France, after all, has descended into chaos. The national debt has hit record highs. No budget has been voted for 2026. And the government is unlikely to last more than a week.

Prime Minister François Bayrou is on track to lose a confidence vote on 8 September. Since there is no majority in the National Assembly, no one knows what comes next. President Emmanuel Macron could try to appoint a new prime minister — if anyone can command enough support — or call snap legislative elections.

Not if Mélenchon gets his way. The founder of the La France Insoumise party (LFI) wants Macron’s head. The President must resign. “We are in a regime crisis,” he declared, channeling his inner Robespierre. “What is on the agenda now is moving to a Sixth Republic.” Since Macron won’t oblige, he has ordered his MPs to file a motion to impeach the President. It stands no chance of succeeding, but that doesn’t matter to Mélenchon. He has also supported a mass strike on 10 September.

These aren’t just the hijinks of an aging Trotskyist longing for the revolutionary frissons of his youth. Mélenchon is a leading personnage on the French political scene. He ditched the Parti Socialiste to form his own outfit in 2008. Nearly 20 years and a few name changes later, LFI is a force to be reckoned with. It holds 71 seats in the French Parliament, making it the third largest group after Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National and President Emmanuel Macron’s Ensemble.

But Mélenchon has loftier ambitions than parliamentary democracy. His obsession is the presidency: he has run three times. He posted his best result in 2022, finishing third in the first round with 22% of the vote, just behind Le Pen at 23.2%. Fear not, though, the révolution was merely postponed. Everyone in Paris knows he’s gearing up for another run in 2027 — or sooner if Macron throws in the towel.

Mélenchon is unlikely to become president — and he probably knows it. He is too radical to win over the majority of voters at the ballot box. But that’s not his real concern. A revolutionary at heart, Mélenchon wants to foment chaos and become the uncontested leader of the shambolic French Left. The LFI as well as the Communists, Greens, and Socialists came together at the last election under the umbrella of the Nouveau Front Populaire. But the alliance exists only on paper. Its leaders can’t agree on anything. Mélenchon wants all of them to follow him. Only then will the Left be saved.

But far from being the savior of the French Left, Mélenchon is its executioner. His craving for power has led him to betray every principle the Left is supposed to uphold. La France Insoumise runs counter to Republican ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité. It is the mirror image of Le Pen’s Rassemblement National. Both parties are built on exclusion. They just disagree about who is to blame for France’s troubles.

To even call LFI Left-wing is to besmirch the long tradition of French socialism as a force for progress. Mélenchon’s party spurns the animating ethos of the French Left: universalism. All citizens are equal in the eyes of the Republic. Race and religion aren’t important. That’s not to say the French Left ignores discrimination — it doesn’t — but the fight against discrimination is ultimately a fight for everyone to be treated the same.

Not so in the eyes of LFI. The party is openly sectarian. It flirts with Islamists — including groups linked to the Muslim Brotherhood — and exploits religious grievances. Look no further than its attacks on laïcité (secularism): the Republican principle that religion belongs to the private sphere. When Macron’s government banned the traditional Muslim abaya robe from schools, LFI was up in arms. Mélenchon accused the government of being “obsessed” with Islam. His sycophantic sidekick, Manuel Bompard, fumed that secularism was being exploited “to stigmatize one religion in particular”.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Banning teenage girls from wearing the abaya in the Republic’s schools is no more anti-Muslim than banning the kippa is antisemitic or banning the turban is anti-Sikh. To pretend otherwise is a deliberate provocation. In a country scarred by repeated Islamist attacks, including the beheading of a school teacher, that’s indecent.

Indecency, however, is hardwired into the DNA of LFI. Any greatest hits compilation would have to include its press release on 7 October 2023. “The armed offensive of Palestinian forces led by Hamas comes in a context of intensification of Israel’s policy of occupation in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem,” it began. “We deplore the Israeli and Palestinian dead.” It ended by calling for a “ceasefire” and “the end of colonization”. Nowhere does it mention that the Islamist group had killed more than a thousand Jews in a pogrom of medieval barbarity.

Believe it or not, it’s only gone downhill from there. Mélenchon and his henchmen have refused to call Hamas terrorists. For them, the plight of the Palestinian people is just a political weapon. The target: anyone who expresses even a modicum of support for Israel. In many cases, it reeks of antisemitism.

And in this respect, Mélenchon leads the pack, of course. He accused Yaël Braun-Pivet, the Jewish President of the National Assembly, of “camping in Tel Aviv to encourage the massacre”. He also attacked his former friend, the Jewish Socialist Jérôme Guedj, for “pleading for an ‘in-between’ between genociders and supposed supporters of the ‘erasure of Israel’.” In reality, Guedj is a steadfast supporter of the two-state solution and a vocal critic of Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-Right government. His only crime: defending Israel’s right to exist — and being Jewish.

