmatism. And indeed, perhaps if the incoming order has a single defining characteristic, it is pragmatism rather than any coherent replacement ideology. Perhaps it is not just the great 20th century ideologies — fascism, communism, postwar liberalism — that are dead, but any all-consuming ideology at all.

The sudden and dramatic seizure of power by Syria’s former al-Qaeda faction Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is a moment of wider political significance than mere regional analysis assumes. Over the decade-long course of the country’s bloody civil war, the assumed end state for Syria was one or another totalising 20th century ideology — whether liberal democracy, Baathism, or Salafi jihadism was preferred aligning with the sympathies of the beholder. Yet instead the new power on the throne seems, so far, a purely pragmatic technocrat, a centralising moderniser closer to Lee Kuan Yew, Bukele or Mohammed Bin Salman than anything in either liberal or jihadist theories of governance. In this sense, al-Jolani is perhaps a bellwether of the coming post-ideological century. Simply put, the central political question is “If you were to found a new state in 2024, what would it look like?” Certainly, the 20th century liberal democratic model is no more attractive than the 20th century Baathist model. Perhaps, by its very nature, results-driven technocracy is non-liberal, even if it isn’t necessarily illiberal. Perhaps, the new Syria even offers glimpses of our own society’s future.

The 20th century liberal democratic model is going the same way as the great 20th century totalitarianisms it defined itself against. Yet — as reflected in liberal discourse where the assumption made is that politics is a binary choice between liberalism and fascism — liberals are still trapped in the 20th century, fighting ghosts, even as the world has already moved on. Applied to the international order, then, the conclusion — we must hope — of the war in Syria is a perfect example of this conceptual shift. Just a few years ago, the operating assumption that a stable conclusion to the Syrian war was really something within the West’s (which means America’s) power to bring. Instead, we have witnessed the opposite: rebel victory was brought by a group the West shuns, under US terror sanctions for perfectly valid reasons. The West’s purported end state in Syria, a rebel victory, was brought about by the West walking away from the problem, and conceding strategic defeat. Yet the relatively bloodless form of political transition witnessed in the past few weeks was also brought by the seeming strategic victors — the supposed resistance axis of Iran, Russia and Hezbollah — making the pragmatic decision to withdraw support from Assad, confident that they could maintain their interests in the new order.

For all the moralising discourse we’ve suffered on Syria over the past decade, the conflict was internally, a multipolar one, with multiple armed groups making pragmatic bargains and shifting alliances depending on their self-interested needs of the moment. That internal dynamic has now recapitulated itself in terms of the international order, with the pragmatic and so far mutually agreeable deal-making of regional powers presenting, if anything, a hopeful vision of multipolarity in action. What does all this mean for us, for Britain and for the West?

Just before Christmas, Robert Jenrick published a piece in The Telegraph arguing that “liberal interventionism is dead”, saying, explicitly, that “The experiment in liberal utopianism has proven to be a fantasy.” It is difficult to imagine a senior Conservative politician — and, surely, the next leader of the Tory party — making this case, and certainly not using this terminology, then seen as rather a fringe view within IR discourse, even during the last Trump administration. That Jenrick does so is a reflection not just of the manifold and obvious failures of liberal interventionism at the height of American imperial power, but also of the fact that its power has waned, we can assume, permanently — unless, like HTS, liberals wage a shock campaign of reconquest from their embattled stronghold.  Arguing, as Jenrick does, for Britain’s “Palmerstonian pursuit of our self-interest abroad” is a tentative glimpse of British foreign policy in this new multipolar order — something that would have sounded naughtily transgressive just a few years years is now the common sense worldview of a senior Tory writing for The Telegraph readership. That is how rapidly the world has changed.

Will the second coming of the Trump World Order be similarly pragmatic? On Ukraine, Trump’s likely aim of imposing a painful peace on the country, writing off its losing war, can certainly be framed as ruthlessly pragmatic. Yet, whether bullying humour or sincere, Trump’s rumblings of annexations and interventions in North America — of absorbing Canada and Greenland while imposing order on Mexico — are surely less so. Yet intimidating Canada and Denmark at least robs America’s Nato vassals of the comforting illusion they are partners instead of vassals: perhaps a pragmatic case can be made for establishing the ground rules of 21st-century international politics early on. The lanyard-wearing, security conference-attending clerisy of liberal Atlanticism now finds itself wedded to an order of purely homeopathic liberalism. Flanked from across both the Atlantic and the Channel by a Rightist surge whose form is still being defined, the changing political order will hit Whitehall’s ideologues hardest of all.

Perhaps, like Jolani, we should rethink our situation from first principles. If we could put every aspect of 21st-century Britain’s governance, individually, to a referendum, which parts would survive? The gap between the likely answers and the current reality explains British politics at this moment. It is sadly ironic that while Syria seems to be acquiring pragmatic, post-ideological governance led by al-Qaeda veterans, Britain is still ruled by the arcane processes and ideological fixations of zealots. As in France and Germany, now rendered ungovernable by the last ideological spasm of Left-liberalism, its total commitment to mass immigration and its consequences as a moral end in itself — its last irreducible principle when all other goals and aspirations have been abandoned —  will define British politics in the coming decades. European politics in the 2020s is largely the product of safe, orderly societies suddenly becoming not so; Americans, who are used to this lifestyle, thinking we’re being prissy about it; and European progressives, who are entirely America-brained provincials, are taking social cues from the imperial metropole rather than their own lived experience.

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Yet it is the liberal argument, that such a dramatic and socially-disruptive course of action is both natural and desirable that now requires defending — the pragmatic case is simply that the experiment has been tried and, as many warned, failed. Slowly, then suddenly, the progressives became marginal reactionaries and the dissident Right, the sensible pragmatists. The fundamental demand of the British new Right, from which Conservative party and its allied thinktank-thought is now increasingly downstream, is a return to the Britain of the early Nineties: a hard reset to fix the bad coding newly written into the system. Yet, as it stands, the British state in 2024 appears to be an experiment in formulating an angry ethnic nationalism, by heightening competition for increasingly scarce resources. This is a dangerous path to travel: the pragmatic choice is simply to admit, and undo, the errors of past ideologues.

Yet no less than Starmer’s Labour Party, an increasingly isolationist holdout of a now-dead order, the Conservative Party is wedded to the past. Its choice of Badenoch, a leftover 2010s culture warrior seemingly self-exiled from party politics in search of ageless Tory principles to bear back down from the mountain, was a poor one. The British Right is now rapidly consolidating on a Cummings-Jenrick-Lowe platform, of data-driven questioning of bad governance, and urging the necessity of radical reform — with Starmer now signalling his own agreement. The previous model failed, but we live in a time of change: in Britain as in Syria, the people will tolerate experiments in governance that offer them prosperity, security and stability. The rigid ideological certainties of the 20th century did not serve us Europeans well. To survive the coming order, our political leadership should accept the luxury of pragmatism over fossilised principles that the dawning world order affords it.

His talent for miscalculation is undeniably impressive. His high-handed dissolving of parliament in the summer produced a hopelessly divided National Assembly which lasted just three months — the shortest on record for the Fifth Republic. Macron now has the near-impossible task of finding a new Prime Minister who can manage the same Assembly, pass a budget, and address accelerating economic woes. Sisyphus had an easier time of things, and, at this point, if the boulder of political impossibility rolls back over Macron, crushing his presidency and forcing his resignation, most of the French will cheer.

But does Macron really bear the biggest share of blame? France is hardly the only Western democracy in crisis. The United States just elected Donald Trump to a second term. Germany is in political meltdown. In Britain, Reform has moved ahead of Labour in the polls. Everywhere, it seems, populist forces have the whip hand. Nor did Macron single-handedly spur the rise of France’s hard-Right. The party then called the National Front began its steady advance in the Eighties, when he was still in primary school. The first Le Pen to make it into the final round of a presidential election was Marine’s ghastly father Jean-Marie, 22 years ago.

And the French are not just angry at Macron. According to a striking poll published this week by Le Grand Continent, fully 43% of them think EU membership hurts France, 46% think the Union is corrupt, and 26% want to see France leave it at once — the highest figure on record, and astonishing for the country at the heart of the European project. So perhaps Macron is not Sisyphus, suffering divine punishment for his misdeeds, but just another hapless victim in the path of a tidal wave.

Perhaps. But individual actions have played an important role in all these countries’ recent political misfortunes. Think, for instance, of Joe Biden’s disastrous decision to remain in the 2024 presidential race until it became too late for the Democrats to recover. It is always possible to make a bad situation much worse. And ever since Emmanuel Macron’s first election in 2017, he has shown a remarkable talent for doing so.

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Much of the problem goes back to his misinterpretation of the French presidency itself. When he was still Economics Minister to Socialist President François Hollande in 2015, Macron gave a strange speech in which he spoke of the inherent “incompleteness” of French democracy, thanks to an “absence” at its heart — the absence of a king. Referring to the execution of Louis XVI well over two centuries ago, he mused that “the Reign of Terror left an emotional, psychic, collective vacuum: The King is gone!” But, he suggested, the regal presidency created by Charles de Gaulle for the Fifth Republic in 1958 had the capacity to fill the gap, providing France with impartial, unifying, Olympian leadership, far above the political fray. During his victorious 2017 campaign, Macron mused about governing in a “Jupiterian” fashion, and his first official portrait as President showed him posing at a Louis XV-style desk, with de Gaulle’s memoirs prominently displayed on it. He summoned the two chambers of parliament to hear him speak at the former royal palace of Versailles.

But 2017 was not 1958, and Macron was no de Gaulle. In 1958, France had been a broken country: the short-lived Fourth Republic was utterly paralysed, the colonial empire was dissolving, and the bitter struggle for Algerian independence had raised the spectre of civil war. De Gaulle himself was a towering, heroic war leader whose political movement, while broadly conservative, included many different ideological tendencies. He could, in fact, play the king, and did so quite successfully until the tumult of 1968. But by 2017, the Fifth Republic had settled into political banality, with persistent but manageable economic stresses and party squabbling. The incumbent, François Hollande, had promised to serve as a “normal president” — de Gaulle would have shuddered at the expression — and although he was widely mocked for his failures, he was not hated. Macron, meanwhile, was an almost entirely untested 39-year-old who had never run for office. He was a chemically pure product of France’s ultra-elite educational institutions and possessed a full share of the excessive self-confidence they so often instil in their graduates. His vision of politics was largely intellectual — or, rather, pseudo-intellectual (he had retained just enough from his early philosophy studies to sound learned in the subject without really being so).

Still, for a time, his youth and vigour excited support. His promise to govern from the centre, balancing neoliberal reforms with a strengthening of the social safety net, raised the hope he might move past politics as usual. And with the Socialists and the neo-Gaullists both in a state of collapse after a failed presidency for each (those of Hollande and his predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy), Macron won the 2017 election, handily defeating Marine Le Pen in the second round. Foreign observers swooned. In 2018, Politico even titled a story “How Emmanuel Macron Became the New Leader of the Free World”.

But soon enough, his desire to play the king, and to lecture the French on what was good for them, eroded the good will. For all his talk of the social safety net, Macron was at heart a neoliberal who believed France had to be shaken out of its bad old statist ways to become competitive in the world economy (he had spent formative years at the Rothschild investment bank). If doing so caused people to lose jobs, well, they could always reboot. In September 2018, when an agricultural worker complained to him about being unable to find a job, Macron told the man to retrain in the service sector. “You’ve got to do it!… I could cross the street and find you a job right now.” Within his first year in office his government overhauled the labour code, making it easier for employers to fire workers, and abolished a “solidarity tax” on the wealthy — all in the name of economic efficiency. And, warning of climate change, Macron approved a large hike in gasoline taxes, in a country where gas already cost more than twice as much as in the United States (and average household income was 40% lower). That last decision triggered the furore of the Gilets Jaunes whose dramatic and sometimes violent protests brought hundreds of thousands into the streets. The movement only subsided with the arrival of the pandemic in early 2020.

