“We feel nostalgia for a place simply because we’ve lived there; whether we lived well or badly scarcely matters. The past is always beautiful. So, for that matter, is the future. Only the present hurts, and we carry it around like an abscess of suffering, our companion between two infinities of happiness and peace.”
– Michel Houellebecq, Submission, 2015
The Paris Olympics are the necessary diversion for President Emmanuel Macron but will it be for the people of France?
Walking around at the Olympic Village on Monday, French President Emmanuel Macron called for a “political truce” during the summer Olympics in Paris, which begins this Friday.
As France prepares for a spectacular Seine-side opening, hosting over 100 heads of state and countless spectators, Macron is in a precarious spot. He is unpopular and helms a caretaker government amid security fears. Historian Patrick Weil jabs, “Macron dreamed of welcoming the Games like an emperor, but now he’s just a lame duck.”
The Political Impasse
C’est dingue! That’s the word on the streets in France, perfectly capturing the chaos the electoral outcome has thrown the French polity into. The French National Assembly now resembles its Nordic counterparts, featuring 11 groups, three and a half blocs, and a myriad of parties and factions. France is now facing a parliamentary deadlock unseen since the 1950s—an elaborate maze with no apparent exit, a puzzle that keeps us all guessing and intrigued about what the future holds.
In a week of political twists, Macron’s centrist ally Yaël Braun-Pivet clinched re-election as Speaker on July 18th, after six tense hours and three rounds of voting, with 220 centre-right votes. She edged out left-wing rival André Chassaigne, who received 207 votes in the 577-member National Assembly. Just two days earlier, President Emmanuel Macron accepted Prime Minister Gabriel Attal’s resignation, thrusting his government into caretaker status amid the ongoing political upheaval.
France has been in a political impasse, with the recent polls delivering an unexpected twist. To keep the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) at bay, the emergence of the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP), a mix of leftist and green parties, has signalled that the political turbulence is far from over. The verdict against incumbency caught President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Ensemble off guard, and the National Assembly was without a ruling bloc for the first time, a turn of events that surprised us all and left us in a state of surprise.
The Left bloc continued with their dissensus on a name for the Prime Minister, as the hard-left La France Insoumise (LFI) proposed one of its stalwarts, including the indomitable Jean-Luc Mélenchon, as a candidate. The Parti Socialiste, however, championed their leader, Olivier Faure. However, hopes for France’s left-wing bloc to rally behind a single candidate evaporated on Sunday, July 14. Despite days of wrangling, the leftist bloc NFP couldn’t solidify around 73-year-old Huguette Bello, a former Communist MP and current regional council president in France’s overseas territory La Réunion. Bello managed to snag the support of La France Insoumise (LFI), the Communists and seemed to have the Greens on her side. But the centre-left Socialists stubbornly stuck with their party leader, Olivier Faure. Faced with Socialist resistance, Bello gracefully exited the race, leaving us all concerned about the unity of the Left bloc.
By evening of July 15, a new name emerged—Laurence Tubiana, a 73-year-old climate diplomat rather than a party hack—as the Socialists, Communists, and Greens distanced themselves from Mélenchon’s LFI. If the Mélenchonistes dig in, it will only underscore the Nouveau Front Populaire’s transient nature, reduced to a mere echo of its former cohesion.
Attal’s caretaker crew will steer the ship and prep for the Olympics starting July 26 while the coalition chaos sorts itself out.
With the Centrist Speaker’s re-election and an avowed refusal to name a left-wing Prime Minister, the Left Bloc claims Macron is thumbing his nose at the popular verdict. They’re fracturing more despite flinging colourful epithets like “lunaire” (out-of-touch dreamer) and “hors-sol” (detached from reality) his way. They’re even threatening strikes during the Olympics if he doesn’t budge—but let’s face it, that’s about as likely as pigs flying over the Seine.
The resulting deadlock suggests a prolonged period of political stagnation, which could spell trouble for the future. This situation leaves us all with a sense of concern, both politically and economically. That begs the question: Did Macron’s gamble pay off?
Houellebecqian moment
How did France come to such a mess?
