OPINION: France is a mess, but it's far from the only country floundering
François Bayrou, the fourth Prime Minister in 11 months, took his place. Bayrou's exit seems likely in October or November.
This year, at least, we should be spared a summer of politics or politicking. Normal warfare has been suspended until the Autumn.
An IFOP opinion poll last weekend found that President Emmanuel Macron's approval rating has fallen to its lowest ever level – 19 percent. Bayrou, who was already the least popular Prime Minister
of the Fifth Republic
(ie for 67 years), has slumped to 13 percent.
It is now less than two years (gulp) before France elects a new President of the Republic.
READ ALSO
:
ANALYSIS: Who's who in France's 2027 presidential election race✎
The democratic health of the country has reached its most disturbing ebb since the 1950s or maybe the 1930s (ignoring the hiatus of 1940-44).
The Centre and Centre-right government is exploring unseen depths of unpopularity. The Left is not only divided but its divisions and sub-divisions are divided.
Advertisement
France's most popular politician, the far-right leader Marine Le Pen, is also one of its most unpopular, with negative ratings in the high 40s. She is, in any case, banned from running for President in 2027 after being found guilty of stealing money from the European Union last March. Her appeal will be heard in the Spring.
As things stand, the front-runner for the presidency is her 29-year-old deputy, Jordan Bardella, who proved in last year's parliamentary election to be a pretty (and petty) TikTok politician incapable of defending his own policies without a script.
Whoever does enter the Elysée in 22 months' time will inherit a fiscal time-bomb. The unserious reactions to François Bayrou's truth-or-consequences budget plan last week suggest that the French – both politicians and people – are not yet willing to confront the €1.3 trillion consequences of a half-century of state overspending.
At the same time, France faces rising unemployment, deep divisions over immigration and the challenges of two forever wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. Like the rest of the EU, it is still scrambling to grasp the implications of a second Trump presidency in the US which is anti-democratic, anti-truthful and anti-European.
What a mess.
And yet the mess is not French alone. The politics of the USA, Britain, Germany, Italy, Poland, the Netherlands and Belgium are equally poisonous and divided. Democracy and truth have gone out of fashion.
The old half-truths and approximations which allowed democracy to function have been overwhelmed by outright falsehoods. Political parties have been pushed aside by the cult of personality – from Donald Trump to Nigel Farage to Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
Social media and slanted 24-hour TV news channels are partly to blame. The rule of acknowledged fact and widely accepted opinion is over. It is unlikely to return. Young people never read newspapers and seldom consult traditional news sites on line.
In other words, the extreme fragility of French politics in 2025 cannot be understood by looking at France alone. It is the result of a coupling of the old and the new, the domestic and the global.
Advertisement
There is a traditional and permanent French disenchantment with politics – a constant desire for change and a perpetual rejection of all changes. To this has been added the aggressive cynicism of the social media age which sees all mainstream politicians as corrupt and all received wisdom as a conspiracy.
This is fertile ground for the Far Right, as shown by the success of Donald Trump and the surge of support for Nigel Farage in the UK. I used to argue that the Far Right could not be elected in France. I am no longer so sure.
In France, we are lucky, perhaps, in having ineffectual Far Right leaders. Marine Le Pen is disturbingly likeable if you meet her but she lacks the hallucinatory mass appeal of a Trump. Bardella is good on social media but feeble on TV.
France, I fear, would be ripe for plucking by a demagogue with genuine charisma and a more convincingly intellectual manner – a right-wing Mélenchon.
Advertisement
If not the Far Right, then who in 2027? Who could win by honestly confronting France's weaknesses and reminding France that – despite all – it gets many things right?
There is Edouard Philippe, the former PM who hopes to reconcile the Macron centre with what remains of the ex-Gaullist Centre-right. He is a decent man but looks increasingly like a 1990s politician floundering in the 2020s.
There is Gabriel Attal, the former PM who is struggling to transition from wonderkid to statesman. He has the impossible task of distancing himself from Macron while promising to rescue Macronism.
There is Bruno Retailleau, the hard-line interior minister who wants to resurrect the Centre-right but has nothing to say on any subject but crime and immigration.
Could there still be hope for a Relative Unknown, another Macron, from right, left or centre-field? It would take great luck to pull off that trick again but the TikTok Age demands instant celebrity and politics as a form of reality TV.
