Did Macron’s Dubious Conversations With Putin Foreshadow France’s Present Chaos?

With the Paris summer Olympics only about three weeks away, it appears that President Macron is making an event out of sowing chaos in France. The truth is that the seeds of discord were planted even before his ill-fated decision last month to dissolve the lower house of the French parliament. They came in two varieties: foreign and domestic.On the domestic front were the president’s efforts last year to push through pension reform legislation. While the intention may have been to take some of the torpor out of the French economy, Mr. Macron antagonized unions and many others while galvanizing his opponents in parliament, chief among which is the National Rally. Marine Le Pen never forgets.Yet there were signs even before that. Who can forget the long phone calls with Vladimir Putin in 2022? Not the Kremlin, certainly. It’s not that Monsieur Macron erred in trying to talk the Russian president out of pressing his invasion of Ukraine, but a more level-headed politician — say, Boris Johnson — would have spotted a lost cause from a long way off.For what kind of world leader thinks that Mr. Putin’s bellicosity can be shut down with a couple of polite phone calls? Even Mad Vlad himself was said to be amused by the feeble effort. It turns out that the diplomatic debacle was a precursor to everything happening now. The world’s most historically significant revolution after our own, after all, started in the streets of Paris.What Mr. Macron appears to have triggered is more of a slow-motion train wreck than revolution, but unintended consequences are rapidly unfolding. One of them is that he appears to be losing control of his own government. If he thought that by dissolving the National Assembly he could avert three years of lame-duck-ness while reining in Ms. Le Pen, his judgment was occluded.The newspaper Libération reported that the mood at a Monday cabinet meeting at the Élysée Palace was particularly somber and only worsened when President Macron said that “The situation is clear: it is the far right that is about to access the highest functions [of government], and nobody else.”That admission could be read as a sign that the le président’s gambit of calling a snap election has already failed — and even before the second round of voting. In the first round, Madame Le Pen’s list came first in 297 of 577 French constituencies, against 159 for the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire and a mere seventy for Macron’s Ensemble bloc.Now, with only a few days before the final round, Mr. Macron’s severely weakened allies are finding themselves in a tough spot behind a dominant National Rally and the hastily cobbled together New Popular Front. What Mr. Macron has essentially done is blow up the French electorate into a three-headed Hydra.As of mid-week, the pressure was mounting on third-place candidates of the left-wing and center-left parties to withdraw from the race to order to clear the way for other candidates who are presumed to be better able to defeat the National Rally. That, though, is a big presumption, not least because any candidate who managed to secure at least 12.5 percent of registered voters can technically compete in the runoff vote. According to various French news reports, some of Mr. Macron’s staffers did not even try to get on the ballot in the first round in a bid to give better-placed left-wing opponents a better chance of beating National Rally candidates in the various constituencies. So that means they will not be on the ballot in the second round either. “Il faut quitter le navire avant qu’il ne coule” as the French expression goes — better jump ship before it sinks.Paris will survive all this as it always has —it’s worth recalling the motto of the French capital itself, “she is buffeted by the waves but does not sink” — but Mr. Macron’s credibility is sinking fast. If the National Rally secures an absolute majority in the second round then Mr. Macron will be compelled to make his nemesis, Jordan Bardella, prime minister. There are signs the president is already preparing for an uneasy “cohabitation” by putting his people or those close to him in positions of power at the European level before Mr. Bardella can throw his own weight around. Mr. Macron has nominated Thierry Breton as France’s European commissioner for the next term of the European Union’s executive body and gone all in on the reappointment of Ursula von der Leyen as European Commission president. Then again also, too, Ms. Le Pen is already maneuvering to outfox Mr. Macron. There is speculation she will be pulling the National Rally out of the far right Identity and Democracy bloc in the European Parliament — the group having outlived its usefulness. After all, its other members, including Italy’s Northern League and the Dutch Party for Freedom, helped carry the National Rally across the finish line in European parliamentary elections last month. That win is precisely what led Mr. Macron to call the French snap legislative vote. While he makes some adjustments in anticipation of cohabitation, there will be no denying that once that happens, the pressure will be on for him to resign. If that happens, Mr. Bardella will not be the only one giving a tip of the hat — or modified Phrygian cap? — and exclaiming, “Chapeau, Madame.”

Did Macron’s Dubious Conversations With Putin Foreshadow France’s Present Chaos?

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