A president in his last days in office, flailing and failing. No, not Donald Trump: Emmanuel Macron. Elected to the Élysée Palace in 2017, Macron was meant to be the West’s wunderkind, the thinking person’s politician who would escape the tectonic plates of the Socialists and the Republicans, the two parties that have alternated power forever in France. He was the smart-as-paint former minister of François Hollande (read: caring, moderate Leftie decrying “social and statutory conservatism”), but from a banking background (read: sensible, fiscal Rightist). He was the liberal solution to populism in Europe — the antidote to Salvini, Orban, and, of course, France’s very own Marine Le Pen of the National Front.
Macron was the centrist modernist who was going to lead a tradition-shackled nation into a brave, new de-regulated future. His embrace of opposing ideologies, akin to Tony Blair’s “triangulation”, even had its own fond nickname: l’en-même-temps-ism, “both-sides-at-the-same-time-ism”.
It has all gone wrong. These days Macron cannot put an expensively-shoed foot right. Always, he steps in the merde. The laws on retirement reform and unemployment assistance? Suspended. Deficit and debt are going through the roof, while GDP is going through the floor; GDP decline in France in 2020 was 10%, double that of Germany. After a spate of Islamist terror attacks — France is the worst hit of all western nations, 270 deaths since 2012 — Macron has pushed forward a bill on security that has caused a crisis because of a provision restricting the filming of police officers. Human rights groups have shouted foul (thus denting Macron’s socially liberal image just a tad). The anti-lslamist war in the Sahel has become bogged down in the dust and the sand.
And, as if all this were not enough, Macron has mismanaged the Covid crisis. France, now on her second lockdown, has one of the highest infection rates in the developed world; the official death toll of 43,000 fails to adequately account for mortality in the maison. The country is under 8pm curfew, except for those areas where it is …6pm curfew. Everywhere, bars, restaurants and cinemas are shut. It might just be me, but Alouette radio seems to be playing The Specials Ghost Town rather a lot nowadays. Oh, and the ‘speedy’ virus variant that swept Britain is now out and about in France.
Then, there is the debacle of covid vaccination. According to the French health ministry, just 516 people had received the vaccination by January 3; in the same time frame, 200,000 people were immunised in Germany. In Bloomberg’s global vaccination tracker France is second…from last.
The deputy president of National Rally (née National Front), Jordan Bardella, declared that France had become the “laughing stock of the world”. Bardella could be expected to take a jab at Macron; more worrying for the President was the attitude of the French media whose default stance is to throw itself as an ideological Praetorian Guard around him (elites recognise their own with the keen certitude of dogs sniffing bottoms), but even Le Monde was prompted to ask, “Is France getting the dunce’s hat in Europe for vaccinations?”
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