The cocktail of our times stems from the failure of Centrist politics deeply embedded in neoliberalism and unable to fend off the growing challenge to liberal democracy, often framed in terms of the rise in Populism. This tune is heard across the Western world. It is more of a powder keg waiting to blow off!
Our social and political fabric hinges on balancing Labor and Capital. This battleground echoes the human condition of our times and is a perennial arena of debate that reflects our politics.
In France, post-1968 thinkers and idealogues redefined this relationship with Capital. In the wake of the 1968 left-wing upheavals, France saw the emergence of the New Right—a reactionary tide. At the vanguard stands philosopher Alain de Benoist, who re-emerges in 2002 into the public debate with the republication of his book View from the Right (1977). He is known for his penchant for critiquing free-trade capitalism, fearing it will erode national identity and regional culture.
Similarly, his anti-egalitarian beliefs couched in notions of ethno-pluralism and challenged the enduring humanist ideals that once intertwined the French and American Revolutions. However, it was liberal individualism that settled as the mantra of the times, what we know as neoliberalism, inventing the project of happiness, arguing that hedonism is more strongly related to happiness in more individualistic societies. Thus, we moved on to realise the societies of desire and constructed supply in a globalised economy.
Conservatism dances to a different song in France today, at odds with corporate capitalism. This is where there is an uncanny overlap between the Left and Right, perfectly illustrated in the articulations of Michel Houellebecq, the most famous French novelist of his generation, and Michel Onfray, a philosopher and polemicist.
Houellebecq penned “Submission” (2015) with an eerie prescience, foreseeing Islamic terrorism. Later, he tapped into the zeitgeist with “Serotonin” (2019), anticipating the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) anti-government protests. He is embraced by left-leaning writers and thinkers in the West as he critiques modern capitalism across his oeuvre, lambasting neoliberalism, free trade, and radical individualism. Not in the vein of a reactionary, but his characters harbour a deep disdain for the excesses of social liberalism. They are repulsed by the drab uniformity of modern consumerism—from soulless supermarket checkouts to forgettable business hotels in featureless towns.
Inspired by Proudhon, Onfray sidesteps the so-called “savage” capitalism and communism in his latest opus, La Foudre gouverneur le monde (Paris, Albin Michel). He pitches a “libertarian socialism” “Destruction of the Nation, collapse of the State, cracks in the Republic, it is a question of putting an end to it,” he says, “with a social model that is presented as archaic, outdated, old-fashioned, to promote the Anglo-Saxon model of communitarianism, of the market making the law at school, in hospitals, in the army, in bookstores, on television, at university, in sport, the model of competition becoming that of the entire country” (p. 107).
Onfray is merely the latest French intellectual to be slapped with the “far-right sympathiser” label by government-friendly media and Socialist party officials—primarily for his takes on immigration, Islam, and the quest to restore France’s bruised self-image. It mirrors Alain Finkielkraut’s fixation on the decline of France’s traditional republican culture and the nation’s “unhappy identity” in his 2013 bestselling book. Such contestations in public discourse have made observers take note of the shifting narratives in the making of French intellectuals. One must, however, point out that “the modern French essay style favours a tone of brusqueness and agitation (not to mention a style in certain quarters, now somewhat passé, favouring the higher gibberish).” Likewise, Shlomo Sand, argued that it is chiselling away the quality of discourse, if not the French’s deference to its intellectuals.
The overlap of creed is not entirely new. It gels with the spirit of the times, captured by the term “sinistrose“– alluding to “the deep-rooted pessimism that has French society as a trait of the French psyche but is taking a turn for the worse in times of economic and political uncertainty.”
The Last Neoliberal
Emmanuel Macron loves to play the rebellious outsider, but he’s the face of neoliberal orthodoxy. One may recall the prescient Parisian graffiti that put the equation straight: Macron 2017 = Le Pen 2022.
From his days as Hollande’s finance minister to founding En Marche (now La République En Marche) to chase his presidential dreams, Macron’s roots run deep in the French elite. A graduate of the elite École Nationale d’Administration, a former investment banker, and a neoliberal reform advocate for Sarkozy, he’s as establishment as they come. The 2008 financial crisis might have momentarily discredited his free-market dogma, but Macron’s neoliberal streak remains intact. Authors Bruno Amable and Stefano Palombarini, in their book, The Last Neoliberal: Macron and the Origins of France’s Political Crisis, dissect Macron’s “Jupiterian presidency,” offering a riveting look at how the once centre-left, ditching its working-class roots, gets drunk on its own ideological excess.