But there’s no low Mélenchon won’t stoop to. “What’s interesting,” he added about Guedj, “is watching him fidget around the post where the leash of his affiliation keeps him tied.” Guedj’s response says it all: “I must say of the man I deeply loved that he’s become an antisemitic bastard.”

How did that happen? And how did LFI become so toxic? To figure that out, you have to go back to the very beginning of Mélenchon’s political career.

Mélenchon started out on the far-Left in the Seventies. But he wasn’t just on the far-Left, he was a Trotskyist. And he wasn’t your milquetoast Trotskyist either, he was a Lambertist. Lambertists took their name from Pierre Lambert, the leader of the revolutionary Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (OCI). Mélenchon spent three years in the OCI. Although he doesn’t like to talk about them, he has admitted they were “very important years in my intellectual formation”.

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Mélenchon learned operating principles in the OCI that still guide him today. For one, the leader is always right. Lambert was domineering and distant — there was no internal democracy at OCI. What the red godfather said went. Mélenchon runs LFI the same way. It’s his fiefdom. When talking to the media, he likes to portray himself as a mentor to fledgling progressives. “We never had youth organizations for one reason,” he said recently. “The young people were the ones who were running the show!” Ever the altruist, he added: “I’m just one element.”

But that’s propaganda even Pravda wouldn’t have run. “La France Insoumise is me!” he once exclaimed. According to La Meute, a new exposé by French muckrakers Charlotte Belaïch and Olivier Pérou, Mélenchon runs his party like a “cult”.

“This isn’t about the angry outbursts of an authoritarian man, but about domination and submission,” Belaïch and Pérou write. “It’s not about the discipline needed to win power, but about control.” As one LFI MP told the reporters: “Normally, you wouldn’t let anyone treat you the way Jean-Luc treats you. Not even your mother or your father could make you crawl like that.”

Like his old boss Lambert, Mélenchon loves nothing more than a good purge. Every few years, he “renews” the movement and promotes the youth. Supposedly, it keeps his finger on the pulse of the masses. In truth, it’s a smokescreen. Mélenchon can’t stand anyone stealing his limelight. Far from mentoring a new generation, he crushes anyone who shows promise. Even if that means dissing collaborators who have stood by him for decades.

Instead, Mélenchon has packed LFI with dunces, charlatans and fanatics. They’ve turned the National Assembly into a crèche. The breakout star has to be Sébastien Delogu — a trade union representative and Mélenchon’s former driver, now MP for Marseille North. “Mélenchon is God, and me, I am the son of God,” Delogu likes to say.

The 38-year-old speaks five words a minute, so profound are his thoughts. He once admitted on live radio that he didn’t know who Philippe Pétain was. “I’ve heard about him, and I know that apparently he’s a racist,” Delogu said.

Mélenchon learned another important lesson from his time with Lambert: you must be willing to do anything to gain power. What set Lambertists apart on the far-Left was their duplicity. Lambert realized it would be impossible to stage a revolution. It wasn’t 1789 anymore. He had no popular support. So, instead, he adopted a strategy of entryism. He planted undercover agents in other Left-wing movements, such as the Parti Socialiste. Mélenchon joined the party in 1976, shortly after leaving the OCI.

Some Socialists now speculate that Mélenchon was one of Lambert’s moles. “With hindsight, I think: he looked every inch the mole,” said Claude Germon, the former mayor of Massy in the Paris suburbs who hired Mélenchon as his chief of staff in 1978. Julien Dray, a prominent Socialist strategist and erstwhile ally of Mélenchon, agrees. In his book Qui Est Mélenchon, he suggests the latter played a double game for years.

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Yet it didn’t pay off: Mélenchon never gained power in the Socialist Party. He spent 20 years as a senator, a marginal post in French politics, and never held a major cabinet role. The best he could manage was a short stint as Minister Delegate for Vocational Education. Whatever Mélenchon did, others did better. He had neither the intellectual heft of Dominique Strauss-Kahn nor the killer instinct of François Hollande. Doomed to be an extra, he quit the Socialists, high on his own ressentiment.

At first, Mélenchon tried to build a traditional Left-wing movement. His objective was to win back the working class from Le Pen’s far-Right. In 2012, he ran to be an MP in the industrial wastelands of Northern France for the Front de Gauche, the precursor of LFI. But, there too, he failed. “It’s the worst campaign I’ve ever had,” he reportedly said, complaining he couldn’t connect with poor white voters. “You understood nothing they said… They were sweating alcohol from morning… They smelt bad… Almost all obese.”