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The protests did not leave Macron chastened. Indeed, in the years after the Gilets Jaunes revolt he sometimes seemed to take seriously Bertolt Brecht’s quip that “the government should dissolve the people and elect another”. The people reciprocated the disdain, and in early 2022, after a small pandemic rebound, his popularity had fallen to 37%. Even so, without a viable opponent from outside the extremes, he tottered to reelection that spring. But the enthusiasm that had marked his first victory was long gone. Marine Le Pen received over 40% of the vote, and in the parliamentary election that followed, the National Rally scored the greatest success of any hard-Right party since the 19th century. Macron was forced to govern without a parliamentary majority, but even so, he continued to pursue a program of austerity. Article 49.3 of the Fifth Republic’s Constitution allows governments to enact laws by decree, and Macron’s third Prime Minister, Élisabeth Borne, resorted to it 23 times during her 20-month tenure between 2022 and 2024. Most controversially, she did so to pass a hugely unpopular measure that raised the retirement age from 62 to 64. It provoked further massive protests, eventually led to Borne’s replacement by Gabriel Attal, and contributed to the National Rally’s European election breakthrough. If the Rally then failed to gain a parliamentary majority, the credit lay not with Macron, but with the Left-wing parties that hastily organised themselves into a New Popular Front, winning a plurality of seats in the National Assembly.

It is probably unfair to criticise Macron for mishandling the political situation since the summer because, in truth, no one could have handled it successfully. He chose to tack Right, picking a conservative hardliner on immigration, Barnier, as his third Prime Minister of the year, and relying on the National Rally’s tacit support to stave off a no-confidence vote. But facing a fiscal crisis, with France’s national debt having risen far past the caps mandated by the EU, Barnier tried to make severe cuts to the social security budget. Although he backtracked on many of them in the face of criticism from Le Pen, last week he still had to resort to article 49.3 to pass the bill. Two days later the National Rally and the New Popular Front came together to vote a French government out of office for the first time since 1962. In joining forces with the Left, Le Pen had a clear ulterior motive, since she is currently on trial for misusing public funds and in March faces both a possible jail sentence and a five-year ban from electoral office. She would love to force Macron’s resignation and a new presidential election before that occurs.

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Macron’s reaction to the defeat, meanwhile, has been, well, classic Macron. In a speech on Thursday, he ruled out resignation, and, while acknowledging his overall responsibility for the political situation, also said that his decision to dissolve parliament in the summer had been “misunderstood”. And he added that he would never accept blame for the “irresponsibility of others, especially members of parliament who have chosen in good conscience to torpedo the budget and the government of France a few days before Christmas”. He called them an “anti-republican front”. Charles de Gaulle, in his day, also grumbled at the ingratitude of the French. Yet when he lost a referendum in 1969, he took responsibility and resigned. That is a lesson that Macron has obviously not learned.

In the conclusion to his speech, Macron changed his tone. He boasted of his success in hosting the Paris Olympics, and in rebuilding the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, which reopened to the public in a grand ceremony on Saturday. “This reconstruction that was thought impossible… Well, we have managed it.” And he finished with a flourish: “Wherever the Nation has grown fragile, rebuild it; wherever outbursts and insults have raged, restore wisdom; wherever there is division, choose unity; wherever some yield to anguish, bring hope.” It was grand, beautiful rhetoric, worthy of a king, just as the stunning reconstruction of Notre Dame is a project worthy of a French king.

Emmanuel Macron still longs to be that regal, Jupiterian figure. But this vision of the presidency was already long past its sell-by date when he first ran for office, and in the seven years since it has only grown more stale, more inappropriate, and more profoundly irritating to the French people. Notre-Dame, and pictures of him alongside Trump and Zelensky, has brought a small rebound in his popularity, but it is very unlikely to last. Whether or not he finishes out his second term, his legacy is not a pretty one, and if he doesn’t deserve all the blame for France’s current political shambles, he still deserves a very large share of it. On this issue, the French people have it exactly right.

In spite of these severe economic woes, the French political class is consumed by strategising and tactical manoeuvres, all tied to the possible fallout from the collapse of the Barnier government. It looks increasingly likely that Barnier will push through his budget using the famous Article 49:3 of the Constitution, which allows legislation to be passed without a parliamentary vote. The Left has said it would respond by seeking to bring down the government. The far-Right, whose votes will be decisive, has said that as things stand they are minded to vote with the Left. In which case, the Barnier government will collapse some time between 15 and 21 December.

In the last few days, the possibility of an even earlier move to bring Barnier down has been suggested — perhaps as early as next week. French public opinion is divided on the matter, though it seems surprisingly favourable to the prospect of a collapse. A recent poll found that just over half of those surveyed supported dissolution, despite the turbulence of the legislative elections over the summer. This number falls a little when the prospect of a financial crisis is evoked, but even then a hefty 46% still support a move against Barnier.

When the Barnier government was first put together, at the end of the summer, after an extended period of feverish uncertainty, it seemed as if it might signal some kind of return for the country’s centre-right Républicains. They were given some of the most powerful roles — the minister of interior, for instance — whilst Barnier himself came from this wing of the political spectrum. The Left cried foul, as they considered themselves the winners of the legislative elections, and yet the centre-right was back in power.

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However, it was always dangerous to rest the revival of a party and a political tradition on an edifice as fragile as the Barnier government. Less than six months later, we see that the fundamental dynamic of political fragmentation — where no political force is able to create a majority of any kind — is reasserting itself. And the Barnier government is a distillation of that fragmentation rather than a way of overcoming it.

This fragmentation has not come out of the blue. It was already evident in the early 2000s, but it was masked by the rallying effect that came from surprisingly good scores by the French far-Right. The fact that neither the Left nor the Right could command the same sort of vote share as in the past was hidden by the power of the cordon sanitaire: majorities were built on a fear of letting the far-Right into power.

This resistance to the far-Right has steadily fallen away, leaving the centre-right exposed and unable to secure its place in the presidential run-off. At the same time, the Left has split between the centre and the far-Left. Macronism, for a time, functioned as a broad centrist coalition, able to govern and thus seeming to reverse this trend of fragmentation. However, lacking any ideological consistency, this was only a temporary solution.

Today, with a shrunken Macronist party, the only thing keeping the Barnier government in place are the fears of his opponents about what exactly might happen should he be brought down. The far-Left, dominated by Jean Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise, is determined to censure the government: it has never accepted its legitimacy in the first place. Though Mélenchon clearly relishes the prospect of a chaotic end to Barnier’s tenure as prime minister, there are others on the Left who are more cautious about what the voters will make of this parliamentary coup de grâce.

The same consideration lies on the far-Right. Marine Le Pen is unquestionably the one holding the cards at the moment. The Left can only bring Barnier down if they also have the support of the far-Right. Le Pen has up until now judged the government on a pragmatic basis, keeping her powder dry. The Rassemblement National has not managed to get over its own sense of betrayal in the legislative elections, when enough of the other parties united against it to keep it out of power. Moreover, it has not won any obvious battles in the debates on amendments to the budget. This week, Marine Le Pen declared that as things stand with the budget, she would also support a dissolution of the government. Even so, she is cautious about triggering an unnecessary crisis. She is also wary of being seen to play political games typical of the Parisian elite, games that appear unintelligible to her voting base.

There is no principled defence or critique of the Barnier government today in France. Current discussions and decisions are overwhelmingly tactical. Those eying up the presidency in 2027 — such as former Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, and former leader of Les Républicains Laurent Wauquiez — are asking themselves whether a dissolved government will be good or bad for their chances. Both are watching events closely.

But despite this uncertainty, a full-blown crisis of the eurozone still seems far-fetched, given the broadly robust nature of the French economy. A sense of governability at the national level, however, is a key criterion for eurozone stability. And in France, the budget and the country’s future economic trajectory have become subordinated to political calculation. The government currently survives: but its existence is an expression of the indecision of others. And even though France has a government today, it remains no more governable than in the dramatic weeks after the dissolution of the legislature.

After losing the legislative elections, it seemed that Macron would be forced to nominate a Prime Minister from the Left. After all, the Left alliance, the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP), won 193 seats, compared with the 166 of Macron’s Ensemble, the 142 of the far-Right Rassemblement National (RN), and the mere 47 picked up by the centre-right Républicains (LR). Given the radical content of the NFP’s programme and how likely it would be to row back on Macron’s controversial pension reforms, a Left-wing Prime Minister would have been a difficult pill for the President to swallow.

By waiting until after the Olympics, and riding it out through the August sunshine, Macron was able to let the sense of electoral defeat dissipate. Capitalising on the divisions within the National Assembly, where no single party or group commanded a majority, Macron argued that he would only nominate a Prime Minister that would escape a vote of no confidence. The Left-wing candidate, Lucie Castets, was most likely to be voted down by her opponents, giving Macron a reason to refuse her appointment. Determined to find someone who would double-down on his legislative achievements, Macron turned towards the Right. His interest in Xavier Bertrand, however, was a red rag to the RN: Bertrand, as President of the Hauts de France region, has very often clashed with Marine Le Pen. She made it very clear to Macron that a Bertrand-led government would not last long. Barnier, by contrast, was far more amenable to the far Right. On 5 September, very quickly after his name appeared out of nowhere, Barnier was sworn in as Prime Minister.

Superficially at least, Macron has been able to shore up his own policies while also stealing the premiership from under the noses of the Left. The response within the NFP has been vitriolic. As one Le Monde headline put it, “The Left misses out on Matignon, the Parti Socialiste (PS) tears itself apart.” At issue here is the candidature of socialist heavyweight and former Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve. On 19 August, Macron telephoned Cazeneuve, after weeks of speculation about his possible nomination. Days later, at the PS’s summer conference, Cazeneuve was the subject of strong disagreements: the Left alliance remained committed to Castets, but others voiced their support for Cazeneuve and criticised Olivier Faure, the leader of the PS, for doggedly seeking an alliance with the far-left France Insoumise. By the beginning of September, it was clear that Cazeneuve did not have the support of his own party and Macron turned elsewhere.

Since then, Faure has been accused of torpedoing Cazeneuve’s nomination out of self-interest. The same has been said of former President, François Hollande, who is now back in Parliament as an MP. Neither Faure nor Hollande wanted a heavyweight Left-wing Prime Minister because it would detract from their own ambition to be at the centre of things. Macron’s move has thus provoked some blood-spilling within the Left alliance.

But Barnier’s nomination is symptomatic of a deep crisis not only on the Left but also within Macronism. The fact that the new Prime Minister is struggling to put a government together should not be surprising, and for at least three reasons.

The first is that Macron’s decision-making around the nomination was clearly oriented towards protecting his policies from being reversed by the Left. And this could only be guaranteed by a Right-wing Prime Minister — even the more moderate Cazeneuve gave indications that he might reverse some of Macron’s reforms. As a result, it is no longer possible to think of Macronism as an ideologically ecumenical — or post-ideological — movement, which is precisely what distinguished Macronism in its beginnings from its opponents. Macron explicitly sought to distance himself from the language of Left and Right and relied heavily on figures from both sides when putting together Prime Ministers and governments. Over the years, however, this has proven more and more difficult. The Left, in particular, has increasingly seen Macronism as just another term for the Right, and its politicians like Gérard Collomb, who used to support Macron, have refused to serve under him. Collomb, prominent within the PS, resigned as Minister of the Interior by the end of 2018. He’d had enough of the haughty and uncompromising manner of the young President.

The second reason is that Macron’s choice of Barnier is evidence that his own centrist political movement is giving way to a return of the centre-right in French politics. In their eyes, he stole an election, in 2017, which should have been won by their candidate, François Fillon. And he went on to steal their policies, most notably the cause of pension reform, as well as their politicians, such as Édouard Philippe and Rachida Dati. The result for the centre-right was catastrophic in electoral terms: while in 2017, Fillon was only fractionally behind Le Pen in the first round of the presidential election, five years later, their candidate, Valérie Pécresse, was unable to win even 5% of the vote. The nomination saga and the eventual choice of Barnier tells a different story. In order to avoid the Left, Macron has had to ally his movement to the centre-right in a way that has amplified the latter enormously. With only a relatively small number of deputies, the centre-right appears as if it will dominate the government. For some centre-right leaders, this all amounts to a slow take-over of Macronism, a reverse of what has occurred over the last seven years. It is for this exact reason that Gabriel Attal and Macron’s MPs in the National Assembly, are beginning to turn against Barnier, realising that they are unlikely to be appointed to any of the most important ministerial posts.

