Where\u2019s Charles de Gaulle when you need him? Buried, of course, in a humble grave in the cemetery of Colombey les Deux \u00c9glises. But it is difficult, at a time of a new epic French crisis, to forget how almost 70 years ago the general turned a country on the cusp of civil war into a strong presidential system. And, in harness with West Germany\u2019s Konrad Adenauer, into the driving force of a confident, recovering western Europe.<\/p>\n
Today, under Emmanuel Macron, France may not be in such drastic straits as in 1958 but it appears politically enfeebled and adrift, no longer the beacon of centrist renewal. His presidency started with a comparison to Jupiter, the god-commander of the skies. Today he doesn\u2019t throw thunderbolts, he fires blanks.<\/p>\n
His answer in 2017 to the challenge from the extreme right and extreme left was to forge a movement free of ideology, open to modernisation and reform, which would have as its totemic leader a 39-year-old political debutant ready to use the full powers of the post-de Gaulle presidency to make France great again. He was the country\u2019s youngest head of state since Napoleon Bonaparte.<\/p>\n
In his second term, this mission of creating a powerful, flexible global player has crumpled<\/a>. He can on occasion talk the talk. \u201cWe have no right to fatigue,\u201d he told the United Nations last month. \u201cWe have no right to the spirit of defeat.\u201d But though his spinners presented this as a spirited defence of multilateral action, it rang hollow.<\/p>\n France, both polarised and paralysed, has shrunk as a global player. Macron\u2019s interventions \u2014 seeking peace from Vladimir Putin, European engagement from Donald Trump \u2014 have looked performative and flimsy. The bond markets see a country with public debt at 114 per cent of GDP, successive short-lived governments that have failed to curb spending and reform pensions, a deadlocked parliament. A lame duck president, with elections set for 2027 and jostling for succession likely to kick off next year, inspires neither investors nor those in Europe who thought Macron was the man to pull the continent together as the United States turns its gaze towards the challenge from China.<\/p>\n French presidents can only call a snap parliamentary election once every 12 months. He has only one more throw of the dice. If he were to call one and it followed current polling (Marine Le Pen\u2019s hard-right National Rally on 32 per cent, Jean-Luc M\u00e9lenchon\u2019s hard-left Unsubmissive France on 25 per cent, Macron\u2019s centrists trailing on 15 per cent) it would represent a reversal of everything he has fought for. A cynical response (not his first) would be to appoint a Le Pen disciple as prime minister<\/a>, wait for him or her to make a mess out of governance and thus steer voters away from the hard right in the 2027 presidential election. Who wins from that? Other ways forward are even less palatable. His own resignation? His vanity will not allow it. A doomed technocratic prime minister? A referendum \u2014 but on what question?<\/p>\n The Franco-German axis of yore led to unlikely partnerships: Val\u00e9ry Giscard d\u2019Estaing and Helmut Schmidt; Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schr\u00f6der; Fran\u00e7ois Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl. What was remarkable about them is that they were usually from opposing political camps. Giscard, Chirac and Kohl were conservatives; Schmidt, Schr\u00f6der and Mitterrand were social democrats. That was the spirit Macron wanted to resurrect, in French domestic politics and on the European stage \u2014 a kind of creative dynamism. Yet he failed on both fronts, unable to find a common language with his German counterpart Friedrich Merz.<\/p>\n