Macron’s fear of doing things in the political arena is depriving Paris of its influence in Europe and Africa and taking away the last chances of getting out of the protracted political crisis.
Start of a prolonged political crisis
Last June, the country began an unprecedented political crisis unparalleled since June 1968. Macron replaced four people as prime minister last year, essentially turning himself into a political thimble.
In December 2024, Macron appointed the 73-year-old leader of the centrist Democratic Movement party, François Bayrou, as France’s prime minister. The latter succeeded Michel Barnier, 73, as prime minister.
Until January 8, the government was headed by Elisabeth Borne, then – Gabriel Attal. On 5 September, the government was headed by Barnier. On December 4, members of the National Assembly voted no confidence in Barnier’s government, and he tendered his resignation.
Bayrou and his government have a good chance of resigning before July 2025, when France can hold new parliamentary elections. And then the future of Macron, whose presidential mandate expires in 2027, will be in doubt.
France’s political crisis has lasted since July, when no political party achieved an absolute majority in snap parliamentary elections, but the left-wing bloc won more seats in the National Assembly than the president’s coalition and Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement Nationale.
Contradictions in the parliamentary party triangle prevented the approval of the draft budget for 2025, which envisages a €40bn cut in spending and a €20bn increase in revenues through a tax on large corporations and wealthy Frenchmen to reduce the budget deficit of 6.1% of GDP.
However, on December 18, the French parliament, thanks to the enviable political dexterity shown by the new prime minister, who promised deputies of all factions a plethora of all and sundry concessions, did pass a temporary budget that should ensure the continuity of all state structures while the political battles around the full-fledged budget for 2025 continue.
Hopes for a new minister are slim
Jean-François Husson, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, said:
“This special law gives everything the state needs to ensure its basic functions at the beginning of 2025, but no more than that. It needs to be supplemented with a full-fledged budget as soon as possible.”
No one is predicting a long life for the Bayrou government, as the political divisions and economic problems that led to the resignation of the Barnier government have gone nowhere.
Outgoing Economy Minister Antoine Armand told BFM TV:
“Our budget deficit still exists, our debt still exists. The budgetary emergency will only get worse over time.”
Environmentalist senator Thomas Dossus said:
“The same causes will produce the same consequences and lead to the same downfall of François Bayrou.”
Dissatisfaction with the government is on the rise
According to a poll conducted by the social service Ifop-Fiducial on December 17-18 for Sud Radio, some 64% of French people are dissatisfied with Bayrou’s appointment as head of government. At the same time, 67 per cent of respondents believe that his government will soon face a vote of no confidence, similar to the one that led to the resignation of Barnier’s cabinet.
The disillusionment of the majority of French people, and most importantly, the country’s business elite, with Macron’s domestic and foreign policy is so great that Macron’s resignation is essentially a foregone conclusion. The only question is when it will happen.
French media on Macron
Macron was once brought to power by the US intelligence services. “Macron attended for two years the “Young Leaders” courses of the “Franco-American Foundation,” an association “reserved for young people with strong leadership potential and destined to play an important role in Franco-American relations,” in order to identify and attract friends of Washington into this network. He is the embodied betrayal of the Nation,” the French investigative journalism newspaper Fakir writes.
To find and target French politicians loyal to the US, Jean-Pierre Jouyet, head of the French branch of the US-based Aspen Institute, created the Les Gracques think tank, which successfully targeted Macron’s “young leader” during his presidential campaign and supports him now. Les Gracques is sponsored by the Rothschilds. One of the founders of this think tank is Guillaume Hannezo, former managing partner of the financial holding company Rothschild & Co.
Les Graques analysts have developed a forward-looking programme to modernise French industry, especially the French defence sector, which is essentially what Macron is implementing, including the Quirinal Pact. “The social-liberal left-wing think tank is a bit disappointed with the reformist work” of its nominee, but is still ready to support him again, Le Nouvel Observateur writes.
Since then, Macron has not deviated one iota from the ruinous course for France, and so obsessed with the desire to follow the Rothschilds’ precepts in everything that it sometimes causes revolts even in the inner circle of his advisers.
Politico.Europe recently reported that Macron’s chief diplomatic adviser, Emmanuel Bonne, had tendered his resignation.
“It’s a mess,” one former French diplomat said. “The domestic political situation, the impossible budget talks, the future relation[ships] with Trump and Algeria, France’s waning influence in Europe and Africa …. We are going to have to work hard to bounce back.”