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The third reason is to do with Barnier himself. Whereas Attal was the youngest Prime Minister in the history of the Fifth Republic, and someone so close to Macron that he was referred to as “baby Macron”, Barnier is a politician unquestionably and unequivocally from the centre-right Gaullist tradition. He joined the Gaullist party, Union des Démocrates pour la République, in 1965 and remained a member through all of its incarnations from Chirac’s Rassemblement pour la République to LR today.

Barnier is a career politician of the old sort, one whose career spans the local politics of his native Savoie region and reaches all the way to seven ministerial positions starting in 1993, two appointments as European Commissioner and finally leading the EU-UK Brexit negotiations. Indeed, it is quite possible that Barnier is better known in the UK as the EU’s negotiator than he is in France. The contrast between Barnier and the sort of political figure that we associate with Macron’s En Marche movement could not be greater. His methodical and plodding approach, that leaves nothing to chance, is very far removed from Macron’s leadership style that relies heavily on instinct and a firm belief in his own brilliance. Barnier incarnates an older form of politics which Macron had promised to destroy but, in the end, seemed to resurrect.

By choosing Barnier, Macron might have unleashed conflict within the Left, but he has displayed his own desperation and heralded the steady collapse of his political movement. By the time the next presidential elections come around in 2027, there might be nothing left of Macronism at all.

But in an astonishing twist on Thursday, the Élysée announced that it had finally settled on the name of the new prime minister. And it was a familiar one: Michel Barnier, the EU’s former chief Brexit negotiator. Macron had tasked him with forming “a unifying government in the service of the country”. On the face of it, this might seem like a long shot: Barnier is neither popular, nor even that well-known in France. His party, The Republicans, managed a mere 5% in the recent election. Having served four times as a government minister and twice as EU commissioner, Barnier, 73, long seen as a centrist, liberal-minded neo-Gaullist, is very much a representative of the establishment that voters have just rejected en masse. He’s known as the “French Joe Biden”. And yet this latest in a long line of political gambles for Macron may well prove to be a stroke of genius.

Only two months ago, Macron’s crushing defeat at the hands of Le Pen in the European elections had left him deeply delegitimised. He threw the dice and the subsequent French election succeeded in keeping Le Pen at bay — but in turn empowered a new Left-wing bloc comprising Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s left-populist party La France Insoumise, a sworn enemy of Macronisme. Macron was now squeezed between two foes on both Left and on the Right and institutional protocol, and basic democratic logic, dictated that he should appoint a prime minister from the New Popular Front — the coalition that won the most seats.

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This would have spelled disaster for Macron: the New Popular Front vowed, among other things, to repeal Macron’s flagship, but very controversial, pension reform law that raised the retirement age from 62 to 64. To ward off this scenario, the Macroniste bloc and the French establishment performed a remarkable pivot. Having successfully engaged the Left’s support in setting up a “republican front” to defeat Le Pen, it then turned that logic against the Left itself. The “dangerous radicals” who needed to be kept out of power now were no longer those on the “far Right” — but those on the “far Left”. Macron’s party immediately ruled out working with Mélenchon’s.

And so when the New Popular Front finally put forward a prime ministerial candidate — the not-particularly-radical Lucie Castets, a 37-year-old civil servant — Macron released a statement announcing that he was not going to appoint a prime minister from the Left-wing coalition because that they would not be in a position to govern with stability. A shocking denial of democracy, perhaps, but utterly consistent with the French president’s increasingly repressive techno-authoritarian rule, and his longstanding practice of exploiting the Left against the Right to his own benefit, while offering nothing in exchange.

Even though many voices from the NFP condemned the decision as a “disgrace” and an “unacceptable power grab”, Macron was always going to do whatever it took to safeguard his economic reforms and keep the Left out of power. He would readily disregard basic democratic principles to shore up his position — and even, it turns out, strike a deal with Le Pen.

Enter Barnier. Perhaps an unlikely candidate to help broker a deal between the Macroniste bloc and the Eurosceptic National Rally. In his role as the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, he garnered a reputation for being for a radical pro-EU ideologue, who seemed more intent on “punishing” the UK for daring to leave than attempting to carve out a mutually beneficial relationship. His insistence on the EU’s red lines, particularly around the integrity of the single market and the Irish border issue, were seen by Brexiteers as obstructing the UK’s ability to achieve a satisfactory deal, and sharply discouraging for other member states who might have been contemplating similar exits.

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In recent years, however, Barnier has made a significant shift to the Right. During the 2022 campaign, as part of an unsuccessful attempt to become the presidential candidate against Macron, he assumed a hard anti-immigration line, claiming it was “out of control” and proposing a three-to-five-year moratorium on non-EU arrivals to France. He also said that France should regain its “legal sovereignty” and not be subject to the judgments of the EU courts. To many, this was little more than political opportunism: an attempt to whitewash his track record as an EU fanatic. His decision to prop up Macron, despite their short-lived rivalry, would appear to confirm this. Indeed, given his current positioning as a Right-leaning man of the establishment, he’s the perfect candidate for Macron’s latest political gamble: a de facto alliance between liberal-centrist forces and the National Rally against the Left.

While no official alliance is needed to approve the new prime minister — and Le Pen would of course never enter a formal agreement with Macron as it would amount to political suicide — the President wouldn’t have put forward Barnier’s name without having first squared it with Le Pen. He wouldn’t have risked the latter supporting a no-confidence motion against the proposed prime minister alongside the Left (which has already vowed to table a vote). Indeed, Le Pen has already signalled an openness to support the new government on individual policies. “Michel Barnier seems to meet at least the first criterion that we had requested, that is to say, someone who is respectful of the different political forces and capable of addressing the National Rally, which is the first party in the National Assembly”, she said.

It’s not hard to imagine what form the deal took: the new government will address some of the issues that National Rally considers priorities — first and foremost immigration — provided the RN doesn’t challenge Macron’s economic reforms and supports France’s Ukraine policy. There is no guarantee that the agreement holds, of course. But, it’s hard not to see this as a swingeing victory for Macron. In one fell swoop, he has marginalised the Left while absorbing the National Rally into the mainstream, forcing it to blunt its edges on economic and foreign policy issues — even potentially dampening support for the party, if it is seen as cosying up to the establishment. Not bad for someone who was considered politically dead just a few months ago.

Of course, it’s not a terrible outcome for Le Pen, who will be able to influence government policy on key issues. Given the pro-Macron bloc and the other centre-right parties don’t have an outright majority, Le Pen’s party holds a de facto veto over government policy. As one centrist lawmaker put it, Barnier’s fate will effectively “held by the National Rally”. And yet it’s hard not to see the establishment as the real winner here: in exchange for a compromise on immigration and security more broadly, Macron has succeeded in guaranteeing a degree of continuity to his agenda in terms of the overall direction of his economic and foreign policy — i.e., EU-dictated budgetary cuts and neoliberal structural reforms, and continued financial-military support for Ukraine under Nato’s banner.

This outcome was predicted back in 2018, when the French historian Emmanuel Todd put forward the concept of Macro-Lepenisme: a collusion between the forces of the state-financial aristocracy embodied by Macron and the authoritarianism implicitly associated with Le Pen’s political past. Todd suggested that even though Macron and Le Pen represent different ends of the political spectrum, their policies and actions actually revealed a deeper alignment. Both were seen by Todd as supporting a system that benefits the ruling class, particularly the wealthy and the powerful, at the expense of broader societal change. One of Todd’s central critiques is that both Macron and Le Pen exhibit authoritarian tendencies: for example, Le Pen expressed support for the French police’s often-brutal repression of the Gilets Jaunes protests. As this alliance comes into power, it is bound to have implications well beyond France.

In fact, this alliance between centrist-liberal and right-populist forces — a phenomenon that could be characterised as liberal-conservative populism — may soon become the blueprint for other European countries: stricter immigration policies and a cultural pushback against progressivism coupled with a relatively mainstream approach to economic and foreign policy within the EU-Nato framework. As said, one may view this as both a victory and a defeat for right-populism: a victory insofar as it will have succeeded in shifting policy in some areas, principally immigration and public safety; a defeat insofar as it will mean that right-populists will have failed to radically challenge the dominant economic-political order, and will have been reabsorbed into the establishment, as Le Pen in France.

The architecture of the EU itself plays a big role here: the degree of economic and financial control that Brussels exercises over member states, especially those that are part of the eurozone, means that even right-populist parties have little choice but to go along with the EU’s diktats. In this sense, Barnier’s cozy relationship with Brussels will likely be key, as he can be expected to work hand-in-hand with the EU on keeping France in line with the European agenda. It’s no coincidence that in his first statement he heralded a form of “green austerity” for France. As prime minister, people should expect him to “tell the truth, even if it’s difficult — the truth about debt, and the truth about environmental debt, which weighs heavy on the shoulders of our children”, he said.

But right-populist parties also share part of the responsibility: by framing the question of security almost exclusively in terms of stricter controls on immigration, rather than in broader terms of economic security, and refusing to recognise that the EU’s architecture sets structural impediments to real change, they are easy prey for co-option by the establishment. Macro-Lepenisme, it would appear, is here to stay.

Meanwhile, disenchantment with all the country’s political actors has set in. The French National Assembly, far from being seen as a defender of democracy against an autocratic president, is viewed just as negatively as the presidency. It is telling that in recent days Gabriel Attal, the current caretaker Prime Minister, has become a preferred choice for prime minister. It seems as if many in France would rather forget the whole sorry episode altogether and return to the status quo ante.

But political stability is now a luxury of the past. French politics has reached such an impasse that even the eventual nomination of a prime minister cannot overcome it. Calls for action abound but have little real chance of reaching fruition. Take La France Insoumise’s call for Macron’s impeachment. The movement, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has argued that Macron’s actions are profoundly anti-democratic, positioning themselves as defenders of French democracy. Their petition for impeachment has garnered many thousands of signatures, and they have called for mass protests to take place on Saturday.

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And yet, Macron is highly unlikely to face impeachment. The motion is primarily a rhetorical device, as it is extremely difficult to pass under the rules of the Fifth Republic’s constitution. The France Insoumise has met the 10% threshold of MPs or senators required to support the motion for it be considered admissible by the relevant legislative committee. An attempt to impeach François Hollande in 2016, over claims that he had revealed state secrets in his discussions with journalists, reached this stage before being rejected. Should an impeachment motion be considered valid, it would then need a two-thirds majority in both legislative chambers — the parliament and the senate. There is little support for such a move outside of the France Insoumise, which means that it is almost impossible to conceive of it meeting the two-thirds requirement just in the National Assembly, let alone in the Senate where the LFI has no senators at all.

In the face of such hostility, Macron’s strategy has grown clearer. His hard veto of Left-candidate Lucie Castets revealed his determination not to appoint a prime minister committed to undoing his own legislative achievements. His pension reforms appear particularly dear to him.

One serious contender for prime minister is Bernard Cazeneuve, who was Macron’s one-time political confidant when he was a rising star in Hollande’s government and Cazeneuve was interior minister. The two men, who reputedly have the same taste in films (Michel Audiard’s classics) and would get together for late evening chats over whisky, fell out after Macron launched En Marche. In doing so, Macron fulminated against the very political establishment that Cazeneuve incarnated after Hollande made him prime minister in December 2016. Yet despite being a well-known figure, Cazeneuve lacks support within the New Popular Front alliance, most notably the France Insoumise. And, perhaps fatally, he seems not to be in favour of maintaining Macron’s pension reforms.

By contrast, Xavier Bertrand, a centre-right hopeful, would be unlikely to endanger any of Macron’s programme were he to become prime minister. Bertrand has an ambivalent relationship with the centre-right party, Les Républicains. His political career reached its apogee under Nicolas Sarkozy but in 2022 he had seemed likely to win the centre-right nomination for the presidential election. In his party’s primary, however, Bertrand came far behind other contenders, prompting him to leave the party. It is perhaps the party’s subsequent disaster in the 2022 election — in which its candidate, Valérie Pécresse, failed to win more than 5% of the votes, putting the party into serious financial difficulty — that explains Bertrand’s political survival. When the centre-right party leader, Eric Ciotti, decided to strike an alliance with the far-Right for the legislative elections of 2024, putting him at odds with all other leading figures in his own party, Les Républicains were weakened even more. Meanwhile, Bertrand languished in the political wilderness — a period which may have dented his presidential ambitions. He appears unlikely to challenge Macron’s pension policies.

