The Social World

Tag: Marine Le Pen

  • Why is it only left-wing leaders who are allowed to be young?

    Why is it only left-wing leaders who are allowed to be young?

    There was a time when the French left turned its nose up at all things American. Too low-brow for them. Not now. The victory of Zohran Mamdani in the New York mayoral race has caused much joie de vivre in left-circles.

    Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Gallic Bernie Saunders and the leader of the far-left La France Insoumise, described Mamdani’s win as “very good news.”

    The general secretary of the center-left Socialist party, Olivier Faure, posted a smiley face on X above a headline in Le Monde, hailing Mamdani as “the youngest mayor in New York history.”

    Mamdani referenced his age during his victory speech in Brooklyn. “The conventional wisdom would tell you that I am far from the perfect candidate,” he proclaimed. “I am young, despite my best efforts to grow older. I am Muslim. I am a Democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.”

    There has been no need to apologize to much of the world’s mainstream media. His age and his religion have been a help not a hindrance to Mamdani’s rapid ascension.

    A puff-piece in Wednesday’s Guardian was typical. It praised his youthful vigor, particularly his “savvy social-media presence” and the way in which it was “energizing younger voters… who are hungry for generational and ideological change.”

    France’s left-wing Liberation newspaper took a similar line, characterizing Mamdani as “the idol of Generation Z” and the hope for a better future in the United States.

    Curiously, these newspapers have a different take on another political idol of Generation Z, France’s Jordan Bardella.

    The 30-year-old president of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally is routinely attacked for his age and his reliance on social media. When Mamdani promotes himself and his policies to his 3 million followers on TikTok he is being “savvy.” When Bardella addresses his 2.2 million followers he’s using it as a “propaganda tool.”

    For Mamdani, his youth is a virtue but with Bardella it’s a weakness. CNN has pointed to his “short career and lack of concrete experience,” while the Guardian depicted him as “too young and inexperienced.”

    This week Bardella was forced to defend his age during a television interview, saying his youth does not “discredit” him. Yet the same broadcaster made no reference to Mamdani’s age when discussing the possibility that he was the future of the Democratic party. The fact he was a little “too left” was perceived to be his only blemish.

    France’s international broadcaster, France24, believes that the victory of Mamdani will “galvanize” the French left. No doubt. But it will also be a boost for Bardella.

    He has become the face this year of the National Rally, eclipsing the de facto leader of the party, Marine Le Pen. In March she was disqualified from political life for five years after a Paris court ruled she had misused EU funds. Le Pen has appealed her conviction and the outcome will be known next February.

    Even if she overturns the sentence, there is a growing belief in France that Le Pen won’t be her party’s candidate in the 2027 presidential election. She has two disadvantages: her economic socialism, which remains a turn off for middle-class voters, and her last name.

    There are still a sizable number of voters, particularly among the over 60s, who, while they agree with her about the dangers of mass immigration and Islamism, still can’t bring themselves to cast a ballot for a Le Pen. The anti-Semitism of her father, Jean-Marie, is etched in their memory.

    Bardella is different. He does not suffer the sins of his father and he is also more economically liberal. Over the last year he has been courting big business and deftly drawing the distinction between himself and his mentor, Madame Le Pen.

    Bardella’s only disadvantage is his age. Or at least it was until this week. But Mamdani has done the Frenchman a favor. Next time Bardella is interrogated by a hostile journalist about his callowness he can simply namecheck the inspiring mayor of New York.

    Or is it only left-wing leaders who are allowed to be young?

  • Macron must go

    This evening Emmanuel Macron will almost certainly be searching for his fifth prime minister since January last year. François Bayrou’s decision to call a vote of confidence in his government looks like a calamitous misjudgment, one that will plunge France into another period of grave instability. Comparisons are being drawn with the tumult of the Fourth Republic when, between 1946 and 1958, France went through more than 20 governments.

    Bayrou’s coalition government has limped along this year, achieving little other than creating more disenchantment and contempt among the long-suffering electorate. The French are fed up with their political class.

    Above all, they’re sick to the back teeth of their president. It was Emmanuel Macron’s decision to call a snap election in June 2024 that kickstarted the chaos. And to think he did it for “clarification.”

