What was remarkable, however, was an unexpected cri de coeur from the Prime Minister in the days before the confidence vote that ousted him. Bayrou had tried, and failed, to balance the books. Even the threat of an IMF takeover hadn’t helped. With little left to lose, Bayrou declared that the winners in French society have been the baby boumeurs. On live TV, two weeks before the confidence vote, he called them out for their selfishness. The next morning he likened French workers to slaves, arguing that France will be “forcing them for decades to repay the loans lightly decided upon by previous generations”. 

Plus ça change, you might say. Fiscal profligacy and debt have long been a French forte. To find France’s last balanced budget, you would have to go back to 1975, 50 years ago. But with the deficit estimated at 5.4% of its GDP in 2024, its debt at 114% of GDP, and Greek bonds now outperforming French ones, France is living beyond its means. And this splurge of public money is not reflected on the ground. French growth, at 0.6%, is sluggish. Domestic consumption is flatlining and investments are being held back. There is no engine in the French economy.

So where’s the money going? The Left has blamed supposed handouts to heavily taxed French companies. Marine Le Pen sees immigration as the big fiscal drain of our time. But anyone who takes a cold look at the raw numbers can spot the issue: a quarter of all public spending in France goes towards pensions, well above the EU average. At roughly €420 billion per year, this is by far the French state’s largest category of spending. It is comfortably more than what France spends on its education, defense, security, transports, research, justice and infrastructure combined. To put this in context, France’s pension spending could fund 30 new Channel Tunnels per year, or all of China’s military spending for around 300 days. A single minute of France’s pensions spending could comfortably fund even the most lavish state summit at Versailles. 

Worse still, pension spending keeps rising. In 2024, France increased pension spending by another €14 billion in 2024, just to keep payouts in line with inflation, despite the government scrambling to find billions in cuts elsewhere. And this was far from a one-off occurrence: of the €1 trillion of additional debt taken on during the Macron presidency, half can be traced back to pension spending. 

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None of this was the intention of the architects of France’s pension model, which was set up in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. The scheme relied on mandatory contributions that, in theory, constituted a “deferred salary” for when you retire. In practice, 28% of the total labor cost of a working-age French citizen goes towards pensioners. Taxpayers can only hope the next generation will be able to do the same. 

Back then, when the scheme was founded, there were four to five working-age Frenchmen for every pensioner. Now, that ratio has fallen below 2:1, and will only get worse in the years to come. The boumeurs, in other words, paid into the system when there were plenty of workers per pensioner, and are now enjoying its benefits at the expense of a diminishing workforce. And their pensions are but one example of the boumeurs’ unparalleled run of generational luck. Having enjoyed cheap housing when house-building rates were high and net migration low, the boumeurs are much more likely to own property. They have also enjoyed targeted tax cuts and other benefits. As a result, their disposable income outperforms the national average, a first time in French history and an international oddity. 

Emmanuel Macron, who will now have to form a new government, had tried to tackle pensions. When he was elected in 2017, he marginally increased taxes on pensioners. In 2019, he put together a plan to simplify the pensions system, eventually giving up during the Covid pandemic. In 2022, he increased the legal retirement age to 64, weathering massive protests. But he has never offered a true challenge to pensioners, not least because he owes his presidency to the grey vote. In 2022, 69% of 65+ year-old voters backed him over Marine Le Pen, while Le Pen edged him in the 18-34 category. 

The boumeurs have carried out a generational coup, but it is one that has largely gone unchallenged by the rest of the population, despite the burden on their paychecks. There are, of course, dissidents: some of these are economists, while others are X activists. These online posters have made into a global meme sensation the archetype of the head-in-hands millennial Nicolas, 30 ans, paying for the glass-clinking pensioners Bernard and Chantal, as well as the immigrant Karim. “Nicolas qui paie,” the catchphrase goes.

But the activists are the exception. Largely oblivious to where their taxes are going, French millennials provide little incentive for politicians to speak up for Nicolas against Bernard and Chantal. In 2024, when asked by pollsters which parts of public spending should be axed, 32% of the respondents went for family subsidies, 30% for unemployment benefits, and only 6% chose pensions. Perhaps the remaining 94% retain the deluded hope that they, too, will be able to enjoy the largesse of taxpayers when they retire.