The problem with any nomination is that it needs support from other parties in the National Assembly in order to produce a stable government. This was the difficulty posed by Lucie Castets: in promising to deliver on the New Popular Front’s programme, she was unlikely to secure the support of those parties to the right of the NPF, such as Macron’s Ensemble group, which she would need to pass any legislation. Cazeneuve, by contrast, is more amenable to Macron’s MPs but lacks support from the far-Left. His nomination would succeed only by breaking up the New Popular Front. Bertrand faces a similar difficulty on the Right, though his chances look rather better.

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To many, the job itself is a poisoned chalice. Those belonging to Les Républicains with presidential ambitions for 2027, most notably Laurent Wauquiez, are wary of joining the government. They do not wish to attach themselves to a sinking Macronist ship, which will have a deleterious effect on their own political hopes. Bertrand is unusual in that he seems willing to accept the job, but he is also likely to face opposition from the far-Right, which has said it would put forward a motion of censure should Bertrand ever form a government. It is unlikely, however, that such a motion could bring the administration down, requiring as it does an absolute majority in the chamber.

In declaring victory on the evening of the 7 July, then, the French Left was wildly unrealistic. It simply did not have enough seats in the National Assembly to be able to form a government and realise its programme. Should this stalemate continue, Macron may well turn instead towards a non-political figure, someone able to lead a technocratic government that might win the approbation of the parties in the National Assembly. One name that has emerged in this respect is Thierry Beaudet, president of the Economic, Social and Environmental Council, a third pillar of government in France that represents those collective interests that sit in the space between citizens and the state, such as organised labour, business owners and farmers. This would be a curious choice for Macron given his past denunciation of these interests as self-serving and self-interested.

In the meantime, the longer the crisis goes on, the more it weakens Jupiter himself. Divided on everything else, Parliament is unlikely to impeach the President. But should the impasse continue for much longer, the howls for Macron’s resignation will begin.

These Games, however, also served as a curious political hiatus: unexpected legislative elections, held just before they began, failed to result in the formation of any government. Instead, President Emmanuel Macron ordered the outgoing government to remain in place in a caretaker role. The composition of a government, and most significantly the choice of a new prime minister, was deferred until after the Games.

For this reason, the end of the Olympics in France signals not only the end of a big party, and the inevitable hangover that follows. It also means the end of the political truce and a return to the tawdry question of running the country. Though time can do many things, it cannot solve the impasse which exists at the French national assembly. The Left-wing coalition — the Nouveau Front Populaire — did relatively well in July’s elections but it did not win enough seats to form a government on its own. Neither did the far right Rassemblement National, nor Macron’s party, which lost 73 seats, bringing its total to 166.

In the aftermath of the election, the Left claimed that its strong showing — 182 seats — gave it the momentum and “legitimacy” to nominate a prime minister. But more than a month later, it has found it very hard to settle on any name. The Nouveau Front Populaire is itself an alliance formed in the frenzied weeks between the European elections and the legislative elections. It was created in large part to form a barrier against a victory of the far-Right, and brought together individuals and parties that until recently had been firm critics of one another.

Almost inevitably, suggestions for prime ministers came and went, vetoed by one or another of the coalition members. Lucie Castets, the Left alliance’s current nomination, has been dismissed by Emmanuel Macron, who retains the authority to decide who to ask to form a government. Macron’s position is that a government led by Castets would lack a majority, and therefore it makes no sense to nominate her. Completely unknown to the public, Castets, a civil servant specialising in public finances, has tried to establish herself over the course of the summer, giving interviews about her private life to Paris Match and campaigning across the country. She has done her best but, as momentum builds up towards the start of a new political year, doubts are emerging. Her boss at the city of Paris, the mayor Anne Hidalgo, has suggested that what is needed is a more moderate figurehead.

For all the gossip about the identity of the prime minister, there remains a fundamental difficulty which no amount of medal-winning has been able to efface. As things stand, the Nouveau Front Populaire contains as its principal member La France Insoumise, a far-Left party which Macron considers to be led by a demagogue — Jean-Luc Mélenchon — and not much better than the far-Right Rassemblement National. Yet since any name put forward by the Left coalition must satisfy La France Insoumise, it will likely be too far to the Left for Macron. Meanwhile, any prime minister drawn from the ranks of the centre or the Right would appear to undermine the results of the legislative elections: the centre-right party, Les Republicains, only won 47 seats.

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Macron’s own view is that the new government should be made of various political currents, committing itself to compromise and collaboration. This is a position consistent with his own instincts, and the political project of Macronisme, which has always been to push ideology and doctrine to one side, and focus instead on “results” and solving problems that “matter” for people. However, in this instance, Macron is also aware that such a pragmatic solution would likely put an end to the Nouveau Front Populaire. His ideal government would be composed of socialists, greens, his own party, and a few smaller groupings of the centre-right —led a political figure from the old Hollande regime of 2012-2017, a centre-left politician acceptable to the Macronistes. But this would be quite unacceptable for the France Insoumise, presenting the socialists and the Greens with a choice between governing and keeping the Nouveau Front Populaire together.

All of which suggests that, as France’s Olympic holiday comes to a close, the country will have to swap its athletic games for political ones. In many respects, the legislative elections appeared to herald the triumph of ideological politics in France: the Left cloaked itself in the glory of the first Popular Front, while the far-Right seemed as close to governing as it had ever been. The ensuing impasse, however, revealed that French politics is dominated by the spectre of fragmentation, reflecting the shallow and shifting quality of ideological alliances in France.

Macron could make a decision on prime ministerial nomination in the next few days, or he could wait until the end of the month, or even into September. Either way, it seems clear that the route to a majority government in France lies in the dismantling of the Left alliance. Let the games begin.

After an accelerated three-week national campaign, the first round of voting saw National Rally candidates polling 33% of the overall vote. The hastily cobbled together New Popular Front Left-wing Alliance managed to capture 28% of the vote, and Macron’s Ensemble party only took 21.5%. In a British election, this would seem to herald an easy win. Not so in the two-round French system, in which the two losers could decide to gang up on the leader for the second round of voting.

And that’s what Emmanuel Macron decided he, le grand virtuose, could achieve. He wanted to ensure a clear two-way contest, constituency by constituency, between the evil National Rally representative on one side, and on the other, all those brave members of the Front Républicain stepping up to bar the way to Fascism. So, anticipating this shotgun marriage of sorts, he urged anyone coming in last to pull out.

This is why, as news of his incumbents’ dismal performances landed through the night of the first round, Le Président kept smiling, convinced that he could clip the Rally’s wings and come through as the Great Saviour of Democracy. “I have been proven right,” the well-informed Canard Enchaîné quoted him as telling shell-shocked aides. “The abscess had to be lanced. We shall build a very large coalition of government with every party from the New Popular Front alliance, except [Trotskyite Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s] France Insoumise.” A few days later, he amended this to include F.I., even though, three weeks before, he had (accurately) described our version of the Corbynite sect as “anti-democratic, anti-parliamentarian, anti-Semitic, anti-nuclear power and pro-Russian”.

Then, in keeping with the urgent pace of the entire election, all names of candidates fighting the second round had to be registered by Tuesday evening. When the dust settled yesterday, the 306 constituencies where a “triangulaire” three-way battle would have almost automatically favoured the Rally had fallen to 89. Hence the clip of the Elysée Palace Palpatine: he feels his cunning plan has been validated.

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It’s classic Macron. He approaches every problem by dissecting it coldly into abstract components. When plucked by President Hollande from his super-SpAd job in 2015 to be made Minister for the Economy (you don’t need to be an MP in France to be in the Cabinet), he complained about the “messiness” and “pointlessness” of politics, the “needless negotiations over trivia” and the “waste of time” it entailed. The ultimate mandarin, he treats his Cabinet like subordinates and his MPs like employees. Unimpressed by pollsters, he has made his own calculations, and believes he can reshape whatever National Assembly will come out of next Sunday’s vote into a body of legislators he can work with. After all, the reasoning goes, he already did not have a full majority in the previous House.

This infuriates not only his ministers, and all those MPs whose careers he sacrificed with his throw of the dice, but also the electorate. After all, in today’s times of mistrust and suspicions of stitch-ups, the only question is: will voters also go along with his cunning plan? In France, you pick your favourites in the first round, and arbitrate for the least bad in the second. So it’s not just politicians who feel betrayed at having to yield to adversaries: will Républicain voters agree to cast their ballot for politicians who, with a gun to their head, signed up for a Manifesto more radical than François Mitterrand’s in 1981?

The New Popular Front, that uneasy alliance of Socialist, Greens, Communists and Mélenchonista Trots thrown together in three days after Macron dissolved the House, advocates for high taxes, including 100% on all inheritances above a cap to be determined later; import taxes, export taxes, green taxes, Social Security taxes in addition to huge payroll taxes, and an exit tax in addition to a re-introduced wealth tax for anyone trying to leave France’s new paradise. There’s more Net Zero, no pesticides ever, Sri-Lankan style; fast-tracking of any migrants qualifying as “climate refugees” (that would be most of sub-Saharan Africa, a chunk of Oceania, and many Indian Ocean islands); union representatives holding one third of seats in companies’ boards. The EU should sever treaties with Israel; no fossil fuel-powered cars should be on the roads by 2040; building more nuclear plants should be subject to referendums… and on and on it goes. An indigestible smorgasbord of the kind of policies people who spent a good chunk of their adult lives sniping at one another will only agree to when they have to produce a text before 5am, with the printers hollering for copy.

As a result, the Front Républicain may not hold: Les Républicains, already divided when a splinter group led by Eric Ciotti decided to support the National Rally in the first round, are now refusing to tell their voters who to vote for. Macron’s popular first PM, the former Le Havre Mayor Édouard Philippe, a moderate who since the dissolution of the National Assembly has been calling Macron “psychiatrically insane”, insists that the Republican Front cannot include the Mélenchonistas — who, better organised, are contesting the most seats on the Left. And Emperor Palpatine’s youthful Darth Vader, PM Gabriel Attal, who nearly came to blows with Macron the evening he decided to “throw a live grenade” into the French political scene by calling a snap election without telling him, is now considering a presidential run in three years’ time — or sooner should the President’s grand gamble fail.

Judging by Macron’s walkabout last Sunday in the streets of Le Touquet, the Channel coast resort where he owns a holiday home, dressed in a leather biker jacket, a baseball cap and a big smile, he still believes he will be the winner. The Elysée is currently fast-tracking a series of nominations in the top civil service which will ensure Macron-compatible people will head the security services, the police, and other key posts. Should Jordan Bardella accept the job of cohabitation PM without a full majority in Parliament, everything is in place to give him a hard time. And should voters up-end Macron’s plans by deciding on Sunday that no-one will tell them which candidate represents democracy and which represents pure evil, the president has threatened to continue the Palpatine chaos, declaring that “constitutionally, I can dissolve the National Assembly in exactly a year”. Macron has sacrificed all to his vainglorious desire to stay in the game. Everything is proceeding as he has foreseen — and to hell with France.

Why such turmoil? While French economic growth has been sluggish since the pandemic, the country is not in recession, inflation has receded and unemployment has dropped since Macron took office. France has not experienced a major terrorist attack in recent years and faces no immediate international crises. Is this simply another example of grumpiness on the part of a people who, as the writer Sylvain Tesson put it, “live in paradise but think they’re in hell”?

The explanation is more complicated. Much of it, of course, goes beyond France itself, and relates to the global wave of populist discontent that first crested with Brexit and Donald Trump’s 2016 victory. In country after country, large numbers of voters, predominantly older, predominantly from outside major cities, feel abandoned and disrespected by their national elites, unprotected from what they perceive as gale-force economic and cultural change (exemplified above all by migration), and receptive to populist leaders such as the National Rally’s Marine Le Pen, who promise to bring back eras of past national stability and greatness. Anxieties prompted by the pandemic and war, the lingering pain of post-pandemic inflation and the outrage-intensifying effects of social media have all reinforced the trend.