The 2024 Assembly election again demonstrated how France had ditched the old postwar “social-liberal” mix of flexible labour markets, open trade, and EU cooperation with social safety nets and upward mobility. Both left and centre-right parties have traded social solidarity for market freedom. The centre-right “bourgeois bloc” is cranking up the inequality and sidelining low-wage workers, sparking a firestorm of discontent from both the traditional left and the far right.
We see this in the geography of the French vote. France is essentially divided into three zones: Zone A, where the Paris elite thrives in finance and media; Zone B, where immigrants serve Zone A as nannies, Uber drivers, and delivery workers; and Zone C, the rural folks whose social services keep getting slashed. It’s a modern-day map of social stratification. Now you can make out who voted for whom. The Zone A folks were Macron’s people!
So what is Macron’s grand plan? To build a swankier top-tier bourgeoisie while thinning out the blue-collar crowd and pumping up the service sector and white-collar elite ranks.
This dovetails into another map that historian, anthologist and demographer Emanuel Todd offers in his provocative book Who is Charlie?. “Todd’s argument is simple: France splits into two. There’s the “central” France—Paris, Marseille, and the Mediterranean —where secular ideals and family equality rule. Then there’s the “peripheral” France, like Lyon and the West, where the ghosts of Catholicism keep social hierarchies and conservatism very much alive, a phenomenon he dubs “zombie Catholicism.” He further argues in his Who is Charlie? that the Je Suis Charlie protests (2015), in response to the Paris attacks, while well-intentioned, were a showcase of an establishment that champions liberté but sidelines égalité. He contends that the dominant “MEZ” bloc led the rallies—Middle classes, the Elderly, and “Zombie Catholics”—reflecting his view of a France split between a liberal centre and a conservative, hierarchical periphery; he contends that this widespread solidarity was a case of ‘mass hysteria’ manipulated by the French elite, marking a ‘historic turning point’ for the nation.
Fueling the Frexit Fire
The ongoing clamour in American elections isn’t just splitting the West on trade and economic policy—it is also cranking up the migration pressure on Europe; the pro-European narrative is taking centre stage and being hailed as gospel truth.
A prime example? The French and European markets entered a frenzy when Le Pen’s EU election gains grabbed the headlines. It indicates that the subtler currents are buried beneath these dominant narratives.
Another clue is to revisit the conversation between Macron and Jürgen Habermas on ‘Which future for Europe?’ at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin in 2017. “Let’s advocate a European agenda in our national debates”, implored Macron. In response to Jürgen Habermas’s remarks, Macron primarily argued that Europe’s stall was due to a lack of new proposals and a failure to balance responsibility with social justice. Inequity persists in the eurozone, and progress will remain elusive without addressing distribution and fairness.
The second term of Macron demonstrated this further in his pursuit of achieving its target of bringing France’s deficit under 3 per cent in 2027, in line with EU goals. Around a year ago, Macron’s brazen use of a constitutional loophole to ram through the French Pension Bill without a vote sparked chaos in the Assembly and lit the streets with protests. These memories are still fresh, raising questions about how he’ll handle the fractured Assembly. Yet, the budget deficit appears to hover around 5.5 per cent, with debt at about 111% of GDP!
Economic markers haven’t moved, which is making Macron’s audacity glaring. Unemployment is stuck at 7.5 per cent in the first quarter of 2024, consumer prices climbed 2.3 per cent over the past year, and S&P Global downgraded French bonds in May, with another downgrade looming. If that happens, French bond spreads over ultra-safe German bonds will widen, highlighting their yield gap. And, finally, a hefty trade deficit that even makes Italy, a European basket case, look far better!
The growing financial pressures have fueled the fire, urging German scepticism by putting France’s unbudgeted Ukraine pledges in doubt.
The elections captured the default lines produced by the rage over national identity, taxation, cost of living, migration, and pension reforms. They’re fueling questions of solidarity and stoking disillusionment among the youth. It feels like a bit of a tinderbox in France, to say the very least, and one that isn’t just going to simmer down now because of these results.
