French voters are beginning to see the cracks in the President's Machiavellian politics
Source - Daily Telegraph 26/10/21
The slippery slope for the last French president began when two journalists at Le Monde published a devastating account: A President Should Not Say That.
It showed François Hollande to be a vituperative narcissist, and patently unfit to lead the great nation of France. It crystallised a sense that he was not up to the task, and set in motion the final unravelling of his quinquennat.
Authors Gérard Davet and Fabrice Lhomme have now followed up with an equally subversive book on Emmanuel Macron, this time exposing the fundamental emptiness of the incumbent.
Le traître et le néant – the traitor and abyss – draws on over a hundred sources to portray him as a manipulator, willing to betray his mentor, party, and ideals, all for no purpose beyond power. An alarmed Élysée is battening down the hatches for a storm.
President Macron wrote his master’s thesis on Machiavelli, the Renaissance spin doctor (and Italian patriot) who specialised in the dark arts of political make-believe.
The Florentine might have smiled at the way Mr Macron deploys his hard-line interior minister to tickle for votes on the far right, to the point of taunting the Front National’s Marine Le Pen for being “soft” on law and order.
Mr Macron’s economic legacy is certainly not what his global fan club presumes it to be. He has locked in the largest structural deficit in the developed world (unrelated to Covid), contrary to what he campaigned to do as economic Wunderkind almost five years ago.
Over the last two months he has pushed the envelope further, embarking on a pre-electoral spending spree of breath-taking chutzpah for targeted political groups, even though the output gap has closed and there is no Keynesian justification for pro-cyclical demand stimulus.
Some of his Jupiterian cheques are for French technological revival and le start-up nation. Most are not.
What began as a pledge to drag the French economy kicking and screaming into the 21st Century with a version of Germany’s Hartz IV reforms has ended up as a populist cornucopia.
“He has failed to reform France,” said Valerie Pécresse, president of Île-de-France and a presidential rival.
She said Mr Macron had achieved “almost nothing” over a wasted five-year term other than talking grandly, throwing sand in everybody’s eyes, and ransacking the exchequer.
Global liberal opinion still portrays the French leader as a reformer and an altruistic defender of European values against populism, that meaningless term.
There is an unconscious assumption that eurosceptics – that is to say defenders of the liberal national state – are by nature on the wrong side of morality, history, and indeed economics, while defenders of the European project have a higher claim to statesmanship whatever their actual behaviour.
Few American liberals pause to reflect on the Caesaropapist characteristics of the EU system. For them it is all seen through the prism of something else, Trumpism in their case.
This false schema does not really hold in France. The French know their president well by now, and a very different critique is starting to take hold, one that may become threatening for Mr Macron, even if he tops the approval ratings today comfortably at 24pc as the default candidate.
“He is a traveller without a compass, jumping from one conviction to another like a frog on water lilies,” said François Hollande last week, relishing his moment of revenge.
“Lack of coherence and doctrine is driving the president to keep committing volte-faces on essential subjects, from the role of the state, to ecology, and security. The ‘whatever it takes’ mentality has led to a headlong rush to scatter money,” he said.
Oxford Economics said fiscal outlays will blow through the draft budget by €40bn, but that was before last week’s decision to freeze home gas prices until the end of 2022, and to send cheques to half the country to cover rising petrol and diesel costs.
Note the fiscal contrast with the UK, where there is also extra spending but in the context of a smaller deficit than earlier assumed.
The British Government has bound itself with automatic tax rises once recovery is secure, a move praised by the International Monetary Fund as a prudent way to anchor long-term credibility.
The French debt ratio will keep rising to 118pc by the mid-2020s at a time when it is falling across Europe and above all in Germany, where it is expected to return to the 60pc Maastricht limit within five years.
The French and German debt ratios were similar a generation ago. Mr Macron has presided over the definitive decoupling, relegating France from the eurozone’s creditor core to the Club Med debtor periphery.
This renders monetary union even less workable and will inevitably lead to a future showdown between Paris and Berlin.
Professor Brigitte Granville, a French economist at Queen Mary University of London and author of What Ails France?, said Mr Macron seemed like a breath of fresh air five years ago.
“His campaign book was called Revolution and I thought it was very attractive because a real revolution is what France needs, governing from the bottom up rather than the top down,” she said.
She said he has done the exact opposite. He has made it easier to hire and fire, but his Scandinavian “flexi security” labour model forgot the flexible part.
He abolished the wealth tax and cut taxes on capital, pleasing the financial interests that bankrolled his campaign.
Beyond that, nothing much happened, least of all reform of the suffocating bureaucracy. Mr Macron is now spraying money promiscuously to counter his image as the president of the rich.
The latest and most bizarre twist is the rise and rise of Michel Barnier within the Gaulliste party, with talk of “Barnier mania” in the French press.
The former Brexit negotiator and EU commissar has gone from irrelevant dark horse to putative leader of the French centre-right by turning eurosceptic, a revealing insight into where he thinks the political soul of France really lies.
First he called for a five-year ban on all external immigration into the EU, which some might argue converts the bloc into a white fortress, unlike Asiatic Brexit Britain. But let us not quibble.
Then he played the ultimate souverainiste card, in Polish style, calling for a referendum on migration and a “constitutional shield” to restore French legal supremacy and room for manoeuvre.
“We cannot do things if we are being permanently threatened by a ruling or a condemnation at the level of the European Court of Justice or the European Convention on Human Rights,” he said.
If it is not apostasy, it is certainly a repudiation of Europeanist ideology. Dare one point out that the British honourably chose to withdraw from the EU, at an economic cost, rather than trying to subvert the judicial system from within.
Mr Barnier used to tell the British that they could not have their cake and eat it. Touché, Monsieur.
Mr Barnier also stated that German dominance of the European power structure has become insufferable, and implicitly that the Paris-Berlin axis is Gallic wishful thinking.
This takes aim at the central calculation of Mr Macron’s strategy: that France maximises its influence and power by cleaving as tightly to Franco-German condominium, flanked by an obedient EU that defers to its betters.
Mr Barnier was an Anglophile long ago as a French foreign minister. His extraordinary utterings over recent weeks open the possibility of a diplomatic realignment, with Britain coming in from the cold and again treated by France as a valuable ally in Europe’s triangular balance of power.
Should rosbifs be rooting for a President Barnier? Perhaps yes.
Comments
Post a Comment