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But another part of the explanation comes from deep in French history. Since the Revolution of 1789, France’s political culture has been marked by an inordinate distrust of faction that has, again and again, crippled the development of a stable party system. In the United States, where the party system is paralytically stable, populist extremism could only succeed by capturing one of the two dominant parties. In France, Macron himself toppled the weak system that had prevailed for much of the history of the Fifth Republic, opening a breach through which Le Pen’s National Rally now threatens to sweep.

The birth of French democracy in the Revolution was marked by ideological strife accompanied by tragic, large-scale violence. But that very experience generated a desperate desire on the part of successive governments to transcend faction and restore national unity. Despite the country’s reputation for ideological passion, since 1789, genuine radicals have only held power for relatively short periods, such as during the Reign of Terror and Vichy. Otherwise, nearly all France’s regimes — republican, royal, and Bonapartist — have at least paid lip service to the idea of national cohesion. The historian Pierre Serna has gone so far as to characterise post-revolutionary French politics as a repeated return to what he calls the “extreme centre”. As often as not, this has been a politics focused less on ideology than on personality, from Napoleon and Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte to Charles de Gaulle.

When the Fourth Republic collapsed in 1958 amid the strife of the Algerian War, the new constitution put in place by and for de Gaulle included a powerful presidency that would, in theory, stand at a remove from partisan politics and serve as a focus of unity. De Gaulle reluctantly conceded that in order to campaign for the presidency and secure support in parliament, he could not do without a party of his own, but that party accommodated different ideological strains, and went through many incarnations, as shown by its comically frequent name changes (Union for the New Republic, Union of Democrats for the Republic, Rally for the Republic, Union for a Popular Movement, The Republicans).

Over time, the Gaullists did show signs of coalescing into a relatively stable centre-right movement, not hugely different from counterparts throughout Europe such as the West German Christian Democrats. Meanwhile, a relatively stable ideological opponent seemed to take shape in the Seventies after François Mitterrand forged a congeries of Left-wing groups into a new Socialist Party. (French socialists had earlier eschewed the label of party altogether, preferring to call themselves the French Section of the Workers’ International.) In 1981, Mitterrand’s election as president was hailed as proof that the Fifth Republic had finally become an ordinary Western democracy, with regular alternation between Left and Right parties. The dominance of the Gaullists and the Socialists was especially pronounced on the local level, where each built up powerful organisations.

On a national level, however, the party system remained relatively weak, with both the Gaullists and Socialists divided into competing “currents”, and with a constantly shifting constellation of smaller parties nipping at their heels. In theory, the Fifth Republic’s mandatory two-round election system should have helped the major parties, since they had the greatest strength for prevailing in the second, run-off round of both presidential and parliamentary votes. In practice, it turned the first round into repeated opportunities for cost-free protest, in which discontented electors voted their “hearts rather than their heads”, giving unexpected support to extremists including, especially, Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie. Already in the 1988 presidential election, Le Pen senior managed to score more than 14% in the first round, just two points behind a respected centrist former prime minister. Fourteen years later, he shocked the political world by edging ahead of a Socialist and winning a place in the run-off against incumbent Gaullist Jacques Chirac (which he lost massively).

In this century, the party system grew even weaker for several reasons. For one thing, a well-meaning constitutional reform set both the presidential and parliamentary terms at five years (the presidential one had previously been seven), in order to reduce the possibility of “cohabitation”, or split government between the executive and legislative branches. It succeeded in doing so, but at the cost of increasingly turning parliamentary majorities into personal ones, tied to the incumbent president rather than a party. Meanwhile, Marine Le Pen took over the party then called the National Front from her father and began a concerted campaign to “de-demonise” it, notably by renouncing his notorious antisemitism and actively cultivating Jewish support. (This year, the Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld has announced he will vote for the National Rally.) Her vote totals steadily rose, and in the last two presidential elections she made it into the run-off round against Macron, scoring an astonishing 41% in 2022. It also helped that an even more extreme party, “Reconquest”, emerged to her Right, allowing her to play the moderate. In the 2022 legislative elections, the National Front gained the largest number of deputies of any far-Right party since the late 19th century.

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But the largest blow to the party system came with the disastrous presidency of Socialist François Hollande and the rise of his successor, Macron. At first, Hollande’s defeat of incumbent neo-Gaullist Nicolas Sarkozy in 2012 seemed like another successful “alternation”. But Hollande quickly faced a perfect storm of calamities: an embarrassing personal scandal over his affair with an actress; a string of horrific Islamist terrorist attacks; the ongoing European debt crisis; and large-scale protests against his proposed labour and pension reforms. By late 2016, one poll placed his approval rating at an humiliating low of just 4%.

The presidential election that took place a year later went a long way towards exploding the system altogether. Hollande’s ambitious former economics minister Macron declined to run as either a Socialist or neo-Gaullist, and instead created his own centrist political party. It was an entirely personal vehicle — no coincidence that its initial name, “En Marche”, had the same initials as the candidate. Amid the wreckage of the Hollande presidency, in the first round Macron managed to whip past both neo-Gaullist François Fillon and Socialist Benoît Hamon, who scored just 6%, thanks in large part to competition from Left populist Jean-Luc Mélenchon who had founded yet another new party, France Unbowed (La France Insoumise). In the second round Macron easily defeated Marine Le Pen. And then, in the legislative elections that immediately followed, his party (now called “La République en Marche”) won a convincing majority.

Since Macron’s election, French politics has again been very much an affair of personality — his — more than ideology. Both the Socialists and the neo-Gaullist Republicans remain in dire straits, the former wrestling for support with Mélenchon’s party, the latter desperately trying to stanch the bleeding of their support to Le Pen. The Socialists even had to sell off their Parisian headquarters. Macron himself, despite his objectively reasonable economic record, has alienated voters on all sides with his remarkable aloofness and arrogance. Anger especially boiled up in the spring of 2023 when, lacking a parliamentary majority to pass a hugely unpopular pension reform, he resorted to constitutional fiat (“article 49.3”). His approval level, while not yet at Hollandian depths, now stands at just 24%. In the recent European election, the National Rally list, led by Marine Le Pen’s charismatic 28-year-old protégé Jordan Bardella, became the chosen instrument with which the French would vote their disapproval of Macron. The Republicans have now split, with part of them willing to take part in a National Rally government.

Can the National Rally translate the upsurge of protest into a parliamentary majority? In recent days, Macron’s party (now rebranded yet again as Renaissance) has rebounded somewhat in the polls, while the various Left parties have joined into a “New Popular Front” in the hopes of blocking the extreme Right. But the situation remains enormously uncertain.

A hung parliament could actually be a worse outcome than a National Rally victory. Macron, in taking the gamble to dissolve parliament, clearly thought that bringing the far-Right into government, where he could check it with his presidential powers and heap on it the blame for everything that goes wrong, might actually help keep Le Pen from the presidency in 2027 (Macron himself cannot run again due to a constitutional term limit). But if no group gets a majority in the législatives, and Macron’s own party ends up wiping out, the pressure on him to resign, forcing a new presidential election, might become irresistible. For the moment, Macron has said he will remain in office until 2027, “come what may”. But can he keep that promise? If not, France’s long pursuit of national unity and the “extreme centre” may falter, and a government of the extreme Right could come to power sooner than anyone expected.

Similar confusion hangs over the New Popular Front. The party is a surprise development of Emmanuel Macron’s decision to call a snap election. Its name invokes the union of the Left in the Thirties, which culminated in the Popular Front government formed in 1936: a government led by Léon Blum and a host of ministers from the SFIO and the Radical Party, and supported from the outside by the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) of Maurice Thorez.

Yet as Panot demonstrated, the choice of the name does not come from an intimate acquaintance with the history of the Popular Front. Today, it is little more than a slogan, one that celebrates a surprisingly quick display of unity on the Left and — above all — a desire to impress upon French voters the danger of a radical Right victory in the forthcoming elections. Indeed, if we compare more closely the world of 1936 with that of 2024, we can see how the New Popular Front is a very different beast from its namesake: rather than echoing the changing interests of particular social groups in France, it is an expression of electoral opportunism.

As the historian Claire Andrieu recently observed, the Popular Front of 1936 was a fusion of the socialist and communist movements in France, forced upon reluctant party and parliamentary leaders by party members and activists determined both to block France’s drift into authoritarian nationalism and to secure specific gains in the class war between workers and bosses. This move was triggered by violent demonstrations led by the far-Right Action Française group on 6 February 1934, which many viewed as an attempt to seize power. For months, leaders of both the PCF and the SFIO resisted these bottom-up demands for unity, until the PCF was told by Moscow to strike a deal with the socialists.

This fusion, and the elaboration of a shared legislative programme, was made more difficult by the nature of French democracy at the time. Though still excluding women, the Third Republic had become deeply embedded in society. Its political arena was populated not just by political parties but also a host of organised labour groups, and a plethora of committees and leagues of intellectuals. As a result, the Popular Front’s programme was signed off not only by the PCF, SFIO and Radicals, but also by the country’s principal trade unions. Thus the coalition was one of the first expressions of what the sociologist Peter Wagner called the era of “organised modernity”: collective action, pursued by social groups, structuring the lives of individuals, of families, of villages and towns, resulting in a fusion between politics and society.

By contrast, the New Popular Front of 2024 was negotiated in six days, behind closed doors, by party bosses. The agreement was struck between the Socialist Party, the Greens, La France Insoumise (LFI) and the French Communist Party. It also brought on board prominent figures who enjoy a more distanced relationship to the main parties on the Left: Raphaël Glucksmann, whose “Wake Up Europe” campaign for the Socialist Party did surprisingly well in the European elections, and François Ruffin, a firebrand who sits loosely on the LFI benches but functions more often as an independent voice on the Left.

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Most obviously, their alleged catalyst is the prospect of a victory for the far-Right in the legislative elections. Macron’s decision to dissolve the national assembly came as a surprise for most and reflected a willingness to gamble with what he thought was still a refusal, among a majority of French voters, to accept that Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) could ever become the party of government. Aware that this historic refusal may no longer exist, the disparate forces of the Left decided to put to one side their differences. This “antifascist” animation, however, is far from the only reason for this new alliance’s genesis — and perhaps not even the most important one.

Far more essential to the formation of the New Popular Front has been the electoral dissolution of Macronism as a political force. Evident already in the 2022 legislative elections, where Macron’s party was unable to win an outright majority in the national assembly, it was confirmed in dramatic fashion by the poor showing of the presidential party in the European elections of June 2024. In those elections, the combined score of the Socialists, Greens and LFI would have placed the Left within just five points of the RN, and a good 10 points ahead of Macron’s party. Thus, what brought these political figures together — who, just days before in the run-up to European elections, had been viciously accusing each other of antisemitism and warmongering — was the whiff of political office. Should the unified Left come ahead of Macron’s party in the first round on Sunday, they will most likely face the far-Right in a second-round run-off. And under those circumstances, they fancy their chances.

Paradoxically, however, as well as being its animating force, the implosion of Macronism is also the New Popular Front’s main limitation as a political force. It is, after all, operating only at the level of the political players themselves. There is no associated social movement or a coming together of rival social forces. Its programme is an amalgam of the interest of the different parties involved, with an economic programme that focuses on tackling the cost-of-living crisis.

This old Keynesian strategy of boosting aggregate demand through government spending has echoes of Mitterrand’s socialist programme of 1981. However, without a firm anchoring in French society, it is likely these measures would be just as short-lived as Mitterrand’s, who undertook a dramatic U-turn two years into his first term as President. Elsewhere, the New Popular Front has said it would reject the EU’s fiscal rules without explaining how it would go about doing this. Once again, there is a striking contrast with the original Popular Front, whose legislative achievements included the 40-hour week, two weeks’ paid holiday and a host of new additions to the French labour code which were sealed in the Matignon Agreement of June 1936.