Wanted: a moderate and well-meaning Messiah of moderate Left or Right or Centre who is ready to become, as soon as she or he is elected, the most hated person in France. Does such a person exist? Probably not.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
AFP
7 minutes ago
- AFP
Video shows Kenya protests, not mass runaways from Cambodia's internet sweatshops
"Mass escape from scam parks in Cambodia," reads the Chinese text over the clip shared on July 19 on Red Note. The 45-second video showed a group of people running on a highway. Image Screenshot of the false Red Note post captured on July 28, 2025, with a red X added by AFP It surfaced after Cambodian authorities said 2,000 people were arrested in raids, including at least 226 Chinese nationals, after Prime Minister Hun Manet Workers at the centres typically use romance or business cons to defraud web users of an estimated $40 billion annually, but many say they were trafficked or lured there under false pretences. The false claim also spread elsewhere on Bilibili. "They are all victims," one user wrote. Another commented, "The cyber-fraud is finally over." A reverse image search on Google showed a clip showing the same scene was uploaded on TikTok on June 26 with hashtags that read "maandamano" -- or "protest" in Swahili -- and the date June 25 (archived link). Image Screenshot comparison of the false post (left) and the TikTok clip (right) The clip was shared after protesters held ral imagery also showed the clip was filmed along Thika Road in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi (archived link). Image Screenshot comparison of the Google Map Street View (left) and the TikTok video with matching features highlighted by AFP (right) in their reporting, including Citizen TV Kenya (archived here). The Daily Nation published photos where the four-lane highway can be seen several times (archived link). AFP has debunked another false claim about scam centres in Cambodia here.
Euronews
2 hours ago
- Euronews
On defence, France and Germany are inching closer but remain far apart
Germany is becoming more French - and vice versa - when it comes to defence but big differences in the state of their public finances and strategic thinking mean the so-called Franco-German engine is unlikely to be able to power a big shift in the way the EU as a whole does defence. "From a longer historical point of view, the degree of convergence (between the two countries) is arguably higher than it has been for, I would say, decades," Jacob F. Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the Brussels-based Bruegel think tank, told Euronews. Both capitals see Russia as their biggest long-term threat, and both have pledged to pour hundreds of billions of euros into their military and defence industrial base. In Berlin, this has been dubbed a "Zeitenwende" (or historical turning point) while Paris said its latest military programmation law is "the ultimate strategic move". This convergence was driven by Russia's ongoing full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which brought back conventional war to European soil, Donald Trump's return to the White House, which has put in doubt continued long-term US commitment to Europe's security, and a change of leadership in Germany. The new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, "basically took what I can only describe as a Gaullist stance", Kirkegaard said, by saying that "Europe needs to prepare for a future without a US security guarantee". 'France is converging with Germany' Yet one example of how this rapprochement in defence remains a laborious process came last week when France's Emmanuel Macron and Merz sought to diffuse tensions over a joint €100 billion project to develop a sixth-generation fighter jet. At the core of the dispute is the demand by France to secure 80% of the workshare for the new Future Combat Air System (FCAS), negating previous agreements that it would be split equally between the two countries and Spain, which is also part of the project. The French demand, however, "should not be as surprising as it seems", Rafael Loss, a policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), told Euronews, given that one of the major differences between France and Germany is how differently they view their military and the purpose they serve. The armed forces in France are part of the national foreign policy - as recent deployments in the Sahel attest - with the country's overseas territories and its possession of the nuclear weapon adding to its global perspective. "That's why the French military is much more comfortable with acting unilaterally or outside of EU, NATO contexts (than Germany's), and this then extends to the kinds of capabilities that the French armed forces prefer acquiring," Loss said. "Everything that relates to the French nuclear deterrent has to work when France is alone. And that means that FCAS, which is supposed to replace the Rafale fighter bombers going forward in carrying French nuclear weapons, French military and political leadership will not accept a situation where they're dependent to produce this capability because the nuclear deterrent depends on that capability." "French industry will need to be able to produce this aircraft by themselves if push comes to shove. They're willing to cooperate when strategic orientations align, but ultimately they have to produce everything independently of others. And again, that's something that many in Germany and across Europe haven't quite realised," he added. Still, Loss continued, "France is converging with Germany" with the "realisation that for the sake of European security, it needs to show that it invests in its partnerships and relationships with Europeans, especially those on the eastern flank". 'A big wasted opportunity' But the other major hurdle for the two to advance a common defence agenda at the EU level is the stark difference in their respective fiscal space. Germany's debt-to-Gross Domestic Product (GDP) ratio stood at 62.3% in the first quarter of the year. France's was at 114.1%, well above what the bloc's rules mandate (60%). This structural divergence means that as European countries aim to significantly ramp up their defence spending and military capabilities to deter a possible Russian attack towards the turn of the decade, Germany can afford to invest heavily in defence, while France cannot. For instance, Germany has asked to make use of a proposal by Brussels to loosen fiscal rules for defence spending, something France, which is targeted by an excessive deficit procedure, cannot do. France, which has consistently invested in defence over the last few decades, has less ground to cover, so to speak, but the sums advanced by the German government (including a €500 billion fund to boost the military and the country's infrastructure) should mean it catches up quickly. But their public finances also "fundamentally place them on different sides of negotiating tables" at the EU level, Kirkegaard said. The European Commission has put forward a plan to rearm Europe that it hopes will prompt member states to invest up to €800 billion before 2030. But most of that money is expected to come from member states' coffers, which in the case of France, are quite depleted. Given the scale of the task ahead, the Commission has been asked to come up with "innovative" financing options for defence. Macron has called for one of those options to be joint EU borrowing, something Germany has flat-out rejected. For Kirkegaard, this means that the crisis ushered in by Russia's war on Ukraine, is "a big wasted opportunity" for the bloc. "This crisis, the war in Ukraine, will not lead to materially more EU institutional or fiscal integration. It will lead to an expansion of the EU with Ukraine and maybe other countries but that's a different type of change to the EU and that's also very different than the last many big crises we've had," he said.