Despite the divisions of French politics, then, there is one point of unity. Every single political party is terrified of touching the sacred cow of pensions. When Michel Barnier, the previous prime minister, pushed to have pensions only partially indexed on inflation — rather than bound to it — he was toppled by Le Pen. For now, her National Rally party is very happy to continue making inroads into Macron’s gray vote. With pensioners making up 35% of the electorate — as well as being the cohort most likely to vote — few politicians have a shot at ultimate power without them. 

Time and again, voters have reminded politicians to keep the taps on. In 1981, they elected the socialist President François Mitterrand, who dropped the retirement age from 65 to 60. It’s taken 40 years and hundreds of protests later for France to increase it painstakingly to 64. In 1997, the French voted for the Left and the 35-hour legal work week. 

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The longer the system persists, the more absurdities emerge from it. In the public sector, where salaries have been largely frozen for more than a decade, you often hear of situations where senior retired bureaucrats earn more in inflation-adjusted pensions than their waged successors. In education, French teachers are very poorly paid by European standards. Where is the money going? Pensions again. The state artificially props up the total employment cost it pays for teachers only to send the difference to cover for pensions. Everywhere you dig into France’s public spending, you find more hidden pension spending. Thanks to these artificially pumped up social contributions — which go towards former soldiers’ pensions — France’s Ministry of Defense can claim it reaches Nato’s 2% of GDP target. France’s pensioners unintentionally saved their country from Donald Trump’s wrath.

Less amusing for attentive French taxpayers is the reality that pensions spending has got so far out of control that public debt is now used not to pay for tomorrow’s investments but to subsidize the comfort of yesterday’s workers. And it is indeed comfort that is often being paid for, rather than actual need. In 2024, two-thirds of the increase in French savings were made by pensioners. Those aged 70 or over save, on average, 25% of their income, whereas 30 year olds only save 9%. These inequalities between generations pave the way for inequalities within generations, between those who will inherit and those who won’t. And the latter will see the rungs of the property ladder glide further out of reach.

Tragically, those inheriting property will do so, on average, in their 50s or 60s: too late to have a family, but only a few years before they, too, retire. Rinse, repeat. Many economists on the Left call for higher taxes on inheritance, but in the meantime the flow of transfers from the active population to the inactive continues. Inheritances and other financial transfers are expected to reach 20% of French GDP by the end of the next decade.

The French economy, as well as French society, is full of distortions created by the pensions gravity wall. Because their employees are so heavily taxed, French companies struggle to hire, and are therefore rendered less competitive. Meanwhile, the cost-of-living crisis, worsened by this high tax rate, has dragged fertility into a nosedive. Only a decade ago, it was at replacement rate. This decline in fertility will make France’s pension model even less tenable in decades to come.

This is not to say that pensions are the sum of all of France’s problems. The French economy in general is over-regulated, while uncontrolled immigration is applying further pressure to France’s social contract. But it is inescapably true that at the heart of France’s dismal fiscal situation is the matter of pensions.

At some point, the warning lights will be succeeded by sirens. Perhaps intervention might be necessary. Credit rating agencies have either downgraded France’s credit ratings or given a negative outlook for future ratings. In a desperate last attempt to keep parliament on board, Bayrou’s economics minister warned that toppling the government could have the IMF knocking at the door. For now, that is an unlikely scenario, but that doesn’t mean that France isn’t in trouble. When the next global crisis arrives, France will have to deal with it with very limited fiscal firepower. Come the next global technological revolution, France will have little fiscal space to invest. Even now, France’s dismal fiscal situation hamstrings Macron’s ability to fully lead a new era of European defense, despite his having laid the political groundwork for this kind of cooperation.

In 1991, one of Bayrou’s predecessors as prime minister, the Socialist Party’s Michel Rocard, prophesied that, in the years to come, the French pensions problem would be enough to topple five or six governments. Under Macron, in the last eight months alone, two already have fallen over that very issue.

And yet something has changed: never has a politician been as frank with the electorate about the pensions black hole, and its mode of intergenerational extortion, as Bayrou has been. In his last words to the National Assembly on Monday, he doubled down: “We have broken the bond of trust between generations, the very foundation of the social contract. Young people feel like a sacrificed generation, trapped in a form of servitude from which they must be freed. True awareness also means that older generations should come together to ease the burden of debt that the young will one day have to repay.”