    An opinion poll last week reported that Macron’s approval rating has hit a record low: just 15 percent of the country think he is doing a good job. Who are these 15 percenters? How can any voter cast an eye over their crumbling country and conclude that France is in a better state economically and socially than it was in 2017?

    Across the political spectrum calls are growing for Macron to resign. From Marine Le Pen on the right to Jean-Luc Mélenchon on the left, and including veteran centrists such as Jean-François Copé, a minister in the government of Jacques Chirac. They believe the only way France can begin to rebuild is with a new president.  So do the majority of the people; a weekend opinion poll reported that 58 percent believe Macron should resign in the event Bayrou loses his vote.

    Were Macron a man of his word he would step down. In an exchange in 2019 with a group of intellectuals, he criticised previous presidents who stayed in their posts despite losing the confidence of voters in legislative elections. 

    The French are fed up with their political class

    “The president of the Republic should not be able to stay (in office) if he had a real disavowal in terms of a majority,” said Macron.

    The president’s parliamentary majority was slashed in the 2022 election when his party lost 105 seats. In last year’s snap election, they hemorrhaged a further 95.

    The president still struts around the international stage, exchanging hugs and handshakes with other equally inept European leaders. But outside Western Europe no one takes Macron seriously. Not Trump, not Xi, not Putin, not even Tunisia.

    Last week a Tunisian with a history of drug abuse and violence rampaged through Marseille, stabbing several people with a knife as he screamed “Allahu Akbar.” Police shot him dead. The Tunisian government is outraged, calling it “an unjustified killing” and demanding an investigation into the actions of the policemen.

    Authoritarian regimes issue such provocative statements because they know Macron won’t respond. Tunisia, like Algeria – which in the last 12 months have thrown a French journalist and a Franco-Algerian writer in jail – have no respect for the president of the Republic.

    With every day that Macron stays in office, France’s international standing drops another notch. But he insists that he won’t resign.

    In that case, what are the alternatives to France’s political impasse, assuming Bayrou does lose his vote of confidence this evening? Macron could dissolve parliament and call fresh elections, which is what Marine Le Pen wants. But then she would, knowing that the opinion polls put her National Rally party way in front of its rivals.

    Last week, former president Nicolas Sarkozy said that legislative elections were the “only solution.” He also legitimatized Le Pen, declaring that the “National Rally is a party that has the right to stand in elections… in my view, they belong to the Republican spectrum.”

    It’s going to be a week of extreme turbulence in France

    Last month Macron declared that fresh elections aren’t the answer. His preference is to cobble together a third coalition government. Having tried a center-right Premier (Michel Barnier) and a centrist in Bayrou, he’s said to be considering a prime minister from the left.

    The name on commentators lips is Olivier Faure, the leader of the Socialist Party. He and Macron know each other well, to the point of using the informal “tu” when addressing each other.

    You might consider it odd that Macron would turn to a Socialist. This is the party whose representation in parliament has nosedived from 331 seats in 2012 to 66 last year. Their presidential candidate in the 2022 election, Anne Hidalgo, polled 616,478 votes (1.7 percent), 200,000 fewer than the Communist candidate.

    Then again perhaps it isn’t surprising. Macron may have sold himself to the public as a centrist when he launched his En Marche! party a decade ago, but he is at heart a Socialist. He admitted it to a summit of business leaders in 2014, when as the Economy Minister in Francois Hollande’s government, he told his audience: “I am a Socialist… I stand by that.”

    In effect, France has been governed by a Socialist since 2012. Between them Hollande and Macron have led the Republic to rack and ruin. Now there is the prospect of a Socialist prime minister.

    Among the measures Faure has announced in the event he becomes PM are a reduction of the retirement age from 64 to 62 and the creation of a 2 percent tax on assets worth more than €100 million ($117 million).

    It’s going to be a week of extreme turbulence in France. There is the vote today in parliament and then on Wednesday the people will take to the streets in a protest movement called “Block Everything.”

    Do they really need to bother? France is already blocked, thanks to Emmanuel Macron.

  • Are the walls closing in on Emmanuel Macron?

    Are the walls closing in on Emmanuel Macron?

