OPINION: France has taken leave of its senses, and it’s no laughing matter

Has the country gone mad? Yes, writes John Lichfield. There is no certainty that the far right will ‘win’ the parliamentary elections – but the heirs of Pétain and Jean-Marie Le Pen, the cousins of Trump and Nigel Farage, look likely to win the largest bloc, 200 or more of the 577 seats in the National Assembly.

President Emmanuel Macron has certainly lost touch with reality. He insists that his centrist alliance can still win a majority in the elections on June 30th and July 7th. Forget it, Emmanuel. It’s over. Your only job now is to sort through the ruins.
At 200 seats or more for the Far Right, Macron will probably offer the Prime Minister’s job to the vacuous, self-satisfied 28-year-old Jordan Bardella.
Listen to John and the team at The Local discussing the election latest episode of the Talking France podcast? Listen here or on the link below

Marine Le Pen’s Number Two says he will refuse the job at anything less than the 289 seats of an absolute majority. The polls, which have not shifted much for days, suggest that is very unlikely.

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Macron might then offer the job to someone on the moderate Left or to an independent big-wig who could assemble a fragile majority for a caretaker coalition. It is unclear that such a majority or such a person would exist. It is more likely that they would not.
READ ALSO The candidates: Who will be France’s next prime minister?
France might be heading into a rewind of the Fourth Republic (1947-1958) when governments came and went like speed-dating candidates. I once met a man called Pierre Pflimlin who was PM for 18 days in the 1950s. Thirty years later, when he was the mayor of Strasbourg, people still called him “Monsieur Le Premier Ministre”.
Meanwhile, the centre-right Les Républicains have spent a large part of this short campaign fighting each other. Eric Ciotti, the party president made an unauthorised deal with Marine Le Pen. Other leaders expelled him; he locked them out of party HQ.
The Left has created a sprawling monster of an alliance which has many heads trying to bite one another. It stretches from the street-fighting left and radical Islamist sympathisers to the ex-President François “Flanby” Hollande, who was ridiculed (unfairly) while he was in the Elysée Palace as a capitalist lickspittle and traitor to the people.

The Popular Front programme is a Santa Claus list of leftist fantasies: a 13 percent increase in the minimum wage; a freeze on consumer prices (but somehow a better deal for farmers); the abolition of last year’s pension reform; the abolition of the Macron changes in unemployment law which have helped to reduce the French jobless rate from over 9.1 percent to 7.5 percent.
Explained: The party manifestos in France’s snap elections
The RN programme is equally dotty-populist. The pension reform would be abolished. (Maybe. Bardella keeps changing his mind on that). VAT on all consumer energy prices, from diesel or petrol pump prices to electricity and gas would be reduced from 19.5 percent to 5.5 percent, breaking EU law. A Bardella government would recoup the cash by cutting French contributions to the EU – breaking EU law again.
The undeclared programme of the RN is to destroy French membership of the European Union and to destroy the EU. Even Brexit was more honest than that.
How much are Le Pen and Bardella challenged on that objective in the French media? It has started but, overall, not much.
Instead, we have had the constant drumbeat that immigration equals crime and crime equals immigration. The once sensible conservative newspaper Le Figaro leads the way. The paper, formally the house journal of the Gaullist centre-right, has become almost an organ of Lepennism. It will make the last step soon.

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There is a link between migration and crime but neither is as high as the Far Right and the Right suggest. Some levels of violent crime, murder for instance, are historically low.
In any case there is another story to tell about immigration which is rarely told. I spent some days this week in one of the big Paris hospitals. Over half the staff – doctors, nurses, aide-soignantes, porters, cleaners – were black or brown.
This is not the Great Replacement Theory dear to the Far Right – the argument that there is a deliberate policy to replace white people with black and brown populations from elsewhere. It is the Great Assistance Reality, the care given by thousands of young black and brown people to elderly white people like me.
Macron has given France a strong voice abroad, especially on the EU and Ukraine but he is no doubt responsible in part for his own misfortunes.
He promised a revolution in government but delivered cautious reforms on pensions and unemployment law which the French decided were deeply wicked.

