France has faced a tumultuous autumn. The usual strikes, government shuffles, and sensational events — from a high-profile daylight heist at the world-famous Louvre Museum to the imprisonment of a former president — have characterised a disquieting period.
Indeed, just a year after hosting the successful Summer Olympics in Paris, the country has sunk into the same political miasma of discontent, decay, and the grand delusion of spending money which has not yet been created. Everyone seems peeved about something.
During the past 18 months, France has had four prime ministers! And this is France, a prosperous European country in the G-7, a major player in the European Union, and a permanent seat at the UN Security Council. Why? Because the vanity of the current centrist/globalist President Emmanuel Macron could not please either the right or the left with his policies, but rather emboldened them with his ego.
Mr Macron’s reckless gamble of calling early legislative elections last year, hoping to profit from deadlock, turned into a massive miscalculation. The National Rally, a conservative small party of Marine Le Pen, nearly seized the political heights. The far-left movement, the New Popular Front, gained surprisingly, returning the country to a political carousel not seen since the post-war period. But no party gained a majority, resulting in a hung parliament.
France has endured perpetual budget battles to reduce bloated social state spending. Yet both left and right quickly aligned with each other to oppose Mr Macron’s recently appointed prime minister in the latest battle to trim spending. The president has united both sides of his opposition.
Current Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu narrowly escaped a censure motion tabled by the hard-left La France Unbowed (LFI) and the right-wing Rassemblement National (RN). Now the deputies endlessly debate the 2026 budget in the Assembly. The political lightning rod of pension reform has been tabled to avoid further parliamentary logjams.
Meanwhile, France stands near the top of the list of the European Union’s 27 member states for people in public employment. Massive government spending is nothing new, but now there’s simply not enough money to go around. The situation goes well beyond the United States government shutdown, and contrary to America, French production and GDP growth are lagging.
For 2025, French GDP growth has slowed to 0.6% compared to the US, rising to 1.8%. Unemployment stands at 7.8% nearly double that of the US.
Of course, Mr Macron has played a cavalier figure in Ukraine’s resistance against Russia, offering all the right rhetoric but getting the US, Britain and Germany to actually pay the bills for supporting Kyiv. Equally, he has vainly pursued his Middle East policy through France’s formal diplomatic recognition of Palestine during the recent UN Assembly.
Though Mr Macron remains popular on the international stage, his standing in France has fallen like a rock. A recent poll in the centrist weekly Le Point top 30 political personalities, he ranks last. Ranked first and second are none other than his political nemesis from the right, RN, namely the youthful Jordan Bardella, and Marine Le Pen, scion of the old party dynasty, but convicted and barred by law from running again in the upcoming 2027 presidential contest. Her conviction, though under appeal, opens the door to Mr Bardella to represent the resurgent RN party in the 2027 presidential election.
Amidst the political pyrotechnics in the Parliament, the embarrassing Louvre Museum heist serves as a metaphor for the French Republic. We are strong. It can’t happen here. And then, when it does, France’s reputation becomes a global laughingstock. The brazen Sunday morning robbery of Napoleonic era crown jewels jolted France out of complacency.
After the usual suspects were rounded up, the blame game began. The second-storey window accessed by the criminals adjoins a busy thoroughfare along the River Seine. I regularly passed the site on the local bus. The audacious caper, using a moving truck with a lift ladder, was carried out right in front of pedestrians on the sidewalk and traffic on the Quai Francois Mitterrand.
The enduring charm of Paris, with its undeniable glam and gentrification, often obscures the sordid picture of some crime-ridden banlieue (suburbs) where socio-economic rot continues despite massive state spending. Equally, the enduring political deadlock undermines the republic.