Five years later, Mélenchon failed again: he didn’t qualify for the second round of the presidential election. He was 600,000 votes short. And so he abandoned his plan to compete with Le Pen. That wouldn’t catapult him into power. His new base would be the banlieues — those forgotten corners of the Republic. As Dray explains, “the 600,000 missing votes could be found… in these relegated areas that have gradually become ethnic ghettos with large immigrant populations, where Islam is settling in an endemic way, becoming the only active political force.”

Like a true Lambertist, Mélenchon shed his old skin and reinvented himself. If that meant forsaking his core beliefs, so be it. The end justifies the means. He once waxed lyrical about secularism. He once loathed Islamism. He once called the burqa “degrading” and compared women wearing it to “ghosts”. No matter. The new Mélenchon will play footsie with Islamists and defend the abaya.

The irony is that Mélenchon poses as the defender of French Muslims, but his strategy betrays how little he must think of them. He seems to believe they will be won over with sectarian dog-whistles. Rather than speaking to French Muslims as French citizens, he speaks to them as Muslims. In this respect, he resembles Le Pen.

Herein lies the fatal flaw of Mélenchon’s electoral strategy: it underestimates a diverse Muslim electorate. Yes, it might get him the handful of votes he needs to qualify for the second round of the next presidential election. But it risks alienating many Muslims — and large swathes of the electorate.

Mélenchon doesn’t care. A theory making the rounds in Paris is that Mélenchon doesn’t seriously believe he can be president. If he faced a far-Right candidate — either Le Pen or Jordan Bardella — in the second round, they would trounce him. Where he has pursued a strategy of radicalism, they have pursued one of “de-diabolisation”. In the eyes of the majority of French voters, the devil is now Mélenchon. That suits him just fine: deep down he remains a Trotskyist. His bet is simple. If the far-Right wins, civil war will erupt between the state and the banlieues. You can guess who will lead the Résistance.

When Barnier was appointed Prime Minister after the long summer of indecision, Bayrou theorized that it would be better to come after Barnier’s downfall, because surely the parliament would find it harder to censure a government a second time. But this week, as the Assembly musters against him already, he may yet have to eat his words.

Bayrou’s nomination a month ago came as something of a surprise to the public, given how long he has been around without ever securing the top jobs. This time, though, Bayrou had left no one in any doubt that he wanted Prime Minister and President Macron was running out of options. The story his supporters tell is that he was summoned to the Elysée only for Macron to tell him he wanted someone more pliable and likely to take orders than Barnier had been. But after Bayrou threw a furious tantrum, threatening to withdraw his support in the national assembly, Macron backed down.

Just as Bayrou carries the whiff of angry desperation about him, then, so too does his government — some of whom have been hauled out of the political deep freeze. One is the former socialist prime minister, Manuel Valls. After resigning from the Socialist Party, Valls briefly sat as an MP for Macron’s party after the 2017 legislative elections, only to quit in an attempt to become the mayor of Barcelona. Another is Elisabeth Borne, a recent Prime Minister, whose reappearance was an unpleasant surprise for all those who took to the streets to oppose her pension reform bill.

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Most problematic for Bayrou’s government is that it hasn’t got a firm purchase in the National Assembly. This, after all, is what brought Barnier down. The appointment of Valls is a red rag to the socialist bull. Borne is also a snub to the Left, embodying, as she does, the much-hated pension reform. Bayrou is clearly hoping that his relatively cordial relations with Marine Le Pen will help him avoid the fate she handed Barnier as she worked with the Left to bring the last prime minister down.

Bayrou symbolically offered Marine Le Pen his support back in 2022, when she was struggling to acquire the necessary signatures to run in the presidential campaign (candidates have to secure at least 500 signatures from mayors across France). Back then, Bayrou argued that democracies are nourished by ideological differences and that candidates such as Le Pen should not be prevented from standing by an alliance of anti-far Right mayors. Le Pen’s memory is short, however. Her response to Bayrou’s nomination was the same it was to Barnier’s: he will be judged by his actions.

And so, this week, Bayrou’s theory about it being hard to censure a government a second time around is being put to the test: he delivered his speech of political intent on the 14 January and deftly avoided making any firm commitments for fear of angering one of the camps in the parliament. Instead, he presented a vision of government that evolved through time, adjusting its actions in line with the compromises it must make. It was impressive in its ability to transform a significant lack of commitment into a noble principle of government. Perhaps this is how the wily politician has survived so long — he was, after all, education secretary when Emmanuel Macron was still a love-struck student.

