This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

The presidency of Emmanuel Macron, which was supposed to bring about a much-needed renewal of French politics, has instead led to a political impasse from which it’s hard to see how France escapes.

Macron’s supremely irresponsible decision to call for snap elections without any need to do so resulted in a parliament that is all but certain to ensure political deadlock. Not only does no party have a majority, but since members of parliament are divided in three blocs of roughly equal size that face strong political incentives against compromising, no government has a plausible path towards lasting until even the next presidential election — still less ruling effectively.

This is happening just as the country is facing a major fiscal crisis. With revenue woefully overestimated, what was a 4.4 per cent deficit anticipated by the pre-Barnier administration is now forecast to reach 6.1 per cent.

The immediate causes of that deficit are the government’s response to the pandemic and the energy crisis after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but the country’s public finances have been steadily deteriorating for decades, and the music is about to stop at the worst possible moment.

It’s unclear whether the government will be able to do something as basic and fundamental as get a budget passed before it’s overthrown. Even if it does, it will at best delay the reckoning, not prevent it.

The chronic fiscal irresponsibility of successive French governments is just one example of their more general failure to carry out their duties.

On every issue, from immigration to public finances, and very much including education and crime, they have systematically backed away from difficult decisions and often embraced demagoguery.

The result, as the social and political situation continues to deteriorate, has been inertia at the political apex combined with seething radicalisation and fragmentation below. In consequence, it becomes ever harder to reverse the situation. Prevention would have been far better than the painful cure France is now due.

The Fifth Republic can’t just return to the past — and unless they understand why, French conservatives won’t be able to do their part to reverse their country’s decline. Patriotism, self-satisfaction and justified contempt for the folly of others abroad have led too many on the French right to ignore the problems at home.

The classic conservative dilemma presents itself now more clearly in France than in any other Western nation. Those on the right there habitually waste their energy trying to preserve things whose creation they never sought and whose retention they shouldn’t want.

Large swathes of the country need not be apologetically abandoned

Meanwhile, quotidian political busy-work prevents them from conserving that which ought to be defended or promoting that which could be done.

For instance, France is no longer home only to a “people of white race, Greek and Latin culture and Christian religion” as De Gaulle put it, but neither does it have to accept that large swathes of the country are to be apologetically abandoned as enclaves riddled with crime and cultural mores profoundly alien to French or any civilised culture.

It would be all, as Gavin Mortimer details in this issue, to the political gain of the cynical hard left embodied in the arch-opportunist, Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

France can legitimately determine who she lets into the country. Unskilled immigrants from Africa and the Middle East, let alone criminals, have no right to be there if the French don’t want them to be there.

This isn’t going to happen if, instead of coming up with serious policies on immigration, French conservatives self-indulgently waste their time raving about “remigration” — something which is in equal parts infeasible and unsavoury.

On the economy, the French right must finally start telling the truth to the French people, instead of competing with the left in equally reckless rhetoric.

Thus, for example, when a French pharmaceutical company announced that it planned to sell 50 per cent of a subsidiary that produces a popular over-the-counter medicine to an American investment fund, something that should be totally banal in any capitalist society, most French conservative politicians joined the left in calling for the government to oppose the deal in the name of “French health sovereignty”.

The French economy will not start growing again through archaic protectionism, but instead through what delivered Les Trente Glorieuses in the first place. Innovation and competitive industry, allied to high standards, made France rich. Cosplay Colbertianism is beggaring her and will shortly ruin her, if left unchecked.

No one, least of all the Germans, will pay France’s bills for her. Greater competitiveness is what France needs but, as Laurent Lemasson ably sets out in this issue, it’s dismally unlikely that her current crop of conservatives, socialists and nationalists will give it to her.

Macron’s centrist coalition has not only led the country to paralysis, but is itself threatened with implosion as its internal contradictions are no longer cloaked by Jupiterian conceit. Marine Le Pen’s party i- ruled by people who make the court of Nigel Farage seem like determined professionals — even if they managed to win an election, their incorrigible tendency towards self-sabotage would likely deliver what Macron clearly hoped the sudden National Assembly election would do.

He hoped for a right that had safely discredited itself from the Matignon, leaving the Élysée firmly in the hands of the political Bourbons who have brought France to this point.

The catastrophic theory of the French right holds that the best hope for French conservatives would be for the Rassemblement National to win, not because it would succeed but because it would fail so totally that space for a more promising alternative on the right would emerge.

No friend of France can consider such risks with anything other than fear and alarm.