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Offering little by comparison, the New Popular Front is no more and no less than a product of the collapse in the centre. For this reason, it is not surprising to see the return of some of the familiar faces of the Left from the Nineties and early 2000s, such as the former socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin. Far from being a radical force for change, then, it reflects a belief among the old guard that this is a good time to impose a more moderate Left onto what had become a Mélenchon-dominated Left. Indeed, it seems fitting that the New Popular Front may well be a vehicle for the political return of the last Socialist president, François Hollande, who is standing in his old constituency in Corrèze, in the heart of France.

Crucially, because it is a product of the implosion of Macronism, the New Popular Front contains within it the seeds of its own demise. Little more than a product of a void, it is already coming apart as the rival figures within it make the case for why they are the best candidate for prime minister. Mélenchon has refused to step aside, declaring instead that he is ready to govern, invoking the ire of all other parties in the New Popular Front who have spent years criticising his rhetorical excesses and narcissism. The recent exchange between Hollande and  Mélenchon, where each has said that the other should “shut up”, speaks volumes about the mood within the coalition.

Its essence, in other words, is far removed from that of 1936, when the Popular Front was the political expression of a vast social movement rooted in the struggle of the workplace: pay, working conditions and the right to collective organisation. Back then, it was overwhelmingly a workers’ movement, one that generated new forms of popular culture preserved in the joyful and sun-kissed photography of Pierre Jamet and many others. The New Popular Front of 2024, by contrast, is an alliance of political rivals occurring within a context of widespread cultural pessimism. Electoral success may yet lend it some impetus, but even then, it is difficult to see how it can escape the fragmentary pressures that produced it in the first place.

More than two centuries later, the nickname had devolved to remarkable commoner. All of 28, Jordan Bardella has no king. Instead, he has a queen, one who has been very good to him, raising him to the presidency of the Rassemblement National (RN) while she seeks that of France itself. Following last week’s European victory — in which RN won in every region in France — the queen and the dauphin now bestride the nation with as much confidence as their royal predecessors. Unlike their predecessors, however, they also command the present support of the people.

Still, Bardella and Marine Le Pen make for a very odd couple. France is used to her presidents being énarques, graduates of the Ecole National d’Administration and other elite academies. No woman has become President, and only two, Edith Cresson and until earlier this year, Elizabeth Borne, have served as prime minister. Neither did so with distinction, nor did they serve a good length of office to prove themselves.

Bardella, in contrast to all, was raised in rent-controlled housing in the Parisian suburb of Seine-Saint Denis, his parents of Italian and Algerian origin. He did well at school, but dropped out of a geography course at the University of Paris-Sorbonne to join the Front National, forerunner of the RN, at 16. He quickly became a departmental secretary, formed a group called Banlieues Patriotes (a challenge to the banlieues better known for their Islamist radicalism), and was taken into the party headquarters, where he was spokesman, deputy president and, in 2022, temporary then full president.

I’ve seen him perform before a RN crowd twice: once, in 2023, in a convention organised to reward the party’s local leaders in Le Havre; and once, in April, in a vast hall in France’s second city, Marseilles. In both, he gave elaborate genuflection — physically and verbally — to his patronne, who had “faith in him always”. And so she should, since his natural political talent and charm, with a small, slightly shy photogenic smile permanently on show, make him a huge asset.

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A few months ago, Bardella was voted the most popular politician in France, which could irk a woman who has worked for decades, from notoriety to celebrity, to get where she and her party are now. But in both venues, they spoke one after the other, with every sign of affection and with great passion: she invoking the beauty of France’s countryside and settlements, as she likes to do; he ripping into Emmanuel Macron, whose presidency was going through a bad patch, with worse to come. In Marseilles, both took time to emphasise that, in government, they would not be bound by the rules of the European Union, unless these benefitted France.

If Macron’s gamble to call a snap election fails, and the RN wins, then the President is almost obliged to appoint Bardella as prime minister. The liberal-conservative Les Republicains have said they will join an alliance with the RN, a historic departure that Le Pen has since described as “brave”.

Yet were Bardella to enter the Matignon, the PM’s residence, he would be obliged to leave the much easier task of holding the present administration to ridicule, and instead face up to real politics in a large state where millions would still hate him on principle. His talent is now exercised in raucous opposition politics: then, it would be in endless complexities.

Is he cut out for the struggle? Pascal Humeau, a former communications expert with the RN, says of him that “his ease, his enthusiasm, that you can feel today, we had to work on it for months and months”, adding that even Bardella’s smile and greetings were products of painstaking training. He does appear to sincerely believe in Le Grand Remplacement — the name of a book by the writer Renaud Camus, who proposed that elites were secretly ensuring that floods of immigrants, cheaper to employ and grateful to those who allowed them to enter the country, as replacements for the indigenous people. Le Pen herself, when first encountering it, said she thought it absurd. 

And in any case, it is Le Pen who will face the largest test: she will be RN’s candidate for the presidency scheduled for April 2027. Polls conducted earlier this year show her well ahead of the other challengers — with 36% of the vote; former Prime Minister Edouard Phillippe and Gabriel Attal, the present 36-year-old Prime Minister, both on 22%; and the left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon on 14%. Second-round polls are much closer: of her possible opponents, she would beat Mélenchon with ease, 64%-36%. But she would win over Attal (if he were the candidate) by only one point, and is on level pegging with Phillippe, a popular figure (though presently under investigation for possible corruption). Macron, his two-term mandate completed, could only look on.

These results, three years before she has to get real, still emphasise her largest challenge. She must not be seen to be too extreme; has she done enough to bury the Le Pen family curse of far-Right fanaticism? In a leaked private conversation from 2021, she had said that Eric Zemmour — the further right presidential contender with his Reconquête party — “makes me look reasonable. He is into the clash of civilisations, while I say yes, Islam is compatible with the Republic.”    

At the same time, anxious not to be seen to be too mild, she has celebrated the expulsion of Mahjoub Mahjouni, a Tunisian Imam who preached in the town of Bagnols-sur-Ceze in the department of Gard and who specialised in calling the French tricolour “Satanic”. According to a report which the police had compiled, he had said that “we won’t have any more of these tricolour flags, which poison us, and give us headaches”: he thought it a pity that “mosques don’t produce fighters, as in the time of the prophet. women were inferior, feeble and venal, who must be guided and controlled by men, and hidden away in the name of religion”. On the daily message the RN puts out, usually featuring Bardella and Le Pen smiling broadly, waving joyously, she wrote that “the RN never allows our flag to be trampled into the earth of the French republic”.

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Such constant, sharp-edged criticism, which Bardella and Le Pen both deploy in confronting the large Muslim community, has found favour — indeed, it has forced Macron to follow suit. Le Pen believes that many Muslims live decent lives and cause no trouble: she also believes a large proportion, especially of the young, do not. Gilles Kepel, France’s leading expert on Islam — and no fan of Le Pen — writes in his Terror in France that the tendency to label as “Islamophobia” all criticism of Muslims “makes it possible to rationalise a total rejection of France and a commitment to Jihad by making a connection between unemployment, discrimination and French republican values”. The many murders of French citizens by young Islamists have narrowed the space for toleration and exculpation: Le Pen, while careful to avoid extremes, is with Bardella at the head of this popular backlash.

But how long will that stay the case? The dauphin and his queen have already chosen their future titles: M Le Premier Ministre, and Mme la Presidente. He would be in a dauphin-like, subordinate position, as all French premiers are obliged to be: but should he succeed in that office, confounding his critics by showing a grasp of the hugely difficult role, he may himself progress to being a republican king.

Moreover, despite being on the back foot, Macron is still in charge of a timetable and still in the Élysée. If he wins in July, the Le Pen-Bardella charge will be halted. And with some support returned to him, Macron could rally for the last years of his reign, and use them to try to reduce the RN. Beneath the charm and the calm, Bardella must fear such failure. To which his Queen, in Lady Macbeth guise, will surely tell him to “screw his courage to the sticking place, and we’ll not fail”.

Voters certainly seem impressed: polls show the 28-year-old has a double-digit percentage point lead over President Emmanuel Macron’s party as well as over each of the major Left-wing lists — numbers that would solidify the RN’s status as a serious contender in the 2027 presidential elections.

What’s his secret then? For one, Bardella has managed to inspire the RN’s formidable base — something I witnessed first-hand at his rally this month in Perpignan, southern France, where 3,000 sympathisers packed a convention centre to hear him speak alongside the party’s three-time presidential candidate Marine Le Pen. As European elections tend to see low turnouts, parties that manage to energise the faithful often reap the rewards — and the RN is on track to do just that.

“He represents the values of France, he’s the only one who tells the truth,” said Adrien, a 20-year-old in the military who took the train down from Toulouse with a couple of Le Pen-voting friends. “I think Bardella is really the new generation of the party.” Indeed, polls currently show the RN winning about a third of voters aged 18 to 24, which is more than any other party, but on par with Left-wing parties when their totals are combined.

At the same time, the campaign appears to be resonating beyond a band of true believers. Laëtitia, a 44-year-old social worker from Beziers, there with her 19-year-old daughter, said she didn’t vote for Le Pen in the last presidential election. “Like every politician, I don’t necessarily agree with all [Bardella’s] ideas,” she said, referencing a proposal to strip welfare benefits from parents whose children have been convicted of delinquent offences. But she applauds Bardella’s call to rein in immigration. “I’m waiting for him to be close to the people and to listen to us.”

Judging by the polls, more and more of France is willing to give this once-fringe party a chance. Building on its base of conservative working-class voters, the RN is winning solid support from young people, middle-income voters and even retirees — the latter of whom have historically proven hostile to its message. In short, they’re winning more support from just about everyone across the board.

The rally in Perpignan was a near-perfect distillation of the party’s drive to reinvent itself as a mainstream opposition force, the latest chapter of its “de-demonisation” strategy. Part of that involves stylistic adjustments: as the crowd filtered in, speakers blasted out a playlist of friendly pop hits including Rihanna and Black Eyed Peas. The headliners were introduced by the Perpignan Mayor, Louis Aliot, a reminder the party is actually capable of governance. During his speech, Bardella cracked a couple of jokes and showed his capacity for self-deprecation, another quality that separates him from many high-profile Macronists. At one point, he took off his jacket to cheers and mock catcalls in a scene that could have been staged for his 1.2 million followers on TikTok. And after the rally, Bardella took selfies with members of the crowd, a ritual that seems to fascinate the French press.

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But normalisation also means tinkering with the party’s platform, reassuring rather than scaring off voters. Gone are the references to Frexit or leaving the eurozone. Such promises have been replaced by a string of grievances over the EU’s agricultural and energy policies, framed in terms of restoring French sovereignty.

Still, the credo that unites the delicate cross-class coalition — the lifeblood of the party — is a deep hostility to immigration. Though the crowd seemed to be tiring toward the end of his speech, when Bardella vowed to detain all migrant boats that arrive in France and send them back to their ports of origin — drawing out the syllables of the final word for emphasis — the spectators roared back to life, hoisting their tricolor flags, and breaking out into a familiar chant: On est chez nous! On est chez nous! On est chez nous! (“We’re at home!”). Invoking the old-time religion, Bardella fired out a list of ills supposedly caused by foreigners: crime, Islamism, terrorism, declining public services and the loss of French identity. “You’ve understood it, my friends,” he thundered. “This election will also be a great referendum on mass immigration.”

Outside the convention centre, I chatted with Alain Jamet, who helped to found the National Front in 1972 with Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s much brasher father who has been convicted multiple times for hate speech against Jews, Muslims and Roma people. “We’ve kept alive the foundations of the movement and I’m a representation of that,” said the 90-year-old Jamet, who proudly pointed out that he has a Flamme d’Or, an honorific title bestowed by Le Pen père. “Essentially that’s France and the French first.”

When I suggested that many think the party has abandoned its roots, he interjected. “There is a continuity,” he said. “It’s just that the way of presenting our platform has changed. While the father never thought he’d arrive in power, the daughter has adopted a language that allows her to hope for victory.”