Reactions to his speech, and to the censure motion put forward by the far-Left La France Insoumise, suggest that Bayrou may be sticking around for a little longer. It seems he has succeeded in undoing the unity on the Left, at least with regards to the censure motion. The Socialist Party decided, in extremis, not to support it, thus in effect splitting the New Popular Front alliance which has been in place since the legislative elections last year. The sticking point for the Socialists was pension reform. Bayrou took a classic middle-way position: he refused to suspend the reform but he did say he would organize a three-month consultation. When pushed, he said he would be inclined to support a new deal for pensions should there be agreement as a result of the consultation. This was just about enough for the socialists.

As well as all the parties of government, including the center-right Républicains, making it clear they will not support the vote of censure, the far-Right appears is also on side. Jordan Bardella lambasted Bayrou’s speech but the Rassemblement National as a whole has opted to hold its fire. Only days after the death of Jean Marie Le Pen, the party’s co-founder, Marine Le Pen and Bardella are playing a somewhat longer game. Thinking of their electoral prospects over the next two years, neither wishes to be seen as the harbingers of doom nor as needlessly reckless or radical.

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In essence then, Bayrou’s calculation may have been correct. Bringing down a government is an exhilarating and dramatic gesture and a month ago it sent a clear message to the president, holed up in the Elysée Palace with a few of his cronies. But bringing down a second government would tell the country, and the world, that France has become ungovernable. There would, too, be serious consequences such as the need to survive without passing a proper budget and to pay increasingly higher interest on the renewal of its debt.

It would be quite wrong, though, to present Bayrou’s survival as some kind of political triumph or success. The cost of his strategy is considerable. As the prime minister tries his hardest to prevent the parliament from censuring him, it is hard to imagine that his government will pursue anything like a coherent plan for France. His legislative outputs will end up being an aggregate of whatever can make it through the parliament unscathed. Peace in the national assembly is no longer the means via which the government can pursue its program; it has become an end in itself. His is a government that will be defined not by what it does but simply by its capacity to survive.

This is a low bar, particularly given the challenges France is facing, from a faltering economy to the need to determine Europe’s response to the imminent arrival of Trump at the White House. It is unlikely that history will treat the Bayrou government very favorably, even if he does last longer than his predecessor.

The mere idea that Donald Trump might be compared to Charles de Gaulle will provoke howls of outrage — and not just in France. De Gaulle lived a life of austere simplicity. When his grandchildren came to tea at the Élysée Palace, he told the servants to bring him the bill for the cakes that they had consumed. He read widely and took great pains in the composition of his own books. One should never say never when talking about Donald Trump, but I feel on moderately safe ground in predicting that The Art of the Deal will not, unlike de Gaulle’s memoirs, be published in the Pléiade series that is devoted to great works of literature.

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And yet, despite their differences, both men referred, with almost obsessive frequency, to “greatness”. De Gaulle said that France cannot be herself without greatness just as Trump promised to “make America great again”. But greatness is a revealingly vague term. Leaders of states that really exercise great power — namely, Britain in the late 19th century or the United States in the late 20th century — rarely talk about it. They mask their hegemony beneath talk of cooperation and altruism. The British sometimes gave the impression that ruling the largest empire that the world had ever seen was an inconvenient burden of which they were too honourable to divest themselves.

Trump and de Gaulle both ruled — in Trump’s case will probably rule again — nations in decline. In France’s case, the decline was obvious. The country was defeated in 1940. Stirring broadcasts from London and the presence of small numbers of Free French troops in the allied forces could not change this fact. Churchill was cruel when he told his foreign secretary that the number of Canadians who had shed their blood to liberate France was greater than the number of Frenchmen who had done so, but in purely statistical terms he was probably right. After the Second World War, France lost its empire and the most dramatic moment in this process came in 1962, when de Gaulle, to the bitter disappointment of a million European settlers and much of the French army, decided that France could no longer hold on to Algeria. “High Gaullism” — the period from 1962 to 1967 — was marked by flamboyant gestures in foreign policy but the territory that de Gaulle ruled was smaller than that of the Third Republic (1870 to 1940), which de Gaulle talked of with ostentatious disdain.

American decline is more complicated. It is still the richest and most militarily powerful country on Earth. Trump’s detractors make much of his chequered business career. In truth, though, Trump’s time in business was a good preparation for leading the United States in the 21st century. The USA, like the Trump Organization, inherited much from an earlier generation, which built the country’s power and prosperity after the Second World War. But the United States is living on borrowed money because it has huge debts. It is also, like Britain and France in the Twenties, living on borrowed time. The end of the Cold War brought its apparent zenith — just as the peace settlements after the First World War brought the apparent zenith of Britain and France — and no other country is yet able and inclined to challenge America as the global power. But America’s economic superiority is finished. China’s growth may have stalled in the last few years, but everyone expects it to outstrip the United States within the foreseeable future.

