Marine Le Pen appeared on television on Wednesday morning in her first major interview since last Sunday’s election. The leader of the National Rally cast a critical eye over the chaos of the last week and described the cross-party squabbling as ‘parliamentary cretinism’. Even some within the New Popular Front, which won the most seats in the parliamentary elections, have expressed their despair.
France has been afflicted by cretinous leadership for most of this century
‘I’m angry, I’m disgusted, I’m tired, I’m fed up,’ said Marine Tondelier, the head of the Greens. ‘I’m sorry about the performance we’re putting on for the French people.’ Sandrine Rousseau, another Green MP, apologised for the bickering and the fact that ten days after the election, the left-wing coalition appear incapable of agreeing on practically anything.
Things must be bad if Rousseau is seen as a voice of reason. This is the woman who two years ago accused barbecues of being sexist and last year blamed meat-eaters for forest fires. And things are really bad. The left coalition may not be able to come up with a prime minister but they have agreed on their pick to be the new president of the National Assembly: the Communist Andre Chassaigne. There are a couple of other candidates in the mix but it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that later today, when votes are cast in parliament, one of the most powerful positions in France will be occupied by a communist.
For the last seven months, the cretinous parliament of which Le Pen spoke has been presided over by prime minister Gabriel Attal. He officially resigned on Tuesday after six months and seven days in the post; in the 66-year history of the Fifth Republic, only one PM has served a shorter term: Bernard Cazeneuve who lasted five months and eight days under François Hollande in 2017.
During the European election campaign, Attal had used Brexit as a way to try and attack Le Pen’s euroscepticism. ‘Don’t be like the British who cried after Brexit,’ he said in a radio interview. ‘A large majority of British people regret Brexit and sometimes regret not turning out to vote, or voting for something that was negative for their country.’
It seems rather appropriate, certainly for Brexiteers, that Attal’s political career is on the wane while the British economy is on the up. UK GDP increased by 0.7 per cent in the first quarter of 2024; France’s grew by 0.2 per cent and the Eurozone’s by 0.3 per cent. There was more good news last week for Britain, the Financial Times reporting that the economy grew by 0.4 per cent in May, double the forecasted figure, Sterling was up 0.7 per cent against the dollar to $1.2941, its highest in nearly a year,
In France, meanwhile, the state of the country’s finances was described on Monday as ‘worrying’ by the national audit office in its annual report. Several factors are to blame: Covid, the war in Ukraine, the Paris Olympics (the initial budget for the Games was €6.2 billion (£5.2 billion), but the final cost is around €9 billion (£7.6 billion)), the recent unrest in New Caledonia, which resulted in more than €1 billion (£850 million) worth of damage, as well as general incompetence from those in power.
The national audit office said the government’s strategy to bring the budget deficit – currently 5.5 per cent of GDP (€154 billion or £134 billion)– below the 3 per cent required by the EU by 2027 is ‘unrealistic’ because the growth forecasts are extravagantly optimistic.
In an editorial, Le Monde pointed out that the national audit office’s pessimistic prognosis is not its first but ‘many alerts in recent years have been disregarded’. They can no longer be ignored because so indebted is France that ‘a snowball effect will eventually take hold, leading to a loss of control…the point of no return is approaching.’
France’s disastrous finances would be a worry for a stable government; the fact that the Republic is in the grip of its gravest political crisis for decades is a terrifying thought – for France and the rest of the EU. How has France ended up in this shambles? To expand Le Pen’s point, France has been afflicted by cretinous leadership for most of this century, parliamentary and presidential: from Nicolas Sarkozy, president Bling-bling, to Francois Hollande, who was ferried to assignations with his actress lover on the back of a scooter, to Emmanuel Macron, the self-styled ‘Sun King’.
Seven years ago this month, Macron, who had been elected to the Elysée weeks earlier, declined to give the traditional presidential interview to coincide with Bastille Day. His office explained that his thought process was too ‘complex’ for the Great Unwashed.
In fact, it wasn’t Macron who was too complex for the French, it was France that was too complex for the president.
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