It remains to be seen whether this last act of panache will be seen as a genuine cri de coeur or the ravings of an old politician on the eve of political retirement. Short of Macron calling yet another snap election and somehow winning a majority — based on current polls, he would most likely lose dozens of seats — the next prime minister will be in charge of another minority government and France’s fiscal situation will continue to slide.

And yet, while the situation is critical, it is not fully urgent. France can still afford a few more rating agency downgrades. Its cost of debt is rapidly becoming the highest in Europe, but, given that inflation still outpaces interest rates, the French state can still borrow. The French economy will continue to stagnate for years until it hits a serious fiscal wall or major economic crisis that would force the country to make massive reforms or sink.

So as long as the water boils slowly, the frogs might not know yet that they are being irreversibly cooked. Just enough time for France’s boumeurs to continue to reap the rewards of their generational coup.

The RN’s current leader, Jordan Bardella, could even be crowned the youngest prime minister in French history. Were that to happen, it would represent one of the greatest changes in fortunes for a political movement in Europe. When the Front National was founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen, it was home to an eclectic bunch of collaborationists, résistants, former poujadistes and nostalgics of “French Algeria”. During the Eighties, the far-Right party became the scarecrow of French politics, a toxic electoral no-man’s-land made untouchable by Le Pen’s taste for antisemitism. When it reached the presidential run-off in 2002, it was seen as a catastrophe for the nation, but Le Pen senior and his radioactive brand was never in a position to exercise power (he lost 82-18 in the runoff).

While such a poisonous legacy cannot be completely brushed aside, today’s party — a beast nurtured by Marine, Jean-Marie’s daughter — is no longer a radical outfit on the margins of French politics. Rather, it is better seen as an opportunistic catch-all party increasingly at the centre of France’s margin.

Le Pen has spent 15 years “detoxifying” her party, purging it of its more extreme members, changing its name, and even trading blows with her father in the process. Today, a staggering 92% of Jews believe that Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s Left-wing La France Insoumise contributes to the rise of antisemitism, compared to only 49% for the RN. But the gains are twofold: in election after election, the party has made steady gains, making it to the runoff of the presidential election twice. With the tantalising carrot of real political power, the party has decided to shed any remaining rough edges. The RN, as a result, is running a campaign that can only be described as muted.

Once upon a time, Marine Le Pen was the Marianne of Frexit, making it RN’s central pledge in 2017. Since then, however, the party has avoided putting forward anything that looks like aggressive Euroscepticism. Today, her role model in Europe is Giorgia Meloni: the Italian advocate for nationalism within the EU, rather than nationalism in one country.

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On its criticism of Nato, too, the RN has also softened its stance, citing concerns about the message it would send to France’s allies in Ukraine. Indeed, Vladimir Putin’s war seems to have vaccinated the party from its previous demonstrative signs of Putinophilia; his invasion came just days before Le Pen was about to send out a presidential leaflet with a photo of her shaking hands with Putin. The RN may not be Kyiv’s biggest supporters, but nor have they opposed most of France’s aid packages in recent months.

In fact, on most economic issues, the party is keeping its ambitions low, and watering them down at the first sight of pushback. Most obviously, what should have been the flagship measure — ditching Macron’s pension reform that sets the legal retirement age at 64 — has now been significantly watered-down, to the point where only cosmetic changes are discernible. On energy, meanwhile, Le Pen had pledged to leave the EU market, but Bardella has since suffocated the proposal with fine print. He wants to cut VAT on energy prices, but has made clear this is “pending” on “negotiations in Brussels”.

Even on immigration, the RN’s most radical platform, we can see the spirit of moderation starting to seep in. In fact, the issue only ranks as the “third emergency” for Bardella, behind the cost of living and security. Once driven by its commitment to restricting access to strategic administrative positions for dual citizens and removing birth-right citizenship, the RN has softened its stance. On birth-right citizenship it wants people born in France of foreign parents to have to declare their desire to become French at 18 —a  radical break from French tradition, but not a European anomaly either with many EU countries implementing similarly qualified jus soli regulations. As for the restriction of key strategic positions for dual citizens, it already exists.

And what of the people staffing the party themselves? A lot has been written about Bardella’s photogenic appearance, but much of the RN’s leadership are simply bland and presentable former Right-wingers. After getting 89 MPs elected to parliament in 2022, Le Pen instructed them to put on a tie and to avoid acting like fringe agitators. Naturally, they obeyed, and started to tactfully vote with both the Left and the Macronists on various issues. In their first year in office, RN’s 89 MPs backed around half of the Macronist bills — on everything from squatting to nuclear energy — but also supported the Left on high-profile attempts to censor the government.