Trump understands the underlying weakness of his country. Hence his obsession with the Chinese challenge and his desire to stop paying for the defence of other countries. Like de Gaulle, Trump has used a smokescreen of grandiose rhetoric to cover what is really a retreat from American commitments overseas. He understands that American greatness has become an illusion to be sustained rather than a reality to be defended. De Gaulle was also an illusionist, and it is no accident that, in their very different ways, both men were products of the television age. De Gaulle’s Fifth Republic was built on the spread of television sets in the Sixties — and state control of the national broadcast — as much as Trump’s political take-off was built on cable TV and Fox News. De Gaulle’s stage-managed press conferences and dramatic addresses to the nation in moments of crisis were as contrived as Trump’s performance in The Apprentice.

When it suited him, De Gaulle would turn a blind eye to repression in other countries if he wanted their leaders as allies. He was on an official visit to Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania when the student began tearing up the cobblestones in May 1968. Trump is equally sure that morality should have no role in foreign policy. He respects power and leaders who are not afraid to use power. If the circumstances are right, he is happy to do business with Saudi Arabia or North Korea.

Since the Second World War, most democratic leaders have had a particular emotional attachment to one country: the United States. Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Barack Obama all believed that America was a repository of virtue. There are two great exceptions. One was Charles de Gaulle. For him, America was simply a centre of industrial and military power; American idealism meant nothing. The American politician whom he most respected was not Kennedy or Roosevelt but Nixon. The other exception is Trump: a man who once, when asked to explain why he was not worried by the fact that Putin was a “killer”, replied: “You think our country’s so innocent?”

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There is, of course, one respect in which Trump and de Gaulle differ dramatically. Trump has never accepted the result of the 2020 election and did everything that he could to cling to power after it. De Gaulle, by contrast, sometimes seemed eager to leave office when confronted with the mere hint of an electoral reverse. In 1969, a cause that he supported in a referendum was defeated. This had no constitutional implications — his presidential mandate had another three years to run — but he had resigned, packed his bags and returned to his country house in Colombey-les-deux-Églises within hours.

It would, though, be too simple to see a neat division between de Gaulle the defender of democratic propriety and Trump its enemy. De Gaulle had returned to power in 1958 as the result of what was, effectively, a military coup, during which the army took power in Algeria and threatened to take it in mainland France. De Gaulle did not endorse the actions of soldiers — but those who thought that they were speaking on his behalf did so and de Gaulle never disavowed them. He told the president of the two houses of the National Assembly that, if they did not support this return to power, he would do nothing — but that they would then “have to explain themselves to the paratroopers”.

If something kept de Gaulle from making himself a dictator, it was not admiration for democracy. His last visit abroad was a trip to Franco’s Spain in the summer of 1970. Rather, de Gaulle was restrained by a sense of balance and measure. He thought that dictatorships were likely to finish badly because they would always be sucked into “exaggerated enterprises”. He anticipated that the United States itself might choose “some general” to sort things out during the chaos of the late Sixties, but that this general would probably fail.  Most of all, de Gaulle was distinguished from Trump by his pessimism about all human endeavours including, in the end, his own. He was intensely aware of the difference between de Gaulle the public man — an image that he had so carefully constructed for the French people — and de Gaulle the fallible human being. For more than a decade before his death in November 1970, his writing was frequently marked by reference to old age and the turning of autumn to winter. Somehow, I suspect that Trump — who is now one year younger than de Gaulle was at the moment of his death — is not as reconciled to his own mortality.

That party, Les Républicains, now a sad rump that will struggle to poll 7% in June’s European elections, promptly expelled her. It won’t change her trajectory: a mediocre MEP in opposition, she has flourished as mayor of Paris’s posh 7th Arrondissement, where, from early misgivings at her flamboyance, the constituents have now become her biggest fans. The general opinion is that Dati, the consummate retail politician, gets things done: the streets are clean, the schools work, no letter goes unanswered. The 7th was the first Paris Mairie to provide Covid vaccinations, and Dati said no Paris resident from any neighbourhood would be turned away, enraging the hapless City Mayor Anne Hidalgo, whose job she is shooting for in 2026. Being the pepper and salt in an Attal Cabinet smooths her path towards that goal, just as it suits Emmanuel Macron, who courted her himself this week.

Until that moment, in the form of Attal, Macron seemed to have straightforwardly indulged himself with a compatible quasi-clone who’d run affairs in a concentrated style of the President’s own reactive moods. (It’s hard to call them vision, or ideas: they’re consecutive, often contradictory, always context-dependent.) The choice of Dati, the Marmite of French Right-wing politics, certainly signals that the strongman image Attal was sometimes finding hard to project is truly meant to finally address the slide of the French Overton Window Right-ward.