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He failed to create a narrative for reforms from the centre. Anything he did about immigration or crime dissatisfied the Right and angered the Left. He failed to build a grass-roots political movement.
He failed to realise that the combination of low wages and high prices would kill him, despite doing more to shield the French from inflation than any other European leader. The French don’t shop or buy their electricity in other European nations.
There will be howling and shrieking when the RN achieves a high first round score on June 30th. For the time being, much of the country is drifting indifferently towards the waterfall.
In hospital, I overheard a loud conversation about the election between an old man and his daughter in the next room. They thought everything was funny: Macron was funny, the Far Right were funny, the Left was funny, the Centre-right was hilarious.
I hope they are still laughing one month from now.
Follow all the latest French election news HERE, or subscribe to our bi-weekly election breakdown here.

#John Lichfield
#Opinion
#elections
#Politics

Comments (7)

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Celeste

2024/06/27 00:48

Let me tell you something, John Lichfield, keep the United States out of your flap regarding politics… the democrats have absolutely destroyed the country, and by no means are the despicable, filthy, dirty, insatiable greedy politicians in the democrat party, as well as the Republicans In Name Only (RINOs), even slightly affiliated with the democrat party of the past… AND, this comes from one who has copies of the invitation to John F. Kennedy’s inauguration that my parents were invited to, signed notes from JFK to my father, and aspecial note thanking him for attending JFK’s funeral (which I was at with my family) from LBJ (I think you can figure that one out… plus my grandfather and great grandfather were some of the first legislators in a certain state… so don’t talk to me about the liberals or the democrats being anything other than a tribe of insatiably greedy, licentious individuals who are out for world domination, at any costs to the decent, honest and stellar peoples of the first countries, to start with… and you’re just another one of them, so why don’t you sit down tonight and look at the HORRIFIC, DEMONIC crimes which are being committed upon children, women and men just this last week in America!!! It’s vomitous, at best… ITS THE COMPLETE ANNIHILATION of my country which was one of the best countries in the world… and you’re to blame too

Cherie Grishin

2024/06/21 08:43

I don’t think you have a good grasp on what is really going on in the world , and how the globalist agenda is the root of the movement to the right.

Ian McDonald

2024/06/20 17:25

A depressing but realistic summary of what is happening now. Les Echos seems to be about the only French daily doing some serious reporting and analysis. The whole thing is reminiscent of the scene in a film that I used to watch with my kids (one of the Ice Age movies perhaps?) with dodos walking en masse to the edge of the cliff and falling down as of course they couldn’t fly. Except that, as John says, this is no laughing matter.

Thomas

2024/06/20 17:05

When a journalist defends Francois Hollande, who was so despised by his people he couldn’t even stand for re-election, that journalist is totally out of touch and an elitist.

Scott Cameron

2024/06/20 14:49

>> Cutting French contributions to the EU would be interesting. Does the RN not understand that France is a net beneficiary of EU funds…. ie: it receives more than it contributes?

Where are you getting that from? Looking at this data, it appears France is the second highest net contributor after Germany:
https://www.statista.com/chart/18794/net-contributors-to-eu-budget/

Speranza

2024/06/20 13:26

Cutting French contributions to the EU would be interesting. Does the RN not understand that France is a net beneficiary of EU funds…. ie: it receives more than it contributes?

Ian Moore

2024/06/20 13:12

Is there a version of this in French please?

