France is having some problems. The country is on its fourth prime minister in a year. His minority government just barely passed a budget through the National Assembly in February—but it has a big deficit that will only add to the country’s rapidly rising debt.
The troubles are economic, too: France’s biggest and best-known firms are struggling. Inflation is stubbornly high. And the country is having trouble luring foreign investment.
It’s not just the political and economic conditions that look bad, either. In a recent poll, 87 percent of people in France said they thought the country was in decline. French people had long shown considerable faith in their social model, but even that’s eroding now, too. Other surveys show citizens’ trust in public services—hospitals and schools, for example—is falling fast.
What’s happened?
Marc Weitzmann is a French journalist and the author of 12 books, including Hate: The Rising Tide of Anti-Semitism in France. Weitzmann says French people have seen their country as being in decline for decades, if not centuries. But now many of them don’t believe the government knows how to manage it. This is partly a result of the collapse of President Emmanuel Macron’s power, but it’s also the result of a much bigger shift: The French political system has reached the end of an era, and no politician has yet been able to offer a convincing, let alone successful, vision for what comes next.
After the end of the Cold War, the traditional left-right divide became less and less important. The next generation of elites pursued economic globalization and technological innovation, but that agenda hasn’t produced broad prosperity and peace—and other social problems, like immigration, have only gotten worse. Macron ran on a platform of getting past old ideologies, but all he’s given France is technocratic rule—which hasn’t been successful or popular. Neither, Weitzmann says, is the problem uniquely French: A political era has ended throughout the West, and no country seems to have found a way forward …
Michael Bluhm: In a recent survey, 87 percent of French people said the country was in decline. What do we know about why?
Peter Heymans
This article is for members only
Join to read on and have access to The Signal‘s full library.