Currently, Macron presents as a conservative. This changes on demand: once the Economy Minister under the president he supplanted, François Hollande, he coined the “en même temps” (“at the same time”) slogan during his victorious 2017 campaign to garner supporters from the Left and from the Right. It was one of the reasons he got rid of Attal’s predecessor, the loyal, hard-working, but dour Élisabeth Borne (dour doesn’t play well in Macron’s court; you need to look at all times like you’re having the time of your life). She had consistently failed to sell his latest showpiece bills in Parliament. In both cases, whether pensions reform or the recent immigration law, Macron had got the Socialist Borne to defend bills written to court the Right-wing vote — and both abhorred by the Left, Borne’s former political family. The legislative mess that ensued wasn’t of Borne’s making, but a reminder to the President that, what a bore, he had lost his majority.

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Enter Gabriel Attal. From the very start he had proved himself one of Macron’s most successful Wunderkinder. A full 12 years younger than the youngest-ever president of the Fifth Republic, and like him an up-and-coming young Socialist under François Hollande, he rose within five years from an internship at the National Assembly to Macronista MP, having jumped onto the future president’s campaign team bandwagon. Articulate, preternaturally poised, he became a junior Education minister in 2018 at 29, Cabinet spokesman in 2020, Public Accounts minister in 2023, and Education Secretary one year later. He managed to talk up the latter job up so well (back to basics, secular principles, anti-bullying measures, wooing the conservative vote from the urban middle class to the more moderate end of Marine Le Pen’s voters) that no-one realised he left it without anything meaningful to show.

The obvious danger to Macron is (at least) two-fold. If Attal’s charmed trajectory continues, there’s a possibility that voters will prefer the 2.0 version to the somewhat ship-soiled original. Macron’s popularity has already tanked to 25-27%, while Attal polls at 48%, leaving all the conditions in place for three years of presidential lame-duckery. But it’s also possible that a fractious country, faced once again with a bright, snappy know-it-all who fails to project much empathy, will be reminded of the younger Macron seven years ago, and simply think: “Non, pas encore!”

If anything, Attal is already more camera-trained than Macron. Most TV coverage of this week’s reshuffle included footage of Attal aged nine, interviewed during a theatre class for a documentary at his school, École Alsacienne, a breeding ground for the Paris élite (think a combination of Winchester and St Paul’s). And, compared to the pre-digital Nineties video of another aspiring actor, the somewhat overwrought 15-year-old Macron, a gulf does open up. The latter, onstage at the end of term fête at his provincial Jesuit Lycée (watched in the wings by his future wife and drama teacher Brigitte Auzière); and Attal, the self-possessed golden child ticking off Comédie Française leading parts on camera.

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Though Attal never was an Adrian Mole, his early years were like those of another English comic creation: the little Sebastian Moon remembered by Bertie Wooster in Thank You Jeeves. “If ever there was a kid whose whole appearance seemed to call aloud to any right-minded boy to lure him into a quiet spot and inflict violence upon him, that kid was undeniably Sebastian Moon. He reminded me strongly of Little Lord Fauntleroy. I don’t know why it is, but I’ve never been able to bear with fortitude anything in the shape of a kid with golden curls…” No Wodehouse reader since Duff Cooper has ever mistaken his glorious jokes for reality, but it is interesting that Attal was bullied at school. Actors’ Studio-style, he even used it as a clever confession when getting the Education job, reaching out to a large constituency of worried parents.

He was also neatly defusing the fact that he is France’s first gay prime minister. His chief bully, Juan Branco, now a barrister who includes Julian Assange among his clients, was then and now brought to hysteria by Attal’s homosexuality. He later published an entire book denouncing the “elite hothouse” of his old school, tweeting the most unhinged accusations last Tuesday in case they’d been forgotten. This, if anything, has helped rather than harmed Attal — and lanced a possible boil early. But still, the minute his nomination was confirmed, the hard-Left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon coyly tweeted, (mis)quoting the title of a Henry de Montherlant play, “Malheur aux peuples dont les princes sont des enfants” (“Woe betide the peoples whose princes are children”). It was a riff on the 1951 La ville dont le prince est un enfant, one of the classics of allusive gay works in French literature.