Euronews
3 hours ago
- Euronews
E3 leaders make renewed call for ceasefire in Gaza amid hunger deaths
The leaders of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, known as the E3, on Saturday issued a new call for an end to the Gaza war, describing the situation in the besieged enclave as appalling. According to a UK government statement, the three leaders, Prime Minister Keir Starmer, President of France Emmanuel Macron, and Chancellor of Germany Friedrich Merz, spoke Saturday morning by phone. They emphasised the urgent need for an immediate ceasefire, for Israel to lift all restrictions on aid, and for those suffering in Gaza to receive food they so desperately need, the statement said. They discussed their "intention to work closely together on a plan, building on their collaboration to date, which would pave the way to a long-term solution and security in the region," the statement added. Saturday's call follows that of Friday, where the European allies called for an immediate ceasefire, saying that "withholding essential humanitarian assistance to the civilian population is unacceptable." What could the E3 nations' action be? The leaders stated that they "stand ready to take further action to support an immediate ceasefire and a political process that leads to lasting security and peace for Israelis, Palestinians, and the entire region," but did not specify what that action may be. On Thursday, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that his country will become the first major Western power to recognise a Palestinian state, drawing a backlash from the US and Israel. It is unclear what the action will be from the other nations in the E3, but what is known is that the UK has historically been hesitant to recognise a Palestinian state for fear of upsetting its allies, the US and Israel, while Germany, due to its past, mostly finds it inappropriate to strongly criticise Israel. In Friday's joint statement, the leaders urged all parties to bring an end to the conflict and also called for an unconditional release of all hostages who have been held captive by Hamas since 7 October 2023. While their call comes amid a breakdown of ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas, which hit a standstill after the US and Israel recalled their negotiating teams on Thursday, Starmer, Macron, and Merz stressed that the disarmament of Hamas remains imperative. "Hamas must have no role in the future of Gaza. We reaffirm our commitment to supporting the diplomatic efforts of the United States, Qatar, and Egypt," Friday's joint statement said. Gaza hunger deaths rising This week, the world has woken up to grim images of children suffering malnutrition and dying from starvation in Gaza. The images come after experts have long warned that Gaza is being pushed closer to famine after months of Israel entirely blocking food or letting in only limited amounts. Israel says it has allowed around 4,500 aid trucks into Gaza since lifting its total blockade in May. But the UN World Food Programme (WFP) says nearly one in three people in Gaza has not been eating for days at a time, warning that malnutrition is rising, with around 90,000 children and women now in need of urgent treatment. In the past three weeks, at least 50 people have died of causes related to malnutrition, including 28 adults and 22 children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. That's up from 12 children who died in the five previous months of 2025, according to the ministry. UK to airdrop aid in Gaza In its defence, Israel argues that it allows enough aid to enter and blames UN agencies for not doing more to retrieve and deliver it to those in need. As the country faces mounting international outcry and backlash over the worsening hunger crisis in Gaza, media reports claimed that Israel will permit foreign nations to airdrop aid into Gaza beginning Friday. On Saturday, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the UK will be taking forward plans to work with partners such as Jordan to air-drop aid and evacuate children requiring medical assistance. In its statement on the call with Macron and Merz, Starmer said they all agreed it would be "vital to ensure robust plans are in place to turn an urgently needed ceasefire into lasting peace." Once this plan was worked up, they would seek to bring in other key partners, including those in the region, to advance it, the UK statement stated.