The three significant cracks in French polity that philosopher Michel Onfray nailed it with his observation: “right-wing RN rallies flaunt the French flag, Macron’s centrists wave the EU flag, and the left’s FN shows off the Palestinian flag.” Does that imply there is no way to taper the cracks? Analyst Louis-Vincent Gave sums it up: “The only thing all three agree on is spending more. The Left FN wants to tax the rich, Macron’s centrists want to spend and let the ECB buy our (French) bonds and the Right–RN is vague on details. The real debate and politics? Where the money’s coming from.”
Now, whatever shape this takes and emerges in the French budget, it still has to be given the green light by the Brussels bureaucrats!
Bank of France Governor François Villeroy de Galhau hoped the country’s political gridlock would be resolved by September, when parliament must vote on the budget of the euro zone’s second-largest economy. Also a member of the European Central Bank, Villeroy’s anxiety is palpable as the French government expects to cut its public sector budget deficit from 5.1% of economic output in 2024 to 4.1% in 2025, to meet the European Union’s ceiling of 3% by 2027.
Our social and political fabric hinges on balancing Labor and Capital, a battleground that echos the human condition of our times.
While New Consensus Macroeconomics has navigated the turbulent waters of unemployment, inflation, and growth, the past decade has marked a clear break from market-driven neoliberalism. Now, a more interventionist State role is taking centre stage, with buzzwords like productivism, modern supply-side economics, and ‘securonomics‘ leading the way. Another way to understand this shifting dynamics is to look at the austerity policies brought in the Western world.
Clara Mattei’s The Capital Order exposes how economists devised austerity measures to fix economies and shore up capitalism, often at the expense of social equity. By tracing austerity’s evolution, Mattei shows how these policies contributed to rising inequality and set the stage for authoritarianism. The book argues that austerity, far from a mere budgetary strategy, helped pave the way to fascism by undermining democratic institutions and fueling extremism.
Skirting dangerously close to constitutional limits
Rim-Sarah Alouane, a French constitutional law expert, told Al Jazeera: “We might not have the far right in office, but far-right policies on security and immigration are already in play. Macron’s centrist government has normalized this rhetoric.” She criticized Macron for ignoring public sentiment with reforms and tax cuts favouring the wealthy. Alouane summed it up: “The vote shows Macron’s unpopularity. The real question is whether he’ll start listening to the people.”
Lacking a parliamentary majority due to the 2022 legislative election, Attal formed a minority government, the second one since the start of the Macron Presidency. He appointed what was widely described as the most right-leaning cabinet since Macron took office, with over half of his senior ministers previously coming from the conservative UMP/LR party.
The current Prime Minister of the caretaker government, Gabriel Attal, was short of a parliamentary majority after the 2022 elections and assembled a minority government, marking Macron’s second term. His cabinet, widely dubbed the most right-leaning of Macron’s tenure, features over half of its senior ministers from the conservative UMP/LR party.
In the current situation, if the statement lingers on, Macron may opt for forming a technocratic government led by a neutral leader or a unity government with a typical minimum program and the prospect of another election for the National Assembly before the Presidential in 2027. However, Article 12 of the Constitution restraints the dissolution of the National Assembly within one year of the elections held, implying the earliest election call could be the summer of 2025.
Macron might follow President Mitterrand and Chirac’s playbook: relinquish domestic control but hold tight to foreign, European, and defence policy.
All are watching Macron as he is skirting dangerously close to constitutional limits, claiming he has no other option. His grand plan is expanding his centrist alliance to include the moderate left and centre-right, hoping to rebound from his two stinging defeats in the European and national elections with an almost pyrrhic victory. It would be a delightfully twisted finale to the already chaotic Assembly elections, undermining the will of people who explicitly voted against Macron.
Where such an outcome leaves his centrist contenders—Gabriel Attal, Xavier Bertrand, and Laurent Wauquiez—is excellent fodder for Marine Le Pen, setting up a thrilling 2027 Presidential drama.
In the meantime, sit back and enjoy the Paris Olympics!
Narendra Pachkhédé is a critic, essayist and writer who splits his time between Toronto, London and Geneva.
Photo by Narendra Pachkhédé.