Reliable reports say Attal took the tweet in stride, though at the Élysée Macron went ballistic. However, it’s likely that the President immediately saw what an own goal it was for the France Insoumise chief, and played it up at no risk, since even Marine Le Pen has been running a gay-friendly party for over a decade. And the Attal nomination is more about setting the ground for tomorrow’s battles. The National Rally’s list at the June European elections, which currently polls at almost one third of the vote (setting it well ahead of Macron’s Renaissance party at 20%), will be headed by the party president and Marine’s very own Wunderkind, the 28-year-old Jordan Bardella, a banlieue grandson of Italian and Algerian immigrants and a university dropout. Bardella joined what was then the National Front in 2012, aged just 16, “more for Marine than her father”, as he said at the time.

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If anything, his career has soared even faster than Attal’s. At 19 he was a Regional Councillor of the Paris area. Soon, mirroring Attal’s trajectory, Bardella was party spokesman, and in 2019 he was elected the second-youngest MEP in history aged 23. As poised as Attal, but in a more relatable way, Bardella, without the benefit of a luxury education, has already held his own in television debates with the future French PM. They’re both fighting for the same marginal votes, beyond any core constituency. “When you sell a youthful image, it’s to reach out to old people,” as the political scientist Valerio Motta says.

If Attal clicks with Dati — and his colleagues say he’s been friends with her for some time — she will act as his guarantor, ensuring that his vow to “regenerate” France is not just spin. She is of a comparable age to Marine Le Pen, which creates, at least subconsciously, a kind of parallel between a young newcomer and the female politician with experience of failure as well as success. Certainly it lifts the current Cabinet from the colourless technocratic style that has marked the last seven years of Macron governance. No-one in the country doubts Dati is capable of taking the President on, even at the cost of her job. Attal’s friends have been saying all last week that he too is capable of independence, even wilfulness, against Macron when he thinks he is in error. If this tag-team works out, they both have higher hopes for the future. Attal would love to be Macron’s successor; Dati wants to reign over Paris. Even if they don’t succeed, it will make the French political scene more open and vibrant than it’s been in years.

A “tale of two crises” has unfolded in the last few days on the southern and northern shores of the English Channel. Both crises flow, in part, from the high rates of inflation caused by the Ukraine war and the retreat of the Covid pandemic.

In Britain, where inflation is just over 10%, a political crisis wrapped in a financial crisis has threatened to destroy the private pensions system on which millions depend. A chancellor was ejected after a few weeks in office; another prime minister has gone. Britain, though, has so far escaped civil unrest.

On Tuesday in France, however, (with inflation running at “only” 6%) there were around 200,000 people on the streets. A strike for higher pay by oil refinery workers has made petrol and diesel scarce and have spread to the railways, the Metro, schools and other public services.

Some have suggested this could be the start of a “new May 1968” or the “Popular Front” rebellion of the Thirties which gave French workers higher wages and paid holidays. It could mark the beginning of a generalised revolt, both in streets and in parliament, which could destroy President Emmanuel Macron’s second term. His Prime Minister, Élisabeth Borne, was obliged this week to resort to emergency powers to push her government’s 2023 budget through the National Assembly. Losing his parliamentary majority in the legislative elections in June (two months after winning presidential re-election) is coming back to haunt him.

But there’s a fundamental difference between the crises afflicting France and Britain. What has happened in the UK in the last few days is bizarre and unprecedented. What is happening in France is more or less normal — for France — after three years in which social unrest has been largely paused. Macron’s first term was littered with such protests, first by the Gilets Jaunes and then by union marches and strikes against pension reform.

The Gilets Jaunes rebellion of 2018-9 was very unusual — at first. It started in the apolitical, lower-middle and working classes of the countryside and outer suburbs. It was eventually hijacked by the metropolitan anti-state and anti-everything far-Left. “Fake” Gilets Jaunes and their anarchist allies dressed in black were active once again on the margins of the Paris marches this week, vandalising “capitalist” banks and burning “capitalist” litter bins.

The bulk of this week’s protests came from equally predicable sources: the militant trades union federation, the CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail ) and, before that, in a Paris march on Sunday, the hard-Left party, La France Insoumise (LFI). The CGT leader Philippe Martinez spoke of creating that perpetual fantasy of the French Left: une convergence des luttes — a merging of disparate protests and social conflicts into a single anti-government and anti-boss rebellion. He hoped that a decision by the Macron-Borne government to break, or bend, the oil strike by requisitioning key workers would produce a powerful reaction in defence of the right to strike.

The leader of the LFI and Macron’s one-time presidential rival, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, even predicted the beginning of a new “Popular Front” — a “conjunction” of Left-wing and environmental causes to create a “cycle” of revolt “never seen before in our country”. Both predictions fell flat on their faces. Mélenchon forecast 300,000 marchers on Sunday and claimed 140,000. An independent survey for the main French media organisations counted 29,500.

