France is on the brink - again

The photos seemed to signal that the president had not a care in the world. It was the middle of August, and a deeply tanned and impressively muscled Emmanuel Macron was pictured showing off his hydrofoil board skills while on holiday with his wife and their grandchildren in the south of France. “What a handsome grandpa” said the cover of celebrity gossip magazine Voici.

But Macron barely had time to towel down his board before his prime minister decided to commit hara-kiri.

Many in France – and certainly all schoolchildren – are still on summer holidays, slowly moping back to the office from le camping, the seaside, or country houses, nursing an even more severe than normal case of la rentrée, or new work and academic year coup de blues. That hasn’t stopped François Bayrou from announcing he will force a confidence vote in parliament on September 8 over his unpopular government and its austerity budget, plunging the country into political – and even more financial – chaos.

Bayrou was already boxed in by a threatened censure motion from Marine Le Pen’s far right and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s hard left, and hoped to seize control of the national agenda. “He has put us all in the merde,” sputtered an unnamed minister who could soon be out of a job, in what turned out to be a series of scatalogical analogies.

But les crottes have hit more than just his cabinet fan. Now it is Bayrou who is the dead man walking, dragging his boss, the president, through the mud with him.

Across France the slogans abound: “Bloquons Tout!” (“Block Everything!). Those who are angriest want to bring down the government, dissolve parliament, throw out the occupant of the Elysée Palace and force an early presidential and parliamentary election.

There are mass protests and general strikes, with a planned shutdown of the entire country in early September. And all of this is egged on by demagogues on the extremes of the right and left, with evidence of direct Russian interference in the informational and online war. Just another rentrée like any other. Except this time, it is worse than ever.

The prime minister’s wild poker tactic seems to have already backfired: most political parties – including National Rally, France Unbowed, the Socialists and the Communists – have vowed to vote against him, and it is mostly profiting the political movement that pretends to stand above the fray: Le Pen’s National Rally.

“I will fight like a dog,” vowed Bayrou ahead of his televised address to the nation, aimed at convincing the parties on the left and right to negotiate his austerity plan to rein in ballooning debt rather than burn down the house.

Satirical weekly paper Le Canard Enchaîné ironised Bayrou’s strategy: “C’est moi ou le chaos.” Betting site Polymarket gives him an 89 per cent chance of losing his job on September 8, after less than nine months in office, following the short-lived Michel Barnier government.

Bayrou spent July and August haranguing any political or media figure who would pick up his calls to their French or Grecian resorts about the catastrophic state of Gallic finances and the need to pass his budget. To reach citizens directly, he launched the FB Direct YouTube series and podcast, attempting to walk viewers through his personal fiscal Himalayan “summit” and convince them of the necessity of living within France’s means.

His proposals – nearly €44 billion in savings, including a €5.5 billion cut from health spending and the elimination of two public holidays, Pentecost Monday and Victory in Europe Day – remain unpopular. His approval ratings slid to a historic low of 18 per cent, and unfortunately, the series attracted only tens of thousands of viewers.

The symbolism was excruciating: a prime minister seemingly sacrificed by tongues of fire on Pentecost and further punished for his ill-advised attempt to abolish VE Day, while debt levels continued to climb, further shaking financial markets.

Bayrou’s September gamble echoes a similar high-stakes poker manoeuvre by Macron just over a year ago, when he dissolved parliament to assert control over a fragile majority. As Le Monde noted, the move is “just as risky and appears, from the outset, just as badly positioned.”

Bayrou may hope to persuade some, but if the government falls just two days before the September 10 Bloquons Tout! gridlock protests that are bringing back memories of the Gilets Jaunes – and with no credible budget on the horizon – his departure will have complicated the very financial equation he sought to resolve.

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In politics, one man’s kamikaze move is another’s jackpot. Le Pen and her minion Jordan Bardella’s National Rally are already cashing in, presenting themselves as the only adults in the room while perfecting cynicism and ever more flagrant corruption.