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This “strategy of the suit and tie” has paid significant dividends, especially as a foil to the rambunctious agitprop style adopted by their counterparts on the Left, which has made the Le Penists look like serious politicians. The radicalism and ambition of the united left’s “Popular Front” platform (an extra 150 billion euros in spending by 2027) has also helped. It did considerably more to spook markets than the risk of a Bardella premiership and by contrast made the RN’s unfocused hodgepodge of promises look reasonable.

And crucially, as a result, the electorate is starting to treat the RN as a normal party. The historic “barrage républicain“, where Right-wing and Left-wing voters would pinch their noses and vote for anyone but a Le Pen in the run-off lies in tatters. Even centrist voters, when presented with a hypothetical run-off between the Popular Front and RN, put them on an equal footing.

More generally, the appeal of the RN, and of Bardella specifically, has become increasingly widespread: Bardella, with his 17 million TikTok followers, now ranks as the second most popular politician in France. (Édouard Philippe, the centrist Mayor of Le Havre is currently first.) As the pollster Mathieu Gallard writes, the RN now has the most representative demographic breakdown of any party in France.

The caveat, of course, is that even a non-radical RN could end up being hugely disruptive for France. After all, while the RN are no longer made up of hard Eurosceptics, they are certainly not Euroenthusiasts either. And it is unlikely that Le Pen and Bardella will fold into the EU doxa without at least giving the impression of putting up a fight. Indeed, even Bardella’s more moderate platform could spark fireworks in Brussels, particularly over the EU budget, and could have significant debt implications given France’s very tight fiscal space.

And for all of Le Pen’s aspirations to emulate Melonism, the RN, unlike its Italian counterpart, has never participated in a ruling coalition, not even at a sizable regional level. While there has been some frantic speed dating over the past year between the RN and France’s business and administrative elites, the RN does not have a strong establishment footprint yet. So a political transition of this scale could be very rocky.

But for all those risks, the RN no longer acts as a radical party, nor is it seen as such by the larger electorate. It has morphed into an opportunistic catch-all creature: amid all the hysteria blowing in from outside of France, Le Pen and Bardella seem ready to make whatever ideological compromises are necessary.

This isn’t the siege of Aleppo, it’s a scene from Romain Gavras’s Athena, set in one of France’s burning banlieues. Amid the smoke grenades, police and Athenians engage in brutal fighting at close quarters, with metal rods and batons. Later, the police use fire ladders to scale the walls of a tower block. Athenians on wheels circle around a beleaguered police testudo, firing makeshift mortars at point blank range. Men on both sides are visibly shell-shocked.

Athena, a fictitious banlieue, has taken up arms following the death of 13-year-old Idir, apparently at the hands of local police officers. A viral video seemed to confirm it. But rather than being just another anti-cop movie protesting police brutality, Athena never makes it clear whether the police did actually kill Idir. The audience is denied a clear, anti-racist, political message. We are left to choose our own villains.

While the police lay siege to Athena, Idir’s three brothers select very different paths. Karim, the youngest, becomes Athena’s general and messiah, railing against police brutality, masterminding the looting of a nearby police precinct, and manning the defences of Athena. Mokthar, the eldest, is just trying to save his drug empire amid the chaos. The middle brother, Abdel, is a decorated veteran who fought with the French army in Mali, and wants justice for Idir but without bloodshed. The movie is driven by this central tension: between the vengeful idealist, the violent cynic and the honour-bound poster child for French assimilation.

Athena is a dramatisation, shot in Évry-Courcouronnes, just south of Paris — but it could be a documentary set in any of France’s toughest neighbourhoods. Over the past few years, the police have been expelled from these areas (only to come back in massive numbers, for short periods of time, and preferably never at night). Évry-Courcouronnes itself has been rocked by a series of gang-related murders and unspeakably violent clashes. Across France, newspapers overflow with stories of ambulances, firetrucks and police cars being bombarded with fridges, pétanque balls or Molotov cocktails in similar neighbourhoods. The authorities are powerless, just as they are in Athena. As one Athenian boasts while looting the police precinct: “we are the police”.

