And the Gold Medal for Olympic Vanité Goes to the Socialist Mayor of Paris, as Macron Works the Phones From South of France

In August, for the most part, France checks out for les vacances — unless you’re the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, who has just mistaken a relatively uneventful Olympics for vindication of years of failed leftist policies. Or unless your name is Emmanuel Macron, in which case you might think it possible to solve the world’s ills from a sunbed somewhere south of Saint-Tropez.For the moment, Ms. Hidalgo leads the charge for premature hubris as she leverages the soon-to-conclude Games of the 33rd Olympiad to burnish her image ahead of the 2026 municipal elections in France.In an interview with Le Monde, the Paris mayor said, “The message from the far right has been crushed by these games and by the opening ceremony.” Seemingly oblivious to the firestorm over the depiction of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper” as a drag performance as part of that ceremony, Ms. Hidalgo doubled down.The “far right message” was in the mayor’s estimation undone because “Paris is the city of all freedoms, the city of refuge for LGBTQI+ people, the city where people live together, a city where there is a woman mayor, a left-wing mayor, a mayor of foreign origin with dual nationality, a feminist mayor and an environmentalist mayor.” Ms. Hidalgo, who is a national of both France and Spain, appeared to be settling scores with the increasingly center-right National Rally party of Jordan Bardella and Marine Le Pen. During his campaign in the snap French parliamentary elections in June and July, Mr. Bardella said that he favored scrapping the droit du sol, or the French birthright to citizenship. He said that if he could, he would refuse high-ranking posts in the French government to dual nationals, with the exception of EU citizens.Ms. Hidalgo tossed some more of her signature salade des mots with this nugget: “All populists, whether far-right, liberal or far-left, enter through the same door: damaging, and destroying an image, and pressing on the small fact or a real fact, which will amplify the negative message.” In 2022 Ms. Hidalgo ran for president, winning less than 2 percent of the vote in the first round of voting. However, she has found a safe harbor of sorts in Paree, and appears to be laying the groundwork for a run for a third term as mayor in 2026. By that time the French presidential election, slated for 2027, will be looming large and President Macron will likely be even less relevant a figure on the European stage than he is currently.Mr. Macron’s prime minister, Gabriel Attal, has already tendered his resignation and the New Popular Front, a hastily cobbled together coalition of left-wing parties ranging from communists to socialists, is still waiting for Mr. Macron to choose a new one. For the moment at least — cue the alarming parallels with President Biden — it seems that Mr. Macron is content to let the country run on auto-pilot, at least until the Olympic Games wind down this Sunday. He has been trying to manage global affairs from his fortress of irrelevance at Brégançon — which admittedly packs more charm than Camp David or Delaware.From Brégançon, Mr. Macron reportedly phoned Prime Minister Netanyahu to request that he avoid a “cycle of retaliation” in the Middle East and “to enter into the same logic that must apply to all parties in the region.”One of those parties is the leading state sponsor of terrorism, Iran, and Mr. Macron called President Pezeshkian too, asking him nicely to “avoid a cycle of reprisals that would put people and regional stability at risk.”The memo that Mr. Macron has apparently missed is that regional stability, at least in much of the Middle East, is long gone. Despite its legacy of influence over Lebanon, a former French mandate, France has so far mostly come up short in wielding its faded clout to any tangible effect. Hezbollah’s deadly cross-border attacks against communities in northern Israel continue unabated. Also, perfunctory phone calls didn’t quite cut it with President Putin, n’est-ce pas? Chances are they will not do much to deter Tehran either. There is speculation that Mr. Macron will decamp from the south of France to Paris to attend the closing ceremony of the Games. Afterward, the vainglorious mayoress will have earned a little breather, but the lid on French domestic turmoil won’t stay closed for anybody much longer.

And the Gold Medal for Olympic Vanité Goes to the Socialist Mayor of Paris, as Macron Works the Phones From South of France

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