Roberto Bertoni

Arrogant like Sarkozy and irresolute like any one of the Fourth Republic’s prime ministers, Emmanuel Macron is steering France toward a 1958-style situation, except that this time there is no De Gaulle on the horizon capable of staging a substantive coup d’état to give the country back some minimum of stability and social security. After all, the General had been the head of the French Resistance against Nazi-fascism, and so had the credentials to take power, calm the climate, advance the decolonisation process that reached its peak in 1960, mend relations with Algeria after Prefect Papon, on 17 October 1961, had strewn the Seine with the bodies of rebelling Algerians, and bring into being the so-called “Fifth Republic,” now at the end of the line.

Macron, therefore, will go down in history as the man who ended more than six decades of prosperity for France, handing it over, for the first time since the war, to the heirs of the OAS and of Marshal Pétain, whom he, incidentally, once extolled as a hero of the First World War.

This is the context in which voters will go to the polls next spring, and even the accusations hurled at Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise, besides being extremely serious, are frankly ridiculous, since it is false beyond any reasonable doubt that students were stirred up by the left. If Paris, Lyon, Nantes and many other French cities, starting with the poorest and most peripheral neighbourhoods, are on the brink of civil war — with rubbish bins set ablaze, high schools occupied, and young men and women protesting against inhumane, degrading conditions in school life — it is not because Mélenchon or anyone else is fanning the flames, but because Macronism has been a failure from start to finish. And the €54 billion squeeze announced by Prime Minister Lecornu to save the public finances will only make matters worse.

A figure who fancies himself Napoleon when he isn’t even a Talleyrand, who rose to power by taking advantage of an unprecedented crisis of the traditional parties — already on their last legs ten years ago — and who has done nothing since but crush the poorest and favour the richest, humiliating Parliament and effectively stripping it of its oversight function through recourse to Article 49.3, which grants the President of the Republic the powers of a monarch (nothing unlawful, but it ought to be abolished immediately for the good of democracy) — this individual has not kept the public accounts in order (forecasts project public debt to rise from 116 percent of GDP today to 129 percent by 2031) has caused the rating agencies to downgrade France to the point that it now risks slipping from A to B (Moody’s verdict is due on 23 October, and the outlook is negative), has deepened inequalities that were already pronounced in Hollande’s day, and today offers a glimpse of a scenario that closely recalls the days of the banlieues in 2005, when Sarkozy, to feed his own presidential ambitions, called the protesters “racaille” — scum — with the consequences plain for anyone to see.

Unfortunately, Macron is only one of the negative protagonists of this tragic European season, marked by the siege of wars, the severing of ties with Russia — particularly in energy, but not only — and the disaster in Gaza, with its attendant fallout for public order, more than ever in a society shaken by a rising anti-Jewish sentiment (France is, after all, the country of the Dreyfus affair), and by an economic collapse that threatens to jeopardise the very survival of the euro. Yet he is also one of those most responsible for the worsening of the crisis with Russia, in the name of a total refusal to dialogue with Putin that, beyond ensuring that not one stone is left standing on another in Ukraine, is costing us a financial dislocation that risks becoming irreparable.

Then there is Spain, where Sánchez lost a vote in Parliament on a bill called “Maricarmen,” after an eighty-seven-year-old woman facing eviction from the home she has rented for seventy years. A skilled poker player, the Socialist leader could go all-in on early elections as soon as late November, at the risk, however, of watching the Partido Popular advance and, above all, the neo-Francoists of VOX. And after eight years in government, the wear and tear is showing and could have unforeseeable repercussions.

Nor should we forget what is happening in Germany, where in the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania — until 2022 the landing point of the Nord Stream pipelines, blown up by Ukrainian military personnel to sever the Old Continent’s economic ties with Moscow — in that state, as we were saying, the neo-Nazis of Alternative für Deutschland have reached 37 percent, while Chancellor Merz’s CDU did not even make it into parliament. This follows the collapse of the traditional parties in Saxony-Anhalt, where the AfD won in a landslide with Ulrich Siegmund, serving a first eviction notice not only on the aforementioned Merz but also on what remains of social democracy. The only city where the left held firm was Berlin, thanks to the election of Elif Eralp, of clear Turkish and Muslim origin and backed by Die Linke — the left that is not ashamed to be what it is, born of Oskar Lafontaine’s split from Schröder’s SPD, the great champion of the Third Way, the Neue Mitte, Agenda 2010, the Hartz laws and other disasters that have brought us to where we are today.

In Britain, finally, if Labour has regained some colour, it is only thanks to Andy Burnham, the antithesis of Starmer’s Blairism, but even there, according to the polls, we fear it is too late, and the nightmare of Farage looms ever more forcefully at the window.

At which point we allow ourselves to say that we have no problem calling ourselves anti-Putinists and denouncing the crimes of the Moscow tsar, starting perhaps with Grozny, the Dubrovka theatre and the Beslan school, back when half the West was at his feet and welcomed him with fanfares into our parliaments; we would be glad if those who, like Merz, have thought, or even said outright, that Netanyahu is doing the “dirty work” in Gaza for us as well, were to issue an equal denunciation. Well, no. We oppose with all our strength the genocide of the Palestinian people, the illegal occupations of Palestinian territories in the West Bank, the continual reprisals against the population of Gaza, and the now untenable absence of sanctions against a state that has violated every international standard. If Netanyahu can speak at the UN and Abbas cannot, you will understand well enough that the global order is finished and chaos reigns — or, worse still, the law of the jungle.

Nor is that all: we denounce the complicit silence of so many, too many intellectuals who until now have looked the other way or who, in some cases, have expressly backed gag laws and restrictive measures against critical thought and against anyone who dared to voice it.

More than an analysis, this is a prediction: 2027 could be the last year of Europe as we have known it since 1945 and as we dreamed of it after the end of the Cold War. If we carry on at this pace, we risk having to bid farewell to Schengen, to the euro, and to the idea of a continent risen from the rubble of the Second World War and determined to turn into a fully realised political project the “never again” we swore to one another in the memory of Paris under siege, of Italy’s battered cities, of Hamburg with its people burned alive in the Allied bombings, and of Dresden razed to the ground, including the children dressed as Pierrot celebrating Shrove Thursday. Of that spirit, of those ideas, of those statesmen, little or nothing remains. Today, therefore, we are called upon to ask ourselves what might be left of this continent should we fail to understand that, this time, the bell is tolling for us.