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The banlieues are ruled by drug cartels, which thrive where economic opportunity is lacking. They generate an estimated €4.2 billion annually in France (the publishing industry, for comparison, generates €3.75 billion) and employs a total of around 21,000 full-time workers. Over the last four decades, successive French governments have poured tens of billions of euros into extraordinary plans banlieues and other “Marshall Plans” to renovate these neighbourhoods and attract businesses, but these territories remain deeply segregated and unattractive. Drug-dealing remains one of the few steady jobs.

Take Kassim from a Marseilles banlieue, interviewed for the BFMTV documentary “Marseilles, the drug war”: he describes his stable, well-paying job as a chouf (who keeps an eye for the police or rival gangs, from the Arabic “to watch”). He is adamant that he is not a gangster, and is proud of the long hours he puts in: “I work just like everyone.”

The cartels are not the only separatist force in these neighbourhoods. The rise of radical political Islam has further alienated parts of the banlieues from the French state. According to the scholar of Jihadism Hugo Micheron, more than 2,000 individuals in France are considered to constitute a direct Jihadist threat, while another 20,000 are closely monitored by French intelligence. But there’s a much larger group of up to 750,000 who sympathise with radical Islamist ideas, according to the pollster Jérôme Fourquet. The Islamist movement is far from united, but it nevertheless educated a significant portion of the next generation to defy the infidel (French society) — a rejection tracked by polls over the last decade.

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In Athena, as in reality, the rebels’ attachment to France fluctuates. After looting the police precinct, a young Athenian in a stolen van proudly waves the tricolore, hinting that the young insurgents seek to do more than avenge the slain Idir. It’s tempting to see the insurrectionists as heroes fighting for a fairer French Republic. But later in the movie, some rebels with a taste for war reinforce the “us and them” narrative. Karim calls his war-hero brother Abdel a “whore in uniform for France”. For having fought for the French army in Mali, Abdel is accused of being an Uncle Tom, a traitor to his “real” community — which sees itself as outside the nation. Are the banlieues even part of France?

French culture seems obsessed with this question. There is currently a proliferation of movies depicting civil wars in banlieues. One of France’s top-grossing movies in 2021, Bac Nord — based on a true story — depicts a confrontation between police and local gangs in the rough north of Marseilles. And Athena itself grew out of 2019’s Les Misérables, which staged a similar banlieue uprising, from the cops’ point of view. It was directed by Ladj Ly, one of the main screenwriters on Athena, and although the confrontation between the police and the locals does not escalate into an all-out war, Gavras has explained: “The idea with Athena was to start with the next riot” — following the events of Les Misérables — “the spark of a confrontation that has not yet happened and that could unfortunately lead to the beginning of a civil war.”

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The French are haunted by their history of civil war. The last one was only 60 years ago: its embers are still warm — something Gavras alludes to by including the occasional Algerian flag in Athena. Some on the French Right, notably Eric Zemmour, have long capitalised on this anxiety, by predicting a new civil war between the “true” French and the Islamised youth. More recently, such fears have spread beyond the far-Right. The country has been seriously rocked by a series of brutal attacks by Islamist terrorists. Last year, polls showed that while only 45% believe that France will soon have a civil war, 86% believe that in some cities and neighbourhoods, the laws of the Republic no longer apply, and 73% that French society is disintegrating.

A year ago, two open letters, written by dozens of retired general and then-anonymous serving soldiers, warned of the looming civil war. They called for the government to reinstate the authority of the state in these neighbourhoods — or, as they called them, these “lost territories of the Republic”. While most officers remain strictly apolitical, the letter got sizeable public support, with 58% of the French backing its authors.

Even centrist politicians wield this kind of rhetoric these days. “Separatism” or “Islamist separatism” are terms commonly used to express concern about these territories. Macron’s former minister of the Interior, Gérard Collomb, delivered a resignation speech in which he worried that while the French were currently living “side by side”, they might soon be “face to face”, given that in many banlieues, “the law of the drug dealers and of the radical Islamists replaced that of the Republic”. Former President François Hollande admitted that he believed there is a “problem with Islam”, and that France is on the path towards “partition” because of the nation’s inability to integrate a “never-ending” flow of migrants.