    French Prime Minister François Bayrou has recalled parliament for a confidence vote on September 9, betting he can outmaneuver a surging protest movement before it paralyzes France. The grassroots “Bloquons tout” campaign, echoing the gilets jaunes (“Yellow vests”) of 2018-19 and fueled by the hard left, plans to halt trains, buses, schools, taxis, refineries and ports. It is a general strike in all but name. Bayrou’s move aims to reassert control before chaos takes hold, but with the vote just two days before the open-ended strike begins, failure could topple his government and ignite a broader assault on President Macron’s authority. This morning, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s hard-left La France Insoumise (LFI) announced its plans to file a motion of destitution against Macron on September 23 if Bayrou falls, raising the stakes further.

    At the heart of this crisis is the economy. France’s debt has blown past 110 percent of GDP and the budget hole for 2025 stands at around $55 billion. Before the summer break, Bayrou proposed the deepest spending cuts in a generation, in a country where public spending accounts for nearly 60 percent of GDP. The unions are furious. The French are addicted to public spending and there’s a deep-seated mentality that the government owes people ever more. Mélenchon has turned the budget battle into a populist crusade against Macron’s “rich man’s government,” rallying the left and calling on supporters to shut the country down unless the cuts are scrapped. Gilets jaunes veterans have been readying to go back on the streets.

    Within minutes of the end of the press conference in Paris at which Bayrou announced the confidence vote, Marine Le Pen’s hard-right National Rally, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s LFI and others declared they would not support the government. It also appeared yesterday evening that the Socialists were leaning against Bayrou, an immediate slap in the face for him and indirectly for Macron. This morning, Mélenchon escalated the pressure, vowing to push for Macron’s impeachment on September 23 if the vote fails, blaming the president for the crisis rather than Bayrou.

    Bayrou’s move was designed to seize the initiative before the country slides into chaos, but the arithmetic is now completely against him. To survive, he needs 289 votes. His Macron-centrist alliance can deliver barely 165. The consensus yesterday evening among journalists and leading Paris-based analysts is that the government has almost no chance of surviving. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally was the only possible lifeline, and immediately after the announcement they made clear that they would not help Bayrou. A curt statement from the RN said it was “not inclined to support” the government. Bayrou and Macron’s gamble has almost certainly failed. It looks as though Macron and Bayrou completely miscalculated their move.

    Bayrou’s bold move was meant to buy Macron time. But it now threatens to blow up his presidency

    Le Pen no doubt very rapidly concluded that there is no need to save Macron’s prime minister to satisfy her own ambitions. Polls suggest she would emerge from early parliamentary elections as the largest force in the Assembly, even if personally she cannot run. Her party would still, however, fall short of a majority, making her refusal to back Bayrou cost-free and politically advantageous. If the government falls, Macron’s authority erodes further, and the RN’s narrative of “ordinary France versus Parisian elites” hardens. Mélenchon, meanwhile, is actively pushing for Bayrou’s downfall. LFI has seized control of the anti-austerity message and united Socialists, Greens and hard-left radicals behind him. For Mélenchon, an early election offers the chance to turn street anger into parliamentary power.

    Bayrou’s bold move was meant to buy Macron time. But it now threatens to blow up his presidency. If indeed Bayrou loses the confidence vote, Macron will face an impeachment process. He could try to appoint another sacrificial prime minister to preside over austerity and strikes, but no one credible will want the job. He could also call an early election, risking handing power to Mélenchon or leaving the country even more paralyzed. Or he could simply sit tight and let the blockades and market jitters spiral while he waits out the end of his term. If Bayrou falls, Macron may limp on in the Élysée, but the Fifth Republic itself risks a reckoning.

    As Bayrou battles parliament, the markets are signaling that France’s fiscal credibility hangs by a thread. Bond yields are creeping up. Somehow the ratings agencies haven’t yet let things slide. France has held on to its top-tier status long past the point of credibility. Perhaps this is only thanks to the assumption that the country, Europe’s second biggest economy, is too big to fail. But that indulgence has its limits. Come mid-September, when the numbers are on the table and the budget battle begins, a downgrade from the rating agencies seems inevitable. This will damage France and will certainly damage Europe. A downgrade would spike borrowing costs, potentially triggering a broader sell-off in European markets.

    For eight years, Macron’s political brand has rested on him outmaneuvering his opponents and keeping France just stable enough to get by. If the government loses this confidence vote, Macron’s authority breaks. He may cling on in the Élysée, but his presidency will be weakened beyond repair. France risks months of paralysis, street unrest and financial turmoil.

