Special to WorldTribune.com
By John J. Metzler, November 6, 2025
PARIS — France has faced a tumultuous Autumn.
The usual strikes, government shuffles, and sensational events from a high profile daylight heist at the world-famous Louvre Museum, to the imprisonment of a former president, have characterized a disquieting period.
Indeed, just a year after hosting the successful Summer Olympics in Paris, the country has sunk into the same political miasma of discontent, decay, and the grande delusion of spending money which is not yet created. Everyone seems peeved about something.
During the past 18 months, France has had four Prime Ministers! And this is France, a prosperous European country in the G-7 economic group, a major player in the European Union, and holding a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
Why? Because the vanity of the current centrist/globalist President Emmanuel Macron could not please either the Right or the Left with his policies but rather embolden them with his ego.
Macron’s reckless gamble of calling early legislative elections last year, hoping to profit from deadlock, turned into a massive miscalculation. The rightist National Rally, a conservative small c party of Marine LePen nearly seized the political heights.
The far Left movement New Popular Front gained surprisingly returning the country to a political carousel not seen since the post-war period. But no party gained a majority resulting in a hung parliament.
France has endured perpetual budget battles to reduce bloated social state spending. Yet both Left and Right quickly aligned with each other to oppose Macron’s recently-appointed Prime Minister in the latest battle to trim spending. The president has united both sides of his opposition.
Current Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu narrowly escaped a censure motion tabled by the hard Left La France Unbowed party (LFI), and the right Rassemblement National (RN). Now the deputies endlessly debate the 2026 budget in the Assembly. The political lightning rod of pension reform has been tabled to avoid further parliamentary logjams.
Meanwhile France stands near the top of the list of the European Union’s 27 member states for people in public employment. Massive government spending is nothing new, but now there’s simply not enough money to go around. The situation goes well beyond the United States government shutdown and contrary to America, French production and GDP growth are lagging.
For 2025, French GDP growth has slowed to 0.6 % compared to the U.S. rising to 1.8 %. Unemployment stands at 7.8%, nearly double that of the USA!
Of course, Macron has played a cavalier figure in Ukraine’s resistance against Russia, offering all the right rhetoric but getting the United States, Britain and Germany to actually pay the bills for supporting Kyiv.
Equally, Macron has vainly pursued his Middle East policy by France’s formal diplomatic recognition of Palestine during the recent UN Assembly.
Though Emmanuel Macron remains popular on the international stage, his standing in France has fallen like a rock. In a recent poll in the centrist weekly Le Point top 30 political personalities, Macron ranks last! Ranked first and second are none other than his political nemesis from the right, RN, namely the youthful Jordan Bardella and Marine Le Pen, scion of the old party dynasty but convicted and barred by law preventing her from running again in the upcoming 2027 Presidential contest.
Her conviction, though under appeal, opens the door to Jordan Bardella to represent the resurgent RN party in the 2027 presidential election.
Amidst the political pyrotechnics in the parliament, the embarrassing Louvre Museum heist serves as a metaphor for the French Republic. We are strong. It can’t happen here. And then when it does, the reputation of France is made a global laughingstock.
The brazen Sunday morning robbery of $100 million of Napoleonic era crown jewels jolted France out of complacency.
After the usual suspects were rounded up, (one trying to escape to Algeria), the blame game began. The second story window accessed by the criminals adjoins a busy thoroughfare along the River Seine. I regularly passed the site on the local RATP bus. The audacious caper using a moving truck with a lift-ladder, was done right in front of pedestrians on the sidewalk and traffic on the Quai Francois Mitterrand.
Culture Minister Rachida Dati quoted on France 24 cited an administrative inquiry warning of “a chronic, structural underestimation of the risk of intrusion and theft” at the Louvre, “under-equipped security systems,” “inadequate” governance and “totally obsolete” protocols for responding to thefts. “We cannot continue like this,” Minister Dati insisted. She’s right!
The enduring charm of Paris with its undeniable glam and gentrification, often obscures the sordid picture of some crime-ridden suburbs (banlieue) where socio-economic rot continues despite massive state spending. Equally the enduring political deadlock undermines the Republic.
John J. Metzler is a United Nations correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He is the author of Divided Dynamism the Diplomacy of Separated Nations: Germany, Korea, China (2014). [See pre-2011 Archives]
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