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Macron himself, once more of a centre-Left multiculturalist comparable to a young Tony Blair, has steered significantly to the Right on matters of identity and immigration. In a controversial attempt to win support from voters to his Right, he gave an interview in the staunchly Right-wing magazine Valeurs Actuelles, in which he suggested a need “deport those who don’t belong here”. Following the assassination of Samuel Paty, the Macronist-dominated Parliament passed a bill which, among other provisions, considerably enhanced the state’s capacity to oversee the organisation and financing of religious associations. It was soon dubbed the “separatism law”.

While some fear civil conflict, others desire it and prepare for it. In Athena, the threat of far-Right groups is ever-present, waiting to capitalise on the chaos. The French state claims that such groups ran a false flag operation to frame the police for Idir’s death. In real life, these cells seem currently too disorganised, or embryonic, or under too much surveillance, to pose a real threat in the short-term. But there’s a distinct possibility that under-the-radar groups or individuals will decide to blindly assassinate those they consider a threat. In 2019, an 83-year-old man tried to burn a mosque in Bayonne, only to get caught red-handed by local parishioners. He shot them on the spot. Gavras did not have to invent much to depict a French society caught between the anvil of Jihadis and the hammer of the far-Right.

It’s hard to imagine any immediate improvement. In fact, things are likely to get much worse, as inflation and the cost of living crisis put even more pressure on France’s poorest neighbourhoods. Politicians on the Right and far-Right will exploit the crisis and imitate the recent successes of Giorgia Meloni and the Swedish Democrats. But policy ideas are few and far between. For a country that spends so much producing stunning civil war narratives, there’s a distinct lack of potential solutions in play. Those being offered range from the laughably insufficient — limiting immigration flows by opposing international trade deals — to the horrifyingly drastic — creating a ministry for “re-migration”.  Athena will not be the last movie of its kind: under a flailing government, the French will continue to fear, and fantasise about, civil war.

That was the atmosphere on the streets of Paris on the night of the first round. The Trocadéro, overlooking the Eiffel Tower, was occupied not by enthusiastic political activists but by tired partygoers who left the building littered with broken glass. The only detritus of the election were a huge “Zemmort 2022” tag (a contraction of Zemmour and the French word for death) and the occasional trampled campaign flier.

Even the presence of Le Pen in the run-off for a second time did not worry the locals, a stark contrast with 2002, when Marine’s father, Jean-Marie, made the second round and jolted the French youth into organising mass demonstrations against the threat of a far-Right presidency. This is the real story of the 2022 election so far. We are witnessing a phantom campaign.

Another striking example of the exceptional disinterest in this year’s campaign: TF1, France’s oldest and most popular TV channel, decided to broadcast the hilarious medieval time-travel movie Les Visiteurs at 10 pm, only two hours after the announcement of the official results. It was the earliest that the channel had ever cut away from its election debrief.

The impression of apathy is backed empirically. Of registered citizens, 26% abstained, the highest number since 2002. 68% found the election “uninteresting”, according to the pollster Ipsos. A month before the first round, “tiredness” was the strongest emotion associated with the election.

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Away from the verbal provocations of Zemmour, the electoral platforms this year were uniformly bland. Even the relatively lacklustre 2017 campaign entertained radical ideas like universal income, enormous public-sector spending cuts, and a potential French exit from the EU. Large-scale rallies, normally essential rites of passage for presidential candidates, were virtually absent from the last few weeks.

The election also suffered dearly from the absence of its main candidate, President Macron. The incumbent announced his campaign a mere four weeks before the vote and held one major rally before the run-off. He declined to show up for any of the debates with the other candidates, largely because he did not want to be reduced to their level at a time when the war in Ukraine imbued him with international stature. His platform was purposefully modest. It focused on Macron’s strongest attribute: his experience.

This lack of public interest in the election — and with it, the lack of any serious debate about the country’s future — will weigh heavily on the French Republic’s health. More than in any other European country, the French President commands immense executive power. He can fire his Prime Minister at will and call early parliamentary elections with virtually no restrictions. And unlike his American counterpart, he cannot be impeached.

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The French psyche is perhaps even more important than France’s institutional landscape. For all the mythology around France decapitating her king, the French have never broken completely from their long monarchic past. De Gaulle, when he founded the Fifth Republic, made it explicitly clear that he was building a “synthesis” between France’s monarchic and republican traditions — one that would give the president considerable power.

