When the cathedral of Notre-Dame went up in flames in 2019, few people believed Emmanuel Macron could fulfil his promise to restore it by the end of this year. Yet he succeeded in mobilising donors, and a small army of restorers and craftsmen to put back together in five years a medieval masterpiece that had taken almost centuries to originally complete.
Today’s reopening ceremony should have been a triumph for Macron comparable only to de Gaulle’s te deum in Notre-Dