France: The government carousel

PARIS — France has faced a tumultuous autumn. The country has seen the usual strikes and government shuffles, alongside sensational events. These ranged from a high-profile daylight heist at the Louvre Museum to the imprisonment of a former president, marking a particularly 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 is not yet 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 G7, a major player in the European Union and a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council. Why? Because the vanity of the current centrist and globalist President Emmanuel Macron could not please either the right or the left with his policies, but rather emboldened them with his ego.

Macron’s reckless gamble of calling early legislative elections last year, hoping to profit from deadlock, turned into a massive miscalculation. The rightist National Rally, the small conservative party of Marine Le Pen, nearly seized the political heights. The far left movement New Popular Front gained surprisingly, returning the country to a political carousel not seen since the postwar 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 the left and right quickly aligned with each other to oppose 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 France Unbowed party and the right National Rally (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 unlike in the U.S., French production and GDP growth are lagging.

This year, French GDP growth has slowed to 0.6 percent, while in the U.S. it rose 1.8 percent. Unemployment stands at 7.8 percent, nearly double that of the U.S.

Of course, Macron has played a cavalier figure in Ukraine’s resistance against Russia, offering all the right rhetoric but getting the United States, Britain and Germany to actually pay the bills for supporting Kyiv. Equally, Macron has vainly pursued his Middle East policy by France’s formal diplomatic recognition of Palestine during the recent U.N. General Assembly.

Though 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 showed that of the top 30 political personalities, Macron ranks last. Ranked first and second are none other than his political nemeses from the right, the RN's youthful Jordan Bardella and Marine Le Pen — herself a scion of the old party dynasty, but convicted and barred by law from running in the upcoming 2027 presidential contest. Her conviction, though under appeal, opens the door for Jordan 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." But then when it does, France's reputation is made a global laughing stock. The brazen robbery of $100 million of Napoleonic-era crown jewels jolted France out of complacency.

After the suspects were rounded up (with one trying to escape to Algeria), the blame game began. The second story window accessed by the criminals adjoins a busy thoroughfare along the Seine River. I regularly passed the site on the local bus. The audacious caper using a moving truck with a lift-ladder was done right in front of pedestrians on the sidewalk and traffic on the Quai Francois Mitterrand.

Culture Minister Rachida Dati, quoted on France 24, cited an administrative inquiry warning of “a chronic, structural underestimation of the risk of intrusion and theft” at the Louvre, “under-equipped security systems,” “inadequate” governance and “totally obsolete” protocols for responding to thefts. “We cannot continue like this,” Dati insisted. She’s right.

The enduring charm of Paris, with its undeniable glam and gentrification, often obscures the sordid picture of some crime-ridden suburbs where socioeconomic rot continues despite massive state spending. Equally, the enduring political deadlock undermines the republic.

John J. Metzler (jjmcolumn@earthlink.net) is a United Nations correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He is the author of 'Divided Dynamism: The Diplomacy of Separated Nations; Germany, Korea, China."