  • The French are turning against the EU

    The French are turning against the EU

    When Donald Trump won a second term in the White House last November the response in Europe was one of barely disguised horror. “The European Union must stand close together and act in a united manner,” declared Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

    Emmanuel Macron posted a message on X: “The question we, as Europeans, must ask ourselves is, are we ready to defend the interests of Europeans?” The president of France got his answer on Sunday evening. No. The trade deal agreed between Ursula von der Leyen, the EU Commission president, and Donald Trump has not gone down well in much of Europe.

    Scholz’s successor, Friedrich Merz forecast that Germany’s economy would suffer “significant” damage because of the deal. EU exports will have a tariff of 15 percent, which is superior to the customs duties before Trump’s re-election, but much lower than his threatened 30 percent tariff. Additionally, von der Leyen has promised the bloc will purchase energy worth $750 billion from the United States and make $600 billion in additional investments. According to Hungary’s Viktor Orban: “This is not an agreement… Donald Trump ate von der Leyen for breakfast.”

    The most strident criticism of the deal came from France, where in a rare display of unity the terms of the agreement were savaged across the political spectrum.

    Prime Minister Francois Bayrou said that “it is a dark day when an alliance of free peoples, united to assert their values and defend their interests, resigns itself to submission.”

    Trade minister Laurent Saint-Martin described the deal as unbalanced and said the government should not accept “what happened yesterday because that would be accepting that Europe is not an economic power.”

    It was telling that Saint-Martin said “Europe” and not “France.” For centrists like Saint-Martin – he was one of the first to join Macron’s fledging En Marcheparty in 2016 – France and the EU are indistinguishable.

    Macron’s predecessor (and mentor), Francois Hollande once accused him of “believing in nothing and having no conviction.” That is not true. Macron has one unshakeable conviction, and that is the EU.

    It is why he won’t let Brexit go, taking every opportunity to savage Britain’s decision to leave the bloc. Twice during his recent state visit he went on the attack. Britons were “sold a lie” over Brexit he said at one point, adding on another occasion that the country “was stronger when part of the EU.”

    As yet there has been no response the Elysee to von der Leyen’s trade deal. Perhaps Macron is still working out how best to spin the fact that Britain’s tariff rate with the USA is 10 percent.

    Marine Le Pen lost little time in pointing this out, posting on X that the EU “has obtained worse conditions than the United Kingdom.” The leader of the National Rally described the deal as “a political, economic and moral fiasco” and said that that “this form of globalization, which denies and destroys sovereignty, has been outdated for many years.”

    The majority of the French agree with her. In an interview with the BBC in 2018, Macron admitted that if given the choice his people would probably follow Britain out of the EU. This is one reason why he has been so determined to make life difficult for post-Brexit Britain: pour encourager les autres.

    Macron’s strategy has been partially successful. A poll last year revealed that 62 percent of the French are opposed to Frexit. The bad news for the president is that 69 percent of them have a bad opinion of the EU.

    The poll was conducted a month before the European elections, which resulted in a resounding victory for Le Pen’s Eurosceptic party and a humiliating defeat for Macron’s Europhile movement.

    When Le Pen reached the second round of the 2017 presidential election it was with a promise to quit the EU. Two years later she abandoned that position and vowed to reform the bloc from within. Her party won’t return to Frexit, but it will increase its Euroskepticism between now and the 2027 election. The same goes for the hard-left’s Jean-Luc Melenchon, who loathes Brussels as much as Le Pen. Bruno Retailleau, the leader of the center-right Republicans, is also a long-standing critic of the EU’s ambition and voted against the EU Constitution in France’s 2005 referendum. That result, he said in a 2020 interview, along with Brexit, “have shown one and the same thing: Europeans do not want a federal Europe.”

    Across France, enmity towards the EU has strengthened in the last year. The Mercosur trade deal agreed with South America in December is widely unpopular and France’s failure to control its borders is blamed on Brussels.

    The French are demoralized and angrier than ever with their ruling elite. A citizens’ collective called “Bloquons tout!” (Block everything) is using social media to mobilize people for a day of protest on September 10. “Boycott, disobedience, and solidarity” is their rallying cry and they are urging people to take to the streets across France.

    Will it achieve anything? Probably not. After all, what’s the point of protesting in Paris when all the big decisions about France’s future are made in Brussels.