The day of strikes on Tuesday was somewhat more effective but not much. Only one in four rail workers stopped work. The great “convergence des luttes” was supported by 6% of teachers and 4% of public employees. The biggest French trades union federation (there are at least eight of them), the CFDT (Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail), refused to join in. The CGT oil strike, already fading, has since fallen apart. Only two out of seven refineries are still blocked and filling stations are slowly returning to normal, and the CFDT and other moderates had already signed pay deals with Total and Esso.

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It’s not all over yet. There is a dangerous challenge to Macron from CGT-affiliated workers in the nuclear industry. Just under half of France’s 56 nuclear reactors are already closed for emergency repairs and routine maintenance and the strike is delaying their re-opening. If it persists, there could be widespread black-outs this winter. In sum, the hard Left overplayed its hand this week but they will threaten Macron again later in the year.

Macron and his government acted earlier than any other country in the European Union to soften the impact of inflation. They spent €100 billion this year and plan to spend another €45 billion in 2023 to keep down the price of petrol, diesel, domestic gas and electricity. France has the lowest inflation rate in the EU — an annual rate of 5.6% in September, compared to 9.9% in the Eurozone as a whole. Unfortunately for Macron, the French do not shop or fill their petrol tanks “elsewhere”. They shop in France. Even a softened inflation rate has left many people on low to medium salaries struggling to get by.

Because of arcane government rules, those on the statutory minimum wage — Le Smic — have enjoyed a cumulative rise of 8% this year. This has squeezed margins with workers on slightly higher, but still low-to-medium wage levels, leaving them feeling devalued, financially and socially. Both Macron and Élisabeth Borne have been slow to grasp this problem. They were also slow to realise that the vast windfall profits of the oil industry would permit the well-paid refinery workers to become an unlikely symbol of social injustice (to some).

Macron had wanted to keep down wages to prevent an inflationary spiral which would damage France’s competitiveness. Instead, he subsidised energy prices and offered tax breaks for one-off bonuses, hoping that would blunt the demands for higher pay. In recent days, his Prime Minister and other ministers have been belatedly urging all employers to consider wage rises — on top of the bonuses and the splurge of state-spending to dampen inflation. In other words, long-term, economic policy has been jettisoned in an attempt to calm the social unrest.

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By a quirk of the political calendar, Macron and Borne also collided head-on this week with the scattered, but numerically greater, opposition in the National Assembly. Opponents of the Left, Right and far-Right had been picking apart the 2023 draft budget, trying to add billions in pet spending plans. Events in Britain might have warned them of the market dangers of messing with debt and deficits, and France’s overall national debt is much higher than Britain’s — 114.6% of GDP, compared to just under 100%.

The opposition was only playing games. They knew that the government would eventually blow its playground whistle and use its emergency constitutional power to impose something close to the original budget. Borne did so on Wednesday night, using a clause of the constitution inserted by Charles de Gaulle for exactly this purpose. Every previous president of the Fifth Republic has used 49.3 at some time — even those with friendly majorities in the Assembly.

Cue, nonetheless, fake indignation on the part of Left, Right and Centre-Right, accusing Macron of “riding roughshod over democracy”. In fact, the opposition, if it cared to work together, could overturn Article 49.3, the budget and the Borne government by passing a censure motion. An absolute majority of the 577 deputies is needed or 289 actual votes in favour. Macron and Borne have 250 centrists; “the rest” have 327.

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Two censure motions have been tabled. The Left refuses to vote for the far-Right motion and the far-Right refuses to vote for the Left motion. The centre-Right will not vote for either, fearing wipe-out in an early election. In other words, the government has called the opposition’s bluff, as everyone knew they would. Just like the day of inaction on Tuesday, Borne’s use of 49.3 is a faux crisis. Like the day of inaction, however, it presages a proper crisis later this winter or early in the New Year.

Emmanuel Macron insists that he will push ahead by March with his plans to increase France’s minimum retirement age from 62 to 64 by 2027. He warns that he will use 49.3 again, if necessary. He will call new elections, if he loses a vote of confidence (as, on this issue, he might). There are good arguments why France should work longer. Its minimum retirement age is the lowest in the EU. Politically, it is hazardous and even foolhardy to insist on it now. The government has no majority. The national mood, always fractious, has been darkened by two years of pandemic and the resurgence of inflation after years of low or no wage rises.

Macron has bound himself to the pensions mast. The deficit of 5% of GDP promised to Brussels and the markets next year depends on the enactment of pension reform by July. As Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng found out, it’s not a good idea to disappoint (or excite) the markets when you are already hugely indebted to them. On pensions, most French people, including the moderate unions, are united in fierce opposition to Macron. For now, the President remains determined to go ahead. The true “crisis”, both on the street and in parliament, did not happen this week. It is on its way.