Having just ended its ninth month in office, French Prime Minister Francois Bayrou stepped down after the National Assembly endorsed a non-confidence vote with a huge majority. That handed President Emmanuel Macron with a hot potato in the shape of naming yet another Prime Minister, Sebastien Lecornu, the outgoing Defense Minister of the Armies, the fifth in just two years with no certainty that he would be the lucky fifth.
Macron is in a hurry because he wants to fly to New York to settle the Ukraine war, ensure recognition of a Palestinian state, solve the Iranian nuclear problem and offer a master plan for rebuilding Lebanon and Syria.
Meanwhile, the French have reverted to their classical response to political crisis by taking to streets, sabotaging railway lies, looting luxury shops and, of course, flying-picket strikes across the land.
Talk of a general strike is making the rounds with a whiff of revolution polluting the autumn air.
Because the French political vocabulary is full of military terms such as “combat,” “resistance,” “siege” and, of course “revolution,” the narrative of current events might sound more awesome than it need be.
Seasoned politologue Roland Cayrol says: “The French system is paralyzed.”
Other commentators suggest that France needs an institutional “revolution.” The hard-left coalition of The New Popular Front leader Jean-Luc Melenchon in a meeting with a Palestinian flag waved behind him calls for “the abolition of the Fifth republic and the foundation of a Sixth Republic,” casting himself as savior.
“France needs a savior,” says a senior European diplomat here worried about the damage that the French crisis might do to the European Union.
Finding themselves like a headless chicken since the Great Revolution France has always been looking for a savior.
Distinguished historian Jean Garrigues says the abolition of monarchy left a huge hole in the French national life that two empires, two restored monarchies and five republics haven’t been able to fill.
President Macron agrees and has for years hoped to fill that hole by insisting that the buck always stops with him, giving critics the excuse to dub him “Jupiter.”
Is France today in a populist mood and looking for savior?
At first glance the key conditions for the rise of populism are easily detected.
The first is when the base challenges an elite which rightly or wrongly, is perceived as incompetent, corrupt and out of touch with “the real people” whatever that means. As a longtime observer of French politics, I can claim that none of those charges stick.
But so what?
In politics, perception is often stronger than reality.
The second condition is a sense of exclusion by a significant segment of society. We say that in the “Yellow Vests” movement that drove France to the edge of
revolution a few years ago. Again, those who claimed to be “excluded” were in fact rather well-to-do provincial bourgeois who chose to exclude themselves.
The third condition is the structural weakness of political parties whose presence is needed if a democracy is to function properly.
That condition may well be present in France today as traditional governing parties have shrunk to narrow coteries.
The next condition, also present, is the dislocation of constituencies.
Part of Communist and other radical left voters have shifted to the radical-right camp with the National Rally (RN) of Marine Le Pen in the lead. A segment of the left has moved towards the traditional authoritarian right idolizing Vladimir Putin and adopting anti-Semite positions with the Palestinian “cause” as an excuse.
In a populist context, those competing for power have an interest in exaggerating the problems, spreading fear of the future, nurturing resentment against “the other,” notably old or new immigrants, and envy against “the rich.”
The biggest fear that the populists of both right and left try to spread, so far with some success, is that of reforms that might threaten the “acquired social benefits” such as early retirement and long holidays.
The silver bullet that killed Bayrou’s government was the plan to cut annual holidays by just two days to cover part of the nation’s budget deficit. Lurking in the background was the decision to cut retirement age by two years for sole workers while populists campaign for retirement at 60.
People usually make revolutions to bring about change. The French, in their populist mode, however, beat the drum of revolution to prevent change.
The irony in all this is that French democracy - its imperfections not withstanding - has always triumphed over populism but ultimately failed to translate its victory into solid institutions.
Some French democrats may be making the same mistake today that they made when they rallied around wannabe saviors.
Other aspirant democrats are suggesting a variety of solutions, including proportional representation elections and a return to shaky governments under the Fourth Republic.
The real challenge is to fill the hole that Garigue and to some extent Macron have detected in the heart of the Fifth Republic, a system that is neither fully presidential nor parliamentary.
Tailor-made for General De Gaulle, the system worked well as long as the French regarded the president as a savior, first from the Second World War defeat and then from the challenge of costly colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria.
The fifth republic also worked because Francois Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac managed it form strong electoral coalitions. Under presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande, those coalition disintegrated pulling the president into the cesspool of cheap political battles.
Switching to a Rhenish political system with proportional representation, coalition building and parliamentary compromises could take years to adapt to and could be discredited with the inevitable initial bumps on the road. The alternative is a full presidential system partly modeled on that of the United States.
One thing is certain: France’s problems won’t be solved by riots, strikes and what is known in French as jacquerie.
