Nearly a decade after his first election, President Emmanuel Macron faces a systemic crisis in France. While students protested last week, Macron focused on military displays. Analyst Jérôme Fourquet said, "he may be remembered as the last captain of the boat." Many promises from his 2017 campaign remain unfulfilled today.
Nearly a decade after his first election as president, Emmanuel Macron is presiding over a tense country sliding toward the fiscal brink.
As thousands of high school students took to the streets last week in a collective cry of youthful anger, President Emmanuel Macron of France traveled to a navy ship off the coast of Brittany. From the deck, he watched the firing of a new ballistic missile from a French nuclear-powered submarine.
It was a telling display of Mr. Macron's priorities in a country where the president, by tradition, rises above the messy scrum of domestic politics. Mr. Macron left it to his prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, to try to reassure the French people that the government was handling the proliferating unrest.
It also reflected how Mr. Macron, after nearly a decade in power, has failed to solve the manifold problems afflicting France's economy and welfare system -- problems he promised to address when he was elected in 2017, at 39, as an ambitious reformer, and which have now coalesced into a systemic crisis.
"Remember, Macron published a book before the 2017 election, called 'Révolution,'" said Jérôme Fourquet, a political analyst at the polling institute IFOP. "We told ourselves: he will relaunch the machine, he will lead a revolution."
With just seven months before he leaves office, the president "hasn't been able to bring about this revolution," Mr. Fourquet said. Instead, the analyst said, he may be remembered as "the last captain of the boat."