Emma Pearson

2024/06/26 10:27

Translated version – https://www.courrierinternational.com/article/opinion-la-france-a-perdu-la-raison-et-cela-n-a-rien-de-drole

Emma Pearson

2024/06/20 13:58

Hi Ian, no – this is a column that John has written for us, in English. However sometimes Courrier International runs John’s columns in translation, usually a few days later

See Also

Marine Le Pen’s Number Two says he will refuse the job at anything less than the 289 seats of an absolute majority. The polls, which have not shifted much for days, suggest that is very unlikely.
Macron might then offer the job to someone on the moderate Left or to an independent big-wig who could assemble a fragile majority for a caretaker coalition. It is unclear that such a majority or such a person would exist. It is more likely that they would not.
READ ALSO The candidates: Who will be France’s next prime minister?
France might be heading into a rewind of the Fourth Republic (1947-1958) when governments came and went like speed-dating candidates. I once met a man called Pierre Pflimlin who was PM for 18 days in the 1950s. Thirty years later, when he was the mayor of Strasbourg, people still called him “Monsieur Le Premier Ministre”.
Meanwhile, the centre-right Les Républicains have spent a large part of this short campaign fighting each other. Eric Ciotti, the party president made an unauthorised deal with Marine Le Pen. Other leaders expelled him; he locked them out of party HQ.
The Left has created a sprawling monster of an alliance which has many heads trying to bite one another. It stretches from the street-fighting left and radical Islamist sympathisers to the ex-President François “Flanby” Hollande, who was ridiculed (unfairly) while he was in the Elysée Palace as a capitalist lickspittle and traitor to the people.
The Popular Front programme is a Santa Claus list of leftist fantasies: a 13 percent increase in the minimum wage; a freeze on consumer prices (but somehow a better deal for farmers); the abolition of last year’s pension reform; the abolition of the Macron changes in unemployment law which have helped to reduce the French jobless rate from over 9.1 percent to 7.5 percent.
Explained: The party manifestos in France’s snap elections
The RN programme is equally dotty-populist. The pension reform would be abolished. (Maybe. Bardella keeps changing his mind on that). VAT on all consumer energy prices, from diesel or petrol pump prices to electricity and gas would be reduced from 19.5 percent to 5.5 percent, breaking EU law. A Bardella government would recoup the cash by cutting French contributions to the EU – breaking EU law again.
The undeclared programme of the RN is to destroy French membership of the European Union and to destroy the EU. Even Brexit was more honest than that.
How much are Le Pen and Bardella challenged on that objective in the French media? It has started but, overall, not much.
Instead, we have had the constant drumbeat that immigration equals crime and crime equals immigration. The once sensible conservative newspaper Le Figaro leads the way. The paper, formally the house journal of the Gaullist centre-right, has become almost an organ of Lepennism. It will make the last step soon.
There is a link between migration and crime but neither is as high as the Far Right and the Right suggest. Some levels of violent crime, murder for instance, are historically low.
In any case there is another story to tell about immigration which is rarely told. I spent some days this week in one of the big Paris hospitals. Over half the staff – doctors, nurses, aide-soignantes, porters, cleaners – were black or brown.
This is not the Great Replacement Theory dear to the Far Right – the argument that there is a deliberate policy to replace white people with black and brown populations from elsewhere. It is the Great Assistance Reality, the care given by thousands of young black and brown people to elderly white people like me.
Macron has given France a strong voice abroad, especially on the EU and Ukraine but he is no doubt responsible in part for his own misfortunes.
He promised a revolution in government but delivered cautious reforms on pensions and unemployment law which the French decided were deeply wicked.
He failed to create a narrative for reforms from the centre. Anything he did about immigration or crime dissatisfied the Right and angered the Left. He failed to build a grass-roots political movement.
He failed to realise that the combination of low wages and high prices would kill him, despite doing more to shield the French from inflation than any other European leader. The French don’t shop or buy their electricity in other European nations.
There will be howling and shrieking when the RN achieves a high first round score on June 30th. For the time being, much of the country is drifting indifferently towards the waterfall.
In hospital, I overheard a loud conversation about the election between an old man and his daughter in the next room. They thought everything was funny: Macron was funny, the Far Right were funny, the Left was funny, the Centre-right was hilarious.
I hope they are still laughing one month from now.
Follow all the latest French election news HERE, or subscribe to our bi-weekly election breakdown here.

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