The change in France’s political environment has also helped. In recent years, the RN has benefited from a lurch to the Right in France’s media and political landscape that has put topics such as immigration and insecurity at the centre of national debate. This is partly thanks to ultra-conservative billionaire Vincent Bolloré who, since 2016, has acquired prominent media outlets and transformed them into vehicles for Right-wing commentary: radio station Europe 1, newspaper Journal du Dimanche, and most famously, TV channel CNews, often likened to Fox News. The network’s most famous pundit, Éric Zemmour, went on to run for president in 2022 and now heads a party even further to the Right of the RN: Reconquête, which polls at around 5% for the European elections and boasts Marine Le Pen’s niece, Marion Maréchal, at the head of its ticket. Compared with figures like these, the RN can come across as somewhat moderate.

Wallerand de Saint-Just, a member of the RN’s national bureau, the head of its group in the Île-de-France regional council, and the party’s national treasurer from 2009 to 2021, acknowledged that press coverage has become more favourable to the RN, though he chalked it up to the party’s growing support nationwide. “They’ve evolved because they have to acknowledge that more than 30, 35% of the population supports us,” Saint-Just told me.

He also admitted CNews offers relatively sympathetic coverage, even if he argued the network is more favourable to Zemmour. “We have good relationships with them, we’re better treated on CNews than [other channels], but it’s not a media of the National Rally either.”

When asked if Reconquête helps the RN appear more mainstream, Saint-Just was having none of it. “I’m going to be a bit coarse and vulgar, but Reconquête’s programme is ‘death to the poor, death to Arabs,’” he told me. “That’s not who we are. We care about social justice. And concerning ‘death to Arabs’, the Muslim community in France and even around the world knows we’ve always had a very balanced position on this topic and with respect to them.”

After the rally, though, at a highway road stop north of Perpignan, I bumped into Julien Sanchez, mayor of the southern town of Beaucaire and member of the RN’s 12-person executive bureau, who suggested the difference between his party and Reconquête is largely one of style. “We’re not into excessiveness or insults,” he told me. “We defend our positions, we defend our project, we’re obviously opposed to mass immigration, but there’s no point in doing so with excess.”

This strategy poses a conundrum: the more RN tries to present itself to voters as a mainstream opposition party, the harder it can be to understand its plans for governing France. Ever sensitive of their image, RN leaders have tossed to the wayside an impressive number of former idols and allies: Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are no longer celebrated for obvious reasons, but in recent months, RN top brass have also criticised Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni (seen as too friendly with Brussels) and the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party (seen as too friendly with Moscow). “I don’t think we have any particular model,” Sanchez told me. “I think we’re building our own model and it’s pretty unique in Europe.”

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What about Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, often cited as a source of inspiration by European nationalists? “It’s a model of a country that is courageous on the topic of migration, because they said ‘no’ to the European Union and that’s harder to do when you’re Hungary than when you’re France,” replied Sanchez, carefully choosing his words. “I think they’re people we’re going to be talking to in the next few years.”

What’s clear, in any case, is that Bardella and Le Pen have not only succeeded in remaking their party, helping to set the terms of the debate on issues including immigration and insecurity. Macronists’ attempts to reclaim these topics have fallen flat — which has, if anything, strengthened the RN’s legitimacy. Meanwhile, divisions have prevented bickering Left-wing parties from delivering a coordinated response necessary to peel away potential RN sympathisers and win over some of the disillusioned working-class voters now abstaining from politics altogether. It’s unlikely that a fight-back will take shape before next month’s European Parliament elections — and by then, the RN will likely have yet another feather in its cap.

Unsurprisingly, this didn’t go down well with Nato allies, whom the French president hadn’t even bothered to warn beforehand. This was probably designed to maximise the statement’s impact: Macron is prone to attention-grabbing pronouncements that are never actually acted upon, often as a way of deflecting attention away from domestic problems.

This time, though, Macron overplayed his hand. His statement was so obviously unhinged that it fuelled a sizeable backlash in France, where half of the population opposes providing more aid to Ukraine. Marine Le Pen accused Macron of playing with the lives of French children, while radical leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon called it “madness”. Outside of France, meanwhile, practically all Nato members rebutted Macron’s suggestion and ruled out sending ground troops to Ukraine, while Putin himself yesterday warned such a move could spark a major escalation.

But how long will Nato leaders maintain this stance? After all, Macron is right about one thing: Nato countries have crossed virtually all the red lines they had given themselves at the start of the conflict. “Many people who say ‘Never, never’ today were the same people who said ‘Never tanks, never planes, never long-range missiles’ two years ago,” he said. In this sense, the whole troops-on-the-ground debate is little more than a distraction from the fact that we are, of course, already engaged in a de facto war against Russia — troops on the ground or not. Besides, it’s an open secret that Western special forces are already present in Ukraine — including British troops.

Indeed, there is hardly any disagreement among European leaders about the fact that their countries should continue to wage this so-called proxy war; the question is whether the aim should be that of supporting Ukraine’s official strategy of retaking every inch of Russian-controlled territory — a proposition that is now increasingly recognised as impossible even in Western quarters — or if it should rather be that of bolstering Ukraine’s defences with the goal of arresting the Russian advance. European countries seem to be increasingly leaning towards the latter, with Germany currently leading the way.

Even though Germany has emerged as Ukraine’s biggest supporter in the West (as the US Congress continues to block a new aid package), Scholz has hitherto resisted pressure from the opposition, as well as from members of his own coalition, to send German-made Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine. His argument is twofold: first, that the missiles have a range of 500 kilometres and could be used to strike Moscow; second, that their delivery would require specially trained German troops to be on the ground in Ukraine. This would effectively draw Germany into a direct war with Russia.

But even Scholz’s apparent caution seems troublingly naïve in the face of Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg’s recent announcement that the bloc has given Ukraine the green light to use Western-supplied F-16s to strike targets in Russia — yet another dangerous escalation that brings Nato closer and closer to a direct confrontation with Russia. Ultimately, however, the disagreements within Nato are over tactics, not strategy: virtually all countries agree that Ukraine should be supported “for as long as it takes”.

To this end, several European countries, including the UK, have just signed bilateral long-term security agreements with Kyiv, committing to “provide Ukraine with swift and sustained security assistance, modern military equipment across all domains as necessary”. Yet no one really knows what supporting Ukraine “for as long as it takes” really means. There’s no clearly defined and agreed war goal — aside from “not letting Russia win”, and a vague hope of wearing Russia down economically and militarily.

But even that appears to be little more than wishful thinking. Not only has the Russian economy weathered the Western sanctions (and may have even benefited from them); more crucially, as The Economist recently acknowledged, “Russia is winning in Ukraine” — and there’s little realistic hope of this being reversed soon. As Anatol Lieven wrote in Time: “The implication of Ukraine standing indefinitely on the defensive — even if it does so successfully — is that the territories currently occupied by Russia are lost. Russia will never agree at the negotiating table to surrender land that it has managed to hold on the battlefield… Even if [Western] aid continues, there is no realistic chance of total Ukrainian victory next year, or the year after that.”

So, what’s the point of supporting a long and bloody war of attrition, one that could potentially last for years? As Lieven argues, “however painful a peace agreement would be today, it will be infinitely more so if the war continues and Ukraine is defeated”. Yet, in recent months, the US and Ukraine have reportedly continued to reject Russia’s suggestions of a ceasefire.

So why does peace continue to be a taboo in the West? For starters, there is good reason to believe that Western support for Ukraine was never really about helping Ukrainians, but about using them to pursue the West’s own economic and strategic aims. From this perspective, the war has been a success — for some at least. In the US’s case, this is rather self-evident: it has been able to reassert its military hegemony over Europe, while driving a wedge between Europe (and Germany in particular) and Russia, a longstanding American geopolitical imperative. Especially now that the US has succeeded in “Europeanising” the war, by having the EU carry the burden for supporting Ukraine, Biden has no obvious incentive to end the war before the elections, especially on terms favourable to Russia.

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For Europe, it’s a very different story: aside from the continent’s military-industrial complex, which has benefited enormously, the war has been an economic and geopolitical disaster. Moreover, Europe has obviously much more to lose from the increasingly alarming prospect of nuclear war between the West and Russia. Indeed, one may argue that Europeans have an existential interest in bringing the conflict to an end.

Yet not only are European governments not doing anything to work towards a peaceful resolution — they seem to be actively exacerbating tensions. In recent months, we have witnessed a sustained propaganda campaign aimed at convincing European citizens that Russia is bent on invading Europe at some point in the more-or-less-near future — and that, therefore, we have to prepare for war by heavily boosting Europe’s “defence” capabilities. According to the Danish defence minister, Russia could attack Nato in as little as three years. “We have to realise it’s not a given that we are in peace. And that’s why we are preparing for a conflict with Russia,” said Dutch admiral Rob Bauer, the Nato military committee chief. In several other European countries, there is talk of reintroducing mandatory military conscription. And this isn’t just talk: along its north-eastern flank, Nato has recently begun its largest military exercise in Europe since the Cold War, involving 90,000 troops, 50 ships and more than 80 fighter jets.

But is there any evidence that Russia intends to march across Europe? For John Mearsheimer, this is a “ludicrous” proposition. “Putin has made it clear that he does not intend to conquer all of Ukraine,” he said, “and he has never indicated that he was interested in conquering any other country in Eastern Europe, much less Western Europe. He also doesn’t have the military capability to conquer eastern Europe — the Russian army is not the second coming of the Wehrmacht.”

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If this is true, how can we explain the relentless peddling of this narrative? I see three options, all equally alarming.

The first is that European leaders have started to believe their own propaganda and are truly convinced Russia is bent on attacking Europe. If this is the case, it risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy: Putin would view an increase in defence spending as a sign of a growing threat. The second explanation is that Europe’s leaders know that Russia is unlikely to invade, but are raising this phantom threat to justify the continuation of the proxy war in Ukraine, as part of a wider strategy aimed at containing the Russo-Chinese challenge to the US-centric system. The third possibility is that the continent’s leaders have simply gone bonkers and are deliberately trying to precipitate a war with Russia, for reasons unfathomable to sane-minded people.

Amid such unclarity, the good news is that citizens, at least in Western Europe, don’t seem to be buying it. Despite the relentless fear-mongering, Russia ranks only 11th, 7th and 6th among the concerns of Italians, Germans and the French respectively, below crime, inequality and immigration, according to the latest Munich Security Conference report. But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that our elites would rather drag us into war than address our societies’ actual problems. They created them — and they benefit from them. And as long as they do, it seems unlikely that peace will arrive soon.

That party, Les Républicains, now a sad rump that will struggle to poll 7% in June’s European elections, promptly expelled her. It won’t change her trajectory: a mediocre MEP in opposition, she has flourished as mayor of Paris’s posh 7th Arrondissement, where, from early misgivings at her flamboyance, the constituents have now become her biggest fans. The general opinion is that Dati, the consummate retail politician, gets things done: the streets are clean, the schools work, no letter goes unanswered. The 7th was the first Paris Mairie to provide Covid vaccinations, and Dati said no Paris resident from any neighbourhood would be turned away, enraging the hapless City Mayor Anne Hidalgo, whose job she is shooting for in 2026. Being the pepper and salt in an Attal Cabinet smooths her path towards that goal, just as it suits Emmanuel Macron, who courted her himself this week.

Until that moment, in the form of Attal, Macron seemed to have straightforwardly indulged himself with a compatible quasi-clone who’d run affairs in a concentrated style of the President’s own reactive moods. (It’s hard to call them vision, or ideas: they’re consecutive, often contradictory, always context-dependent.) The choice of Dati, the Marmite of French Right-wing politics, certainly signals that the strongman image Attal was sometimes finding hard to project is truly meant to finally address the slide of the French Overton Window Right-ward.

Currently, Macron presents as a conservative. This changes on demand: once the Economy Minister under the president he supplanted, François Hollande, he coined the “en même temps” (“at the same time”) slogan during his victorious 2017 campaign to garner supporters from the Left and from the Right. It was one of the reasons he got rid of Attal’s predecessor, the loyal, hard-working, but dour Élisabeth Borne (dour doesn’t play well in Macron’s court; you need to look at all times like you’re having the time of your life). She had consistently failed to sell his latest showpiece bills in Parliament. In both cases, whether pensions reform or the recent immigration law, Macron had got the Socialist Borne to defend bills written to court the Right-wing vote — and both abhorred by the Left, Borne’s former political family. The legislative mess that ensued wasn’t of Borne’s making, but a reminder to the President that, what a bore, he had lost his majority.

