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When the cathedral of Lady caught fire in 2019, few people believed Emmanuel Macron could fulfill his promise to restore it by the end of this year. Nevertheless, he managed to mobilize donors and a small army of restorers and craftsmen to reassemble in five years the medieval masterpiece that originally took almost centuries to complete.
Today’s reopening ceremony should have been a triumph for Macron comparable only to de Gaulle’s you god at Notre Dame during the liberation in August 1944 or Napoleon’s self-coronation there in December 1804. The youngest French head of state since Napoleon III was expecting his own apotheosis today.
Instead, the former kid banker discovers he’s developed a perverse Midas touch: everything he touches these days turns to soot and ash in his mouth. Over the past six months, Macron has erratically gone from failure to defeat, culminating in the current paralysis of France’s political system.
The poor performance of his Renaissance party in June’s European Parliament elections prompted him to call early elections for the French national assembly. His supporters immediately lost their majority and France. The hard left and the hard right can’t agree on anything but to jam Macron into voting for his hand-picked prime minister, Michel Barnierand his austerity measures – aimed at reviving French entrepreneurship and reducing the huge government deficit, which is forecast to exceed 6 percent of GDP.
Thus, instead of de Gaulle’s vision of the French president as the guarantor of the stability of the Fifth Republic, Macron has become the embodiment of systemic failure and chaos.
France is clearly too important as our main neighbor for its agonies to be ignored – and Britain, or France’s neighbors such as Germanywe cannot overlook how much our woes have in common with Emmanuel Macron’s problems. Across the road Europethe conventional center-left and center-right parties are no longer able to win enough votes to form a government independently or at the head of a coherent coalition.
Germany’s strange coalition of social democrats, greens and free market liberals just fell apart, after a great success of the nationalist AfD party in the recent regional elections. This was as much a reflection of the country’s sharp economic decline as the AfD’s playing up of anti-immigration policies – and suggests the centre-right Christian Democrats will find it difficult to form a classic coalition in Berlin after elections next February.
Across Europe to the east, The political crisis in Romania has grown after its Constitutional Court annulled the country’s presidential election because a nationalist, anti-EU and anti-NATO candidate in the box looked set to win.
On the face of it, Labour’s large majority in our general election in July reversed the trend in the EU. But with Sir Keir Starmer’s personal ratings plummeting since then – and Labour’s rapidly sinking poll numbers – post-Brexit Britain appears to be aligning itself with EU members in a poor public mood about the governance of our country.
In fact, all of the once-industrialized economies of Western Europe are suffering from similar symptoms, including the hemorrhaging of high-skilled jobs at the same time that migrants from sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East are risking their lives to get here. Declining wealth is key to changing public attitudes to immigration in Western European countries, which remain magnets for people from the Global South.
In reality, Europe, including Britain, is trapped as the third economic unit in the world between the two leading ones: the US and China. This face is visible in the way we deal with the race to decarbonize the global economy.
Transition to a net-zero economy it takes a huge toll on German car manufacturers, as it does on any other energy-intensive industry. It’s one thing for governments to promote “green” alternatives, but quite another for European companies to actually design and manufacture cars that people want and can afford to buy, for example.
Compare this with China and the US: regardless of Donald Trump’s climate skepticism, his No. 1, Elon Musk, has turned his Tesla into a signature Western-made electric car. China may be pumping massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, but its producers are breakout of solar panels and electric vehicles that have cut across European markets.
Meanwhile, the EU and Britain remain faithful to the free trade shibboleths of the increasingly redundant Washington Consensus, ahead of Trump 2.0 tariff threats.
Trying to conflate free trade with net zero regulation is a real contradiction that is becoming a living nightmare for European societies squeezed by the kind of external competitive and technological challenges they have not experienced before and still have not considered.
The challenges are numerous, and the paths through them are unclear. President Macron is today’s high-profile European leader affected by these growing problems plaguing France. In a way, his triumphant restoration of Notre Dame is symbolic our general crisis across Europe. Just as the coronation of King Charles was a masterpiece of public theatre, the reopening of the intact Notre Dame shows how good we Europeans are at the past!
For all that, I welcome the return of Notre Dame as the spiritual center of Paris – its reconstruction is a tribute to its former glory, not a sign that France in particular, or Europe in general, is about to enjoy a renaissance. Today’s ceremonies are a wake for old France, perhaps for old Europe.