French Renegade Writer Predicts Ascent of New Prime Minister — and Thinks President Macron Would Do Well To Resign

Will he be a keeper? That’s the question after President Macron named François Bayrou to be prime minister? That was on Friday, 10 days after Michel Barnier resigned as premier following a no-confidence vote Mr. Barnier, sometimes known as Mr. Brexit, is now a footnote of history as the Fifth Republic’s shortest-serving prime minister. His successor is the bland but hale Mr. Bayrou. He seemingly came out of le bleu but is actually a career politician on the national level and also the long-serving mayor of the southern French town of Pau.French author Michel Houllebecq, an iconic enfant terrible littéraire who has made a career for himself by shocking the bourgeoisie with a wit acerbic enough to be deemed acidic, had a premonition of sorts that Mr. Bayrou, now 73, would eventually find his way to the top of the French government.In his 2015 novel called “Submission,” Mr. Houllebecq conjures a France that by 2022 has become a Muslim state, the Socialist party lending its support to the Muslim Brotherhood to clinch the presidential election. Mr. Houllebecq needed police protection after the novel came out.His fabulistic scenario results in an Islamist president and the nomination of François Bayrou to the post of prime minister. In those pages nearly a decade ago, the author described Mr. Bayrou as “an old French provincial politician, defeated in practically all the elections in which he had stood for around thirty years” but nevertheless successful at cultivating “a lofty image thanks to the connivance of various magazines.”The writer leaves it to one of his invented characters to paint Mr. Bayrou as “perfectly idiotic.” If that doesn’t sound very complimentary, neither is the taut world of French politics. Mr. Houllebecq’s prescience underscores the curious reality of governance in France as well as Germany today. Namely that both countries are run by administrations in which the public has paper thin confidence but despite this everybody, as the British say, cracks on.Case in point, the almost invisible German chancellor Olaf Scholz — Herr Cellophane, as auteur Houllebecq might put it — lost a confidence vote in the Bundestag on Monday. Despite some alarmist headlines,this was no surprise: For several weeks now, snap elections in February were a foregone conclusion. That, however, did not stop Friedrich Merz, who heads the Christian Democratic Union, from telling Herr Scholz to his face, “You are embarrassing Germany.”It is too soon to tell whether Mr. Bayrou will prove to be an embarrassment to France, as Mr. Houllebecq insinuates he would be in “Submission.” What is known is that President Macron’s latest oui man thrice this century ran for president himself — and lost each time. The only political job he’s been able to hold on to for a decent stretch is his stint as a mayor, and he is already drawing scorn in the French press for refusing to let go of that role at Pau even as he takes on his new one at Paris.If to a certain extent Mr. Bayrou is filler, it is largely because of Mr. Macron, whose outsized ego has already effectively effaced the five prime ministers that came before and brought France to its present legislative impasse. Another showdown, probably over budgets and deficit management, is just a matter of time. State budgets have proved the undoing of French governments since the hazy days of Jacques Necker, if not before.Surely the French must be inured to all this by now? If any tribe of Europeans was born to be blasé, after all, it is the Gauls. Referring to last summer, when Paris limped by with a caretaker government, Michel Houllebecq recently stated that “Many French people think that whatever the government, it will make bad decisions, so it would be better not to have any government at all.”While Marine Le Pen and a few others would warmly welcome the prospect of early presidential elections, Mr. Macron says he is in no hurry to leave the Élysée Palace. However, if after the months of tumult he authored — mainly to try to keep the ranks of the National Rally at bay — he were to resign, “He might have a chance of coming back,” Mr. Houllebecq told an Italian interlocutor recently.The French president, who turns 47 this month, is still young.“If I were his personal coach, I would advise him to resign nobly and say that ‘the French have not understood me.’ Then try to come back, later,” the author proffered. “But if he lets the situation drag on until 2027…” — cue the cinematic drag on the nearest Gitane, and hope for the best.

French Renegade Writer Predicts Ascent of New Prime Minister — and Thinks President Macron Would Do Well To Resign

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