In the decade that followed the euro zone debt crisis, France stood out as an island of stability amid Europe’s turbulent politics. Spain was burdened by weak governments and serial elections, Italy’s deadlocked parties often left it to technocrats to run the country and the UK struggled through years of post-Brexit infighting and a revolving door at 10 Downing Street. Emmanuel Macron’s rise to power in 2017, by contrast, brought with it with a strong, coherent pro-business agenda backed, at least through his first term, by a stable majority in parliament.
More recently, French national politics have become polarized, angry and hostile to compromise. The country has cycled through five prime ministers in less than two years as parliament sought repeatedly to block President Macron’s legislative program — just the kind of chaos that the architects of the Fifth Republic established in 1958 sought to avoid.