The infinitely selfish Emmanuel Macron had intended the Paris Olympics to be the highlight of his presidency.
Yet on Sunday night, visibly shaken by the humiliating defeat of his hand-picked candidates in the weekend’s European elections, the French president went on national television to denounce the terrifying advance of what he called the “far right.” ” and warned about the threat it represented. poses to “our Europe”.
And then he dropped the bomb: the dissolution of the National Assembly, the French parliament, elected just two years ago.
Thus, France found itself plunged into a political crisis and a dizzying electoral campaign just a month before the opening ceremony of the Games.
What Macron hopes to gain from this is still unclear.
French President Emmanuel Macron today announced early elections and denounced the extreme right live on television.
Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally, a French nationalist and right-wing populist party, could unseat Macron
Bardella, only 28 years old, bursts onto the political scene with his masterful direction of the party’s European election campaign.
Does he really want to lose and hand over the government to the right, in a repeat of 1986, when socialist president François Mitterrand shrewdly allowed conservative Jacques Chirac to take over the government as prime minister?
Chirac then made such a disaster of his leadership that Mitterrand subsequently emerged as the country’s savior.
Or even more cynically, could Macron be exploiting a constitutional loophole, believing that after his party inevitably loses the election, he can resign midway through his second term, thereby circumventing the two-term limit for presidents and becoming eligible to run for office. a third?
Whatever the case, the vote will surely be a long-overdue reckoning for a president who fancied himself as Jupiter, king of the gods, and who after his first election was regarded by the world’s political and media elites as representative. a new era of competent and technocratic governance.
Back then, he even appeared on the cover of the globalist magazine Economist walking on water.
But the truth is that Macron has presided over a France in catastrophic decline.
In 2017, his presidency began as it was to continue, with a disastrous decision to cut taxes on the rich and raise the price of the diesel that ordinary French people rely on to get to work.
The policy was so reckless that commentators drew parallels with Marie Antoinette’s apocryphal suggestion that the breadless masses should eat cake.
A protest against the French right-wing National Rally party took place today in Paris following the results of the European elections.
Their utter incompetence led to two years of violent riots by workers in yellow jackets (the yellow vests) that ended only with Covid lockdowns.
Meanwhile, anti-Semitic incidents have increased by 300 percent this year and a succession of rabid Islamists have burned down churches and beheaded a teacher who had offended a Muslim student.
And cities, including Nice and Béziers, have banned children under 13 from going out unaccompanied after 11pm, such is the problem of youth violence.
This rise in gang violence has been linked to skyrocketing immigration.
Last year alone, more than 320,000 first-time residence permits were issued to non-European foreign citizens, equivalent to the population of Nice.
Parts of the country, such as the northern Paris suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis, have become home to hundreds of homes occupied by migrants and asylum seekers.
Ahead of the Paris Games, thousands of people have been evicted from these informal slums to make way for the Olympic Village.
However, Macron’s attempts to crack down on immigration have been incoherent and too late.
The CGT and Left Party unions called for national protests after the National Rally made significant gains in the European Union parliamentary elections.
This catalog of failures has reportedly so exasperated Macron’s wife, Brigitte, who is almost 25 years his senior, that she has been trying to lead a Soviet-style “purge” of his top advisers.
In other words, the calamity of Sunday’s European elections was the upheaval of a country on the brink of collapse.
The far-right National Rally, formerly the National Front, won almost 32 percent of the vote, defeating Macron’s Renaissance Party with almost 15 percent.
The remaining votes were divided between a motley circus of ultra-leftists, green nuts, animal rights lunatics, and traditional socialists and conservatives.
Also notable was the harsh defeat of the environmentalists, who received 13.5 percent of the vote in previous euro polls in 2019, but this time only 5.7 percent, proof that voters are fed up with dogma. Net Zero.
“France has entered a new political moment,” admitted Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the Corbyn-style ultra-leftists.
So much for the losers. But what happens to the winners?
How did Marine Le Pen, figurehead and former president of the National Rally, manage to triumph against Macron after losing the presidential elections to him in 2017 and 2022?
Marine Le Pen, president of the far-right French National Rally, has her sights set on a presidency in 2027
This week’s results are a sign of both his political resilience and his deft repositioning of the party.
But they are also a savage sign of Macron’s arrogant inability to show the slightest empathy with ordinary French voters.
Le Pen’s second presidential challenge to Macron, in 2022, failed among other things because the heavily subsidized French media and television stations fawned over the sitting president, while demonizing her as an “extremist” or even a “fascist.” ”, which it is not.
In any case, its economic policy is left-leaning.
Where it has been clear is in its unequivocal opposition to uncontrolled immigration by groups that do not share or respect French social values.
His other masterstroke has been the promotion of the victorious National Rally leader, Jordan Bardella, an extraordinary young politician, only 28 years old, who burst onto the political scene with his masterful leadership of the party’s European election campaign.
With Le Pen focusing on her 2027 presidential campaign, the chiseled-jawed millennial is the most likely candidate for prime minister.
Le Pen lost to Macron in the 2017 and 2022 elections, but the political dynamics in France appear to be about to change.
Totally different from typical French politicians, the affable, martial arts-loving Bardella grew up in a crime-ridden tower block in the northeastern Paris suburb of Drancy, the only child in a family of immigrant origin. His mother’s family came to France from Turin in the 1960s, while his father’s family has origins in Algeria.
A precocious student, he graduated from high school with distinction and briefly studied at the elite Sorbonne University in Paris before dropping out to focus on politics.
He joined the National Front, predecessor of the National Rally, in 2012, out of admiration for Le Pen.
He made his mark by campaigning in what seemed the party’s least promising territories – the deprived suburbs in “the forgotten territories of the Republic” – and warned that French civilization “could die… because it will be submerged by immigrants.”
He has triumphantly sought new voters, establishing himself as the new face of the French right.
The collapse of Macron’s presidency and the rise of Le Pen have opened up a new and unprecedented political dynamic in a country that has been declining for years under the management of a political elite that has become increasingly distanced from the people it governs.
Macron increasingly resembles Louis XVI, who, when a mob stormed the Bastille in 1789, asked a noble advisor: “Is it a revolt?” The duke replied: “No, sir, it is not a revolt, it is a revolution.”