Every Manny for Himself
(Apologies for the delay, Macron ran out my work day, went into my Saturday, but damn it, this is still France)
After a mean girl spat, in which the leader of the ever-more-trending-hard-right Le Republicans, Retailleau, said he can’t be in a government with that bitch Bruno Le Maire, Lecornu gave up on proposing a budget at all. He went for a good four day sulk. By the end of the week, he was summoned to an audience with Macron to work it out.
Friends, he did not work it out.
Macron and His Warrior Monk
These are the eyes of a loyal fighting monk, I guess.
Macron is not on speaking terms with either reality or France. He gave himself Friday to fix France’s government. It was mostly silence all day, because there was no rational way of resolving this political crisis without making compromises and talking to all the parties. Then, in the evening, instead of deciding anything at all, Macron doubled down on the fantasy he’s acting outright now. He re-appointed Sébastien Lecornu to the job that Lecornu had been forced to quit on Monday. All it needed was a chimney on the Elysee palace and a puff of shit-brown smoke, for this re-run of the most tragically useless ministerial episode in modern French history.
There was some talk that Macron might try to pull a PM from the center Left, after exhausting his centrist talent pool, but it was not to be. There was some thinking that he could even pull from the more moderate Right, and just admit the direction he’s been drifting since his days as a fresh-faced socialist. (Albeit with maybe just a few royal aspirations that he would mention from time to time in the early days of his presidency.)
Look at those happy boys, so very not in France.
Unsurprisingly the crisis spilled into his Saturday. But don’t worry about Macron, he will be on a plane Monday morning to Egypt. There he will be doing something or other on the Gaza Ceasefire deal, which France is not involved in. Probably some waving, maybe some getting his picture taken, perhaps even some talking to people, as long as they’re not French.
Lecornu doesn’t get to jet off to Egypt. Lecornu remains loyal to a fault. After chatting with his president behind closed doors he has declared publicly that he is Macron’s warrior monk, and doesn’t seem at all embarrassed by saying it. He’s going back to Parliament for a do-over. He won’t be changing much anything because the French are wrong, and Macron is always right.
“But, Wait, What if We Did nothing?!”
Next week he’s bringing mostly the same budget to the same Parliament that signaled they would slapped him down less than a week ago, forcing him to quit. If the definition of insanity really is doing the same thing over again and hoping for a different result, Lecornu, Macron, and France in general, is completely insane.
After he drops his budget turd on parliament, his next task will be trying to form a government. No one who wants any kind of political future will want to be in it. But Macron’s people are either all in or keeping quiet. Even the ones that hope to succeed him are standing there, trying to look normal. All the president’s men have lost their marbles.
What About Everyone Else?
Both the French Right and Left are largely out of the picture for the moment, despite having the second largest (The Right Lead by the convicted and ineligible Le Pen) and largest block (The Left lead by who even knows?)
Marine Le Pen at home with family, where she’s staying whether she likes it or not.
Right now the right is still nominally lead by Marine Le Pen, despite the fact that she’s currently a convicted felon who can’t hold office for years to come. Le Pen is in politics for the good of Le Pen, and she would tear her whole party down if it was standing in the wrong place. She’s unlikely to use her resources to promote someone else to be the vanguard of the Right and take her place as the RN’s presidential candidate. There’s always her meat puppet, Jordan Bardella, but he is too afraid of girls to realistically run for the presidency.
The French Left has a fair bit of political talent, but Mélenchon, who is now well into his 70s, still has energy for one thing: getting in the way of anyone trying to unify the patchwork of leftist parties and accomplish something. He’s still the one ordained French leftist for the media, both in the US and France. It is absolutely a crime against humanity that he still has power over the French mainly by being in journalist’s rolodex, and always returning calls. He recently scored an interview with the New York Times. At no point did the journalist ask what his role is in his former party, which was convenient because he doesn’t have one.
Thierry Breton, former European Commissioner made a point of saying there’s something deeply wrong with the the French. He was articulating something we’re all becoming aware of, but no one knows how to fix. (Breton is a proponent of austerity, which we should all remember Literally Never Works.) But he is right that the politics of this country, like so many right now, is fundamentally broken.
There are a lot of reasons, but it’s important to remember that the 5th republic was engineered to work for exactly one man: Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle used the tools built into the 5th Republic to rebuild France in the post war period, that’s the task it was designed for. He died in 1970.
He never saw the Berlin Wall fall, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Iranian Revolution, the internet, The fall of Nixon, the rise of the Dungeons and Dragons media empire, or Labubus. Much like the American system, France’s hardest problem is being trapped in the amber of past ages. Unlike the American system, France is not set up to ignore its problems forever while it falls apart.
What comes next? Probably stasis and political entropy. But things that aren’t sustainable don’t sustain, a lesson that France, like America, has decided to learn the hard way.