Jonathan Miller Jonathan Miller

Let them buy Teslas! How Macron provoked an uprising

The French President is tinkering with policy while Paris burns

Emmanuel Macron is supposed to be the cleverest man in France but he has painted himself so completely into a corner that there’s no way out. Whether the gilets jaunes insurrection achieves its objectives or not, it has become his nemesis.

As the yellow wave roils France, Macron is a diminished figure after a crunching fall to earth. Bastion of anti-populism, he has united 70 per cent of France against him. He did self-identify as Jupiter. Now, perhaps, he is looking like a sickly lame duck, albeit one for whom the word hauteur might have been invented. Instead of the confident leader, lecturing and preening on the global stage, he is barricaded in his palace, a sort of latter-day Marie Antoinette. French people can’t afford diesel? Let them buy Teslas. Others might compare him to Nero, fiddling with emission targets while Paris burns.

Macron’s fate has serious consequences for France, the EU, the UK and the world. It would be hubristic in itself to try to answer the question ‘what happens next?’ but we may be seeing the start of the effective interment of the Macron project to reform France. How this might turn out for the next presidential election, admittedly four years hence, is impossible to know. French politics are entropic. Marine Le Pen certainly seems back from the dead. Macron could become the third president in a row to fail to win re-election.

The immediate problem is that he is in danger of losing control of his capital city once again this weekend. Paris is not prepared for another Saturday of disorder, never mind the Medusan uprisings throughout the country. The police are demoralised and exhausted. The housing projects are febrile. The prefects are warning (leaked to Le Monde, another sign that discipline is breaking down) that Macron with his non-voter-friendly personality, his almost autistic inability to connect, is himself the problem.

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