Macron has often used the symbolism of the monarchy for political purposes. In 2017, weeks after his election, he hosted Vladimir Putin at the Palace of Versailles, and twice during his term he used his constitutional right to give a speech in Versailles to the Congress in an apparent attempt to develop a French version of the United States’ ‘State of the Union’ address. Before he became President, he said of French politics that “we are missing a king”.

The French presidential election has replaced the coronation ceremony as the symbolic centre of French politics. This means, however, that the présidentielles must be a moment of democratic catharsis. Here is the occasion for France’s electorate to wrestle with all of its frustrations and desires. Debate and political conflict reach new heights, families and friends weigh on the various campaign pledges, and tempers sometimes get out of hand. All topics must be on the table because once the presidential ship has sailed, the opposition parties have few institutional means to steer public policy.

None of that is happening in 2022. And the lack of this ritual catharsis will have profound ripple effects. The next president will lack a strong mandate to implement his (or her) vision. Macron announced mezza voce that he would increase the legal retirement age from 62 to 65, but he has done little legwork in his campaign to get the French on board with this policy. Given France’s long tradition of strikes and Macron’s incapacity to pass a milder pension reform in his first term, this reform could well be political dynamite.

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The 2017 campaign was also underwhelming, albeit to a lesser extent. In its late stages, it was largely highjacked by the centre-Right candidate François Fillon’s financial scandals, which sidelined substantive debate over other issues. Strikingly, in a country that had been recently rocked by a series of high-profile jihadist attacks, the issues of political Islam and what would later be coined “separatism” were largely secondary, as was the question of climate change.

As a result, France wound up electing a president, Macron, that it did not really know. This came back to haunt Macron, who soon discovered that he lacked a mandate for much of his governing agenda. On questions of Islam and identity, for instance, Macron ran a campaign in 2017 that embraced the traditional multiculturalism of the centre-Left. He praised German Chancellor Angela Merkel for welcoming over one million refugees in 2015 and provoked many conservatives by stating that there was “no such thing as French culture, there is a culture in France and it is diverse”. In the aftermath of Brexit and Trump, he was heralded by the liberal international media as the new internationalist champion to slay populist dragons.

This very New Labour stance on identity did not hold. In a blend of tactical triangulation and real concern about France’s unity, Macron, once in office, steered sharply to the Right on immigration and identity. He gave a 12-page interview to the staunchly Right-wing magazine Valeurs Actuelles in which he echoed many of its concerns on immigration, and his minister of the interior, Gérald Darmanin, a former Nicolas Sarkozy ally, even called Le Pen “soft” when she argued that jihadism had nothing to do with Islam. Many of his Left-wing supporters in Parliament abandoned him in response to this about-face.

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Putin has secured a Macron victory

By John Lichfield

But it was the issue of environmentalism that led to Macron’s first real setback in November 2018. Increasingly resentful rural French, who felt condescended to by a president who was accumulating a series of insensitive gaffes (including telling someone to “cross the road to find a job”), finally revolted when Macron went along with a scheduled green tax on diesel. Thousands of Gilets Jaunes rose up across the country, occupied roundabouts, and headed to Paris to manifest their profound discontent.

Macron undeniably paid for 40 years of governmental disinterest for what Christophe Guilluy has called “peripheral France”, but he also suffered from the lack of cathartic debate over his policies, including his green pledges. Although the French state was eventually able to repress the riots and protests, the Gilets Jaunes represented an outburst of revolutionary anger against the system. Denied a proper debate over the direction of their country, many ordinary people felt that taking to the streets was their only option.

So while over the next few days all eyes will be on the genuine, albeit still somewhat hypothetical, risks of a Le Pen presidency, the real poison for French democracy might already be in its veins. In 2017, the pollster Brice Teinturier published the prophetic “Plus Rien à faire, Plus rien à foutre” (don’t care, don’t give a damn), in which he demonstrated that 40% of French citizens were disappointed with French politics, 13% angry, 20% disgusted, 9% indifferent. Only 18% expressed positive emotions. Teinturier even hinted that anger might be preferable to apathy, because angry citizens still want to believe in a cause. Apathetic citizens have given up.

Assuming that Macron is indeed re-elected, France’s monarchical republic will give him all of the power he needs to muscle his agenda through the country’s institutions. But, after the experience of his first term, we should all be concerned that the French Republic will pay dearly for this year’s phantom campaign.