After Le Pen was recently banned from running for office for five years, it has emerged that National Rally candidates claimed reimbursement for travel expenses equal to three times around the Earth during the three-week legislative campaign of 2024. Le Pen continues to appeal her ban for presiding over a scheme that siphoned off millions of taxpayer euros for fictitious European Parliament jobs – but the cash, and the scandals, keep flowing.

The Tweedledum to her Tweedledee, France Unbowed boss Mélenchon, gesticulating and sneering louder than ever, is playing his usual role: the ex-Trotskyist pyromaniac disguised as firefighter, thriving on disarray. Between parroting Kremlin talking points and disgracefully dismissing Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky as “president of nothing” at his party’s summer university pow-wow, he has become the loudest cheerleader of the Bloquons Tout! movement.

Originally hatched on far-right pro-Russian social network accounts, the protest has since been cannibalised by the political class. Mélenchon jumped first in the dead of August, aiming to “bring down Bayrou” and perhaps the Fifth Republic itself. “We are the specialists in organising the brothel,” he crowed.

Mélenchon’s lieutenants and allied leftists urged people to take part. The National Rally, cunningly, stayed in the background, ready to claim success or blame the melée on Mélenchon if it fails – a classic stratégie de la cravate, or the art of appearing tie and suit-wearing respectable while remaining utterly unchanged as an extreme right ethno-nationalist party.

Even François Ruffin, a former France Unbowed firebrand now allied with the Greens, joined in the hysteria: “Emmanuel Macron is the man of chaos. Social chaos with the Gilets Jaunes, budgetary chaos, political chaos with an improvised dissolution. Honour would demand that he resign, and perhaps once again put himself before the French people to ask for their trust.”

The contrast with the tirelessly plodding and earnest Bayrou is instructive. Caroline Fourest, filmmaker and editorial director of Franc-Tireur, captured the disconnect: “I prefer politicians who talk to us like adults to the demagogues who talk to us like children.”

Bayrou lectures on deficits; Le Pen whispers fairytales of painless nationalism; Bardella beams TikTok slogans; Mélenchon promises catharsis through disorder. Journalist Patrick Cohen summed up the French paradox: “The French agree with François Bayrou that the debt has to be reduced. At the same time, they want a political crisis and seem even to want chaos.”

The rest of the opposition is playing along. The Socialists, Greens and Communists all plan to vote no confidence. Not out of principle but calculation.

Even François Hollande, who suggested compromise might be preferable to implosion, was branded a traitor by Mélenchon’s sect. The broad left coalition, now called the Nouveau Front Populaire, is even more fractious and dead in the water than a year ago. At Mélenchon’s summer pow-wow, the hard left shrieked “Everyone hates the Socialist Party,” while a journalist who exposed his sect-like inner circle, La Meute, was banned.

Meanwhile, as political parties jostle for attention, French debt drifts further into Greek and Italian territory. The former minister and entrepreneur Jacques Attali warned: “To bring down the government today would be contrary to the interests of the country and the opposition. France cannot afford a political crisis that would lead to a financial crisis, provoking intervention by the Troika – the IMF, ECB, and European Commission – imposing extremely radical and antisocial measures just to finance our daily expenses.” Or to put it another way: Bring down Bayrou in the name of resisting austerity, and you may end up with austerity squared.

Which leaves the cast of this farce: a prime minister-cum-dramaturge convinced he is producing essential political theatre while teaching economic history’s sternest lesson; a president seemingly more at home as Mediterranean muscle man or on the international stage than dealing with an unworkable parliament; a wrecking ball left-wing opposition and a profiteering extreme right determined to Bloquons Tout! purely for the pleasure of collapse. None will own the conflagration, but all are eager to unleash it.

France’s rentrée has always been tumultuous. This year, it threatens a catastrophe: less a noisy return from holiday than the overture to a massacre. A political and economic version of the Saint Bartholomew bloodbath of 1572, which left tens of thousands dead.

It is an analogy that would not be lost on one biographer of Henri IV – François Bayrou.