France under Macron keeps getting worse
The cost-of-living crisis is the main preoccupation of the French electorate, followed closely by mass immigration.
Gavin Mortimer
Emmanuel Macron (Getty Images)
The warnings continue to come thick and fast in France about the disaster that could befall the Republic on 7 July if Emmanuel Macron and his government are not returned to power. From the celebrity world to the corporate world – including American investment bank Goldman Sachs – the belief is that France is doomed if either Marine Le Pen’s ‘union of the right’ or Jean-Luc Melenchon’s left-wing coalition is elected to government.
Several former senior French politicians have joined the fear-mongering, among them Dominique de Villepin, who was Jacques Chirac’s centre-right prime minister in the 2000s before leaving politics for a lucrative career working with Qatar. In an interview on Wednesday evening, de Villepin warned that the ‘real threat to our country’ is Le Pen because her National Rally is ‘a party of protest, not of proposals’.
Centrists have failed to offer any solutions to the diminishing living standards and rising anti-Semitism
In the eyes of de Villepin the only sensible vote in the upcoming parliamentary election is for Macron’s centrist coalition because ‘the central force is the one likely to provide the answers’. The reason why Le Pen and Melenchon are far ahead of Macron in the polls is because his centrist caste, which has ruled France for decades, have proved incapable of finding answers to society’s great issues.
Perhaps a Le Pen or a Melenchon government would crash the economy, as many predict, but would they be any worse than Macron? The former Rothschild banker, the ‘Mozart of Finance’, promised when he came to power that he would turn France into an economic powerhouse. Quite the opposite. On Wednesday the European Commission rebuked France for breaching the EU’s budget rules; this reprimand came a fortnight after a US credit ratings agency downgraded France’s credit score for the first time since 2013 because of its budget deficit (5.5 per cent of GDP, nearly twice that of the 3 per cent limit set by the EU).
To the average French voter, budget deficits and credit ratings are abstract concepts, but household bills are not. They, too, have soared under the current administration, and they are set to rise again on 1 July – this time gas bills, which will increase by nearly 12 per cent month-on-month.
The timing couldn’t be worse for Emmanuel Macron as the French go to the polls for the first round of voting on 30 June.
The cost-of-living crisis is the main preoccupation of the French electorate, followed closely by mass immigration. These are abstract concepts for investment bankers, millionaire celebrities and former prime ministers. They’re very real for the 14.5 per cent of the French population that lives below the poverty line, a figure that increased last year because of rises in food (7.3 per cent) and energy (23.1 per cent).
The cost-of-living crisis has been an ever-present during Macron’s seven years in powers; it was the cause of his first major crisis in office, the Yellow Vest protest, a social movement that united working- and middle-class French in a revolt against an elite they saw as arrogant and remote.
Mass immigration, and the insecurity that often comes with the phenomenon, has also stalked Macron’s presidency. In the same month as the 2017 presidential election, an elderly Jewish woman was murdered in her Paris home by a man who reportedly shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ as he carried out his crime.
The Establishment refused to classify the killing as anti-Semitic for many months, and the Court of Appeal ruled [13] later that the defendant could not be tried for murder because he was high on cannabis when he carried out his crime. The Jewish philosopher Bernard Henri-Lévy called the decision ‘revolting’ and warned that by ‘handing down this ruling, the judges have created turmoil in public order’.
Anti-Semitic crimes in France have continued with appalling regularity ever since: murders, rapes and assaults, too many to list. Their numbers have risen by 300 per cent since Hamas launched its attack against Israel in October. Earlier this month President Macron called this rise ‘inexplicable’. The Jewish right wing politician Eric Zemmour suggested in response that an explanation might lie in the ‘imported anti-Semitism from the Arab-Muslim culture’.
At the same time as de Villepin was warning that the number one threat to France was Le Pen, several hundred Jews assembled in Paris to voice their anger and fear at the latest act of anti-Semitism: a 12-year-old girl beaten and raped by two young boys in the Parisian suburb of Courbevoie because she was ‘a dirty Jew’ and had made a negative comment about Palestine. The pair reportedly filmed their depravity, just like Hamas when they raped and murdered more than 1,000 Israelis.
The attack was condemned by all political parties, and Macron instructed his minister of education to implement a ‘discussion period’ in schools to ensure that the ‘scourge of anti-Semitism’ does not ‘infiltrate’ schools.
It is far too late for that. Attention was first drawn to the rampant anti-Semitism of some French schoolchildren in a 2002 book entitled The Lost Territories of the Republic by the historian Georges Bensoussan. Trouble lay ahead if the problem wasn’t addressed, he warned.
But the political class ignored him, and 10 years later one of that young generation of anti-Semites, Mohammed Merah, walked into a Jewish school in Toulouse and [20] filmed himself shooting dead three children. Even that atrocity failed to rouse the political elite from their slumber.
Perhaps de Villepin is right when he describes Le Pen’s National Rally as ‘a party of protest, not of proposals’. But that is because he and the rest of the centrist elite have failed to offer any proposals of their own to the diminishing living standards and rising anti-Semitism that have come to characterise France in the 21st Century. That is why so many French are ready to give Le Pen the chance to come up with some answers.
WRITTEN BY
Gavin Mortimer
Gavin Mortimer is a British author who lives in Burgundy after many years in Paris. He writes about French politics, terrorism and sport.
The Spectator