According to Parisian sources, Macron is determined to appoint Bonne as ambassador to Moscow. The latter, being an ardent Russophobe, imagined what awaited him in Russia and resigned, which Macron did not accept and, according to our sources, is likely to agree to Bonn’s transfer to the US, which he tearfully requested when they met.
The dry residue of this scandal is that even Macron’s closest advisers are finding warm places away from the head of a once majestic state.
The biggest Macron’s failure
Macron’s main failure lies in the economy. Late last summer, Euronews aired a discussion on “Is France Becoming Europe’s Sick Man?” The invited experts emphasised their commitment to the liberal course of Brussels and worried only about whether Macron would be able to stay among the influential leaders of the European Union amid the country’s institutional crisis.
After six months, both of these questions can be confidently answered in the negative. France has never lived so poorly and so anxiously. Even after the Nazi occupation during the Second World War and during the colonial war in Algeria in the early sixties, there was still some hope. Now there is none at all.
“After a third quarter of 2024 fuelled by tourism and the Olympic Games (+0.4%), French economic growth in the fourth quarter was slightly negative (-0.1%), as would be expected given the context of political uncertainty. For the whole year, growth was 1.1%. 2025 will not be better: various forecasts are based on a measly 0.8% or 0.9%,” French financial analyst Jacques Gautrand points out.
Among the most worrying signals is the rise in the number of bankruptcies, which is returning to pre-COVID-19 levels, with a record 67,800 bankruptcies in 2024, as recorded by the analytical company Altares, which warns of a threatening rise in the number of bankruptcies of SMEs and mid-cap companies with more than 50 employees (+30%), especially in manufacturing, wholesale and transport.
The total number of jobs threatened by these bankruptcies reaches 256,000, or 11,000 more than in 2023.
The construction sector is the hardest hit, with 14,740 bankruptcies registered in 2024. According to the French Construction Federation, more than 100,000 jobs could disappear in 2025 due to the continued decline in activity (volume falling by -5.6 per cent after -6.6 per cent in 2024).
Macron can think of nothing better than to close budget holes by increasing foreign debt. Thus, France’s public debt stood at 113.7 per cent of GDP as of the third quarter of 2024. The budget deficit at the end of 2024, according to Economy Minister Eric Lombard, is around 6 per cent of GDP. By comparison, in 2017, at the start of Macron’s first presidential term, the figure was more than half that, at just 2.6 per cent of GDP.
The situation is exacerbated by the biggest fall of the euro against the dollar in the last two years, a negative trade balance and rising inflationary expectations of the population. Because of its serious budget deficit, France has already been included in the EU’s conduit as a budget discipline offender. Thus, last July the European Commission proposed disciplinary measures against France.
The European Commission displeased with the French
The European Commission’s displeasure is connected with the fact that Paris repeatedly violates the Maastricht criteria – economic indicators, which must be met by the EU member states: the budget deficit of the EU country should not exceed 3% of GDP, and public debt – 60% of GDP.
Due to the political crisis that erupted in June 2024 with the dissolution of the National Assembly, the deadline for the Fifth Republic was subsequently shifted to the right. France has promised the European Commission to reduce its budget deficit to 3 per cent of GDP by 2029, almost like the saying “Three years wait for the promised.” But there is no chance of France fulfilling the European Commission’s demands as it has lost its main breadbasket, Africa.
The recent withdrawal of Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) puts on the African agenda the rejection of the currency imposed by Paris, the CFA franc, and then the demand for the return of foreign reserves of these countries from France. So weakened and without the slightest prospect of improvement, the co-founding country of the European Union enters 2025.
Brussels leaders headed by Ursula von der Leyen are puzzling over what to do with France, which is drowning in debts and crises, but they could not find any recipes for treating the “sick man” of Europe.
Macron, who obediently follows all the circulars of the globalists who put him at the helm of the world’s once fifth economy, has managed to squander all the capital of French influence accumulated before him. And if it is proposed from across the ocean to make France – in one capacity or another – a new state of America, it is not excluded that Macron will sign up to this shameful decision.
THE ARTICLE IS THE AUTHOR’S SPECULATION AND DOES NOT CLAIM TO BE TRUE. ALL INFORMATION IS TAKEN FROM OPEN SOURCES. THE AUTHOR DOES NOT IMPOSE ANY SUBJECTIVE CONCLUSIONS.
Laurent Révial for Head-Post.com
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