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Enter Gabriel Attal. From the very start he had proved himself one of Macron’s most successful Wunderkinder. A full 12 years younger than the youngest-ever president of the Fifth Republic, and like him an up-and-coming young Socialist under François Hollande, he rose within five years from an internship at the National Assembly to Macronista MP, having jumped onto the future president’s campaign team bandwagon. Articulate, preternaturally poised, he became a junior Education minister in 2018 at 29, Cabinet spokesman in 2020, Public Accounts minister in 2023, and Education Secretary one year later. He managed to talk up the latter job up so well (back to basics, secular principles, anti-bullying measures, wooing the conservative vote from the urban middle class to the more moderate end of Marine Le Pen’s voters) that no-one realised he left it without anything meaningful to show.

The obvious danger to Macron is (at least) two-fold. If Attal’s charmed trajectory continues, there’s a possibility that voters will prefer the 2.0 version to the somewhat ship-soiled original. Macron’s popularity has already tanked to 25-27%, while Attal polls at 48%, leaving all the conditions in place for three years of presidential lame-duckery. But it’s also possible that a fractious country, faced once again with a bright, snappy know-it-all who fails to project much empathy, will be reminded of the younger Macron seven years ago, and simply think: “Non, pas encore!”

If anything, Attal is already more camera-trained than Macron. Most TV coverage of this week’s reshuffle included footage of Attal aged nine, interviewed during a theatre class for a documentary at his school, École Alsacienne, a breeding ground for the Paris élite (think a combination of Winchester and St Paul’s). And, compared to the pre-digital Nineties video of another aspiring actor, the somewhat overwrought 15-year-old Macron, a gulf does open up. The latter, onstage at the end of term fête at his provincial Jesuit Lycée (watched in the wings by his future wife and drama teacher Brigitte Auzière); and Attal, the self-possessed golden child ticking off Comédie Française leading parts on camera.

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Though Attal never was an Adrian Mole, his early years were like those of another English comic creation: the little Sebastian Moon remembered by Bertie Wooster in Thank You Jeeves. “If ever there was a kid whose whole appearance seemed to call aloud to any right-minded boy to lure him into a quiet spot and inflict violence upon him, that kid was undeniably Sebastian Moon. He reminded me strongly of Little Lord Fauntleroy. I don’t know why it is, but I’ve never been able to bear with fortitude anything in the shape of a kid with golden curls…” No Wodehouse reader since Duff Cooper has ever mistaken his glorious jokes for reality, but it is interesting that Attal was bullied at school. Actors’ Studio-style, he even used it as a clever confession when getting the Education job, reaching out to a large constituency of worried parents.

He was also neatly defusing the fact that he is France’s first gay prime minister. His chief bully, Juan Branco, now a barrister who includes Julian Assange among his clients, was then and now brought to hysteria by Attal’s homosexuality. He later published an entire book denouncing the “elite hothouse” of his old school, tweeting the most unhinged accusations last Tuesday in case they’d been forgotten. This, if anything, has helped rather than harmed Attal — and lanced a possible boil early. But still, the minute his nomination was confirmed, the hard-Left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon coyly tweeted, (mis)quoting the title of a Henry de Montherlant play, “Malheur aux peuples dont les princes sont des enfants” (“Woe betide the peoples whose princes are children”). It was a riff on the 1951 La ville dont le prince est un enfant, one of the classics of allusive gay works in French literature.

Reliable reports say Attal took the tweet in stride, though at the Élysée Macron went ballistic. However, it’s likely that the President immediately saw what an own goal it was for the France Insoumise chief, and played it up at no risk, since even Marine Le Pen has been running a gay-friendly party for over a decade. And the Attal nomination is more about setting the ground for tomorrow’s battles. The National Rally’s list at the June European elections, which currently polls at almost one third of the vote (setting it well ahead of Macron’s Renaissance party at 20%), will be headed by the party president and Marine’s very own Wunderkind, the 28-year-old Jordan Bardella, a banlieue grandson of Italian and Algerian immigrants and a university dropout. Bardella joined what was then the National Front in 2012, aged just 16, “more for Marine than her father”, as he said at the time.

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If anything, his career has soared even faster than Attal’s. At 19 he was a Regional Councillor of the Paris area. Soon, mirroring Attal’s trajectory, Bardella was party spokesman, and in 2019 he was elected the second-youngest MEP in history aged 23. As poised as Attal, but in a more relatable way, Bardella, without the benefit of a luxury education, has already held his own in television debates with the future French PM. They’re both fighting for the same marginal votes, beyond any core constituency. “When you sell a youthful image, it’s to reach out to old people,” as the political scientist Valerio Motta says.

If Attal clicks with Dati — and his colleagues say he’s been friends with her for some time — she will act as his guarantor, ensuring that his vow to “regenerate” France is not just spin. She is of a comparable age to Marine Le Pen, which creates, at least subconsciously, a kind of parallel between a young newcomer and the female politician with experience of failure as well as success. Certainly it lifts the current Cabinet from the colourless technocratic style that has marked the last seven years of Macron governance. No-one in the country doubts Dati is capable of taking the President on, even at the cost of her job. Attal’s friends have been saying all last week that he too is capable of independence, even wilfulness, against Macron when he thinks he is in error. If this tag-team works out, they both have higher hopes for the future. Attal would love to be Macron’s successor; Dati wants to reign over Paris. Even if they don’t succeed, it will make the French political scene more open and vibrant than it’s been in years.

It took Ridley Scott and his bloated Napoléon to rouse the serried ranks of French historians, politicians, journalists, museographers, military brass and amateur re-enacters against what is largely seen here as an attack against France’s best-known ruler and military genius. We’re getting L’Année Napoléon two years late ­— ­and enjoying every moment of it.

“Napoléon”, c’est le film d’un Anglais très antifrançais (“Napoleon is a movie made by an arch-anti-French Englishman”) sniffed the historian Patrice Gueniffey in Le Point, before engaging in a meticulous fact-checking exercise. (The entire Institut Napoléon has been producing a detachment of painstaking little French Hugo Vickers to protest, with a thousand details, that the superannuated, gloomy, inarticulate brute portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix is wrong, wrong, wrong). “This is worse than a just a bad film: Ridley Scott desecrates Napoleon”, the Sciences Po professor of media studies, Romain Marsily, thunders in Le Figaro.

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By Jeremy Black

For a country supposedly in the throes of existential gloom and masochistic self-doubt, there’s nothing like a perceived attack by bloody foreigners on a national legend to bring a lot of us together. A recent poll shows only 3% of the French mention the West Indies slavery reinstatement in their rating of Napoléon’s “worse decisions”.

Putting aside the police state that France inherited from the Revolution’s Committee of Public Safety, the first Napoléonic accomplishments the French praise are Napoleon’s legislative and administrative reforms, which pretty much baked Roman law, Louis XIV’s centralism and command economy, the philosophy of the Enlightenment, and the Revolution’s nation-building achievements into a consistent framework. It took four years ­— 1800 to 1804 — to write and collate the 2281 articles of the Civil Code, largely under the stewardship of the First Consul, as he was known at the time, himself (Bonaparte presided over 55 of the 107 writing sessions of the final version).

This, as much as his conquests, left an indelible mark in the law of places from Louisiana and Bolivia to Bavaria and Poland. You find the (translated) hand of Napoleon in the Japanese Civil Code of 1898, in Egyptian Law, in Mustafa Kemal Atatürk new Turkish Code. Half a century before Bismarck, the birth of modern Germany was facilitated by the breaking up of medieval laws and regulations and the power of guilds, as well as the expropriation, à la révolutionnaire, of the churches and the aristocratic landowners.

For a notion of the awe in which of Napoleon was held by his contemporaries, listen to his enemies. “Bonaparte was a poet in action, an immense genius in war, a tireless, skilful and sensible administrator, a hard-working and reasonable legislator. This is why he has such a hold on people’s imagination,” from Chateaubriand, a lifelong royalist whose regular diatribes in Le Mercure de France left no one in doubt of the contempt he held him in.

Or take the opening lines of Stendhal’s Charterhouse of Parma, written from the point of view of the Italian States invaded by the French: “On May 15, 1796, General Bonaparte entered Milan at the head of that young army which had lately crossed the Lodi bridge and taught the world that after so many centuries Caesar and Alexander had a successor. The miracles of valour and genius Italy had witnessed in a few months wakened a slumbering nation.”

The notion of gloire, which has disappeared from our modern world, belongs here to the Roman general’s triumph, the retelling of the Iliad, the tales of the Crusaders, which were part of a regular education. And so the French will talk of Napoleon’s victories — but crucially, his defeats became equally part of his myth. From the Retreat from Russia to that lone figure marooned on an island in the South Atlantic, they combine to create epic and tragedy. What, indeed, would posterity would have made of a Napoleon meekly ending his days as the ruler of Elba, a Mediterranean Ruritania without a Rassendyl, instead of escaping for a hundred days until he meets his, well, Waterloo.

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Having frozen the political consequences of the Révolution during his 16-year rule, Napoleon’s shadow looms over most of the 19th century as his successors try, and mostly fail, to cope with the world after him. The after-effects of Bonapartisme, long after the Emperor’s death, fuelled every single uprising of the 19th century: the short years of the First Empire, with its mammoth legislative achievements, administrative restructuring of France and glorification of science, becoming a hallowed Vingt Glorieuses in French minds from Balzac, La Fayette, Victor Hugo, to Berlioz.

You can even argue that Napoleon himself was in many ways replicating, in the neoclassical vernacular, an age-old tradition in which French kings, claiming a mystical direct connection to their peoples, set themselves as autocratic popular defenders against a hidebound aristocracy. From Philippe II Auguste to Louis XIV, this meant strengthening a centralised, technocratic domination over the country, and the appropriation of the fiefdoms and provinces of anyone trying to rebel. Every Noble Revolt was lost in France over the centuries, possibly resulting in a largely irrelevant upper middle class often deserving of Karl Marx’s strictures.

The Bonapartiste blueprint, which would influence French politics to this day was published in 1823, when Count Emmanuel de Las Cases produced the eight-volume Memoirs the dying Napeoleon largely dictated to him. Le Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène enshrines the principles of an authoritarian regime based on democratic institutions, with elections, and a centralised State. It is recognisable today: De Gaulle was reading it when writing his Memoirs, and its influence is strong in the Constitution of the Fifth Republic.

But from Balzac to Victor Hugo, it’s the non-accommodating memory of the Napoleonic years that gets burnished: the last of the Bourbons muddle through in their Ancien Régime style while more practical than usually acknowledged, as France starts dreaming of an enlightened strongman. Then, as today, the longing for a ruler who will cut through the perceived mediocrity of the times makes compromise look unattractive: Bonapartisme is foremost an illusion that the best solutions are the simplest ones.

The French have a muscular memory for the man of destiny — or woman: when Michelet, the great 19th century historian, published his massive Histoire de France between 1825 and 1874, intent on encompassing 20 centuries of national legend, his volume on Joan of Arc, which was a best-seller, had obvious parallels with the Napoleonic saga, including the final martyrdom. But modernity, and a very French belief in strong institutions, have mostly meant that we exported Bonapartisme more than truly practicing it ourselves.

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Emmanuel Macron is the closest we have come to a Bonapartiste recently. In his conquest of power, his betrayal of his early allies, his refusal to be indebted to anyone, and his destruction of the old political parties, he had the manner, if not the spirit, of Napoleon. Elected seven years ago as the unknown who would make politics as usual obsolete, that young man of destiny who snatched power after a brilliant campaign now faces more of a humiliating dethroning a la Napoleon III than a St Helena ending.

Mistaking micromanagement for command of detail, and picking pale clones of himself as ministers (there are no plain-spoken, capable Maréchaux d’Empire at the Elysée) he tried to compensate for domestic unpopularity with grandiose international initiatives that fell flat from Kyiv to Jerusalem, and has managed to be despised by the diplomatic corps and the police as well as French military. He is done, a three-year lame duck. While we argue historical accuracy, he has already met his Waterloo.