England play Spain tonight in Berlin in the final of the European Championships. Emmanuel Macron is a football fan so he may tune in. Then again, it might all be a little too painful for him.
If football was in keeping with history it would be France in the final. It’s their day, after all, July 14, and no doubt Macron had kept the evening free in the hope of flying east to cheer on his boys.
But there’ll be no jolly to Germany. Worse, England may be crowned champions of Europe. Oh Mon Dieu, non. Anyone but perfidious Albion.
A week after the elections, the country is without a recognisable government and politicians of all stripes are fighting like rats in a sack
Macron has held a grudge against England since the day he was elected president in 2017. Not Britain, just England, for it was they who led the UK out of Europe.
They did it on ‘lots of lies and false promises’, according to Macron, who made this claim in his New Year’s Eve address in 2020. It was a mistake they would come to regret.
The regret these days is on the other side of the Channel, and it courses through the veins of the vast majority of the French who dream of the day Macron will no longer be their president.
And to think this was the man who, on the day he was elected to office seven years ago, declared in his victory speech that he would ‘calm people’s fears, restore France’s confidence, and gather all its people together to face the immense challenges that face us.’ On that evening, he proclaimed to the cheering crowd, ‘there is only the reunited people of France.’
Never in the modern era has France been so disunited. A week after the parliamentary elections, the country is without a recognisable government and politicians of all stripes are fighting like rats in a sack.
The left-wing coalition, which won the most seats (if not the most votes), is becoming restless and some are muttering about flexing their muscles on the street: a signal to the President that he cannot ignore the result of the election and revert to a centrist government.
Adrien Quatennens, who is close to Jean-Luc Melenchon, has warned Macron that if he attempts to ‘steal’ the left’s victory, there might be a ‘great popular march towards Matignon’, the Prime Minister’s residence.
Sophie Binet, the general secretary of the CGT, the hard-left union, called on people to gather ‘in front of the prefectures and the Assembly, to put the National Assembly under surveillance’.
Out in the provinces the rage is of a different kind. Coordination Rurale, the second biggest agricultural union with 15,000 members, has threatened to take up its ‘pitchforks’ if the Greens or the equally fanatical net zero enthusiasts La France Insoumise join the government. ‘We would have preferred the National Rally to be in power, we’ve never tried them,’ said Serge Bousquet-Cassagne, one of the union leaders. ‘La France Insoumise’s agricultural programme is the outright murder of French agriculture. We won’t let ourselves die like that.’
Coordination Ruraleis regarded as a right wing splinter of the main agricultural union, FNSEA, which has over 210,000 members and was at the heart of January’s nationwide farmer protests. Using more temperate rhetoric, FNSEA has also expressed its unease at the prospect of a left-wing government that may try to impose its climate change ‘dogma’.
The atmosphere in France is febrile, and it seems rather symbolic of the current state of the country that today’s traditional Bastille Day military parade is truncated.
Both the route and the duration are shorter than normal, and there is also a reduction in the number of soldiers on show, 4,000 compared to the 5,000 last year. The parade normally ends in the Place de la Concorde but that is inaccessible this year because it hosts several events in the Olympic Games, which start in Paris at the end of the month.
One suspects that the decision to reroute the parade put a few noses out of joint among the military top brass: forbidden from marching to the Place de la Concorde because BMX freestyle and break dancing take precedence!
As for the Games themselves, most French have long since lost interest. They seem grotesquely frivolous at a time when the country is undergoing such turmoil.
Macron had boasted to his inner circle that the Games would be the ‘the climax of his term of office’, and a sporting jamboree that will ‘put the country at the centre of the world for two months.’
Macron wanted to use the Games to sell the world his vision of France: the happy, harmonious, multicultural, progressive start-up nation, presided over by him, the country’s beloved leader.
But this is not so much an Olympic village as a ‘magnificent Potemkin village’, according to one of France’s leading social scientists Jerome Fourquet. ‘It was very gratifying for the President to show off France in a jewel box,’ said Fourquet. ‘But it didn’t correspond to the reality.’
The reality is that France is a country riven by anger and resentment. Rich against poor, cities against the provinces, the Somewheres against the Anywheres and the progressives against the conservatives.
Their only point of agreement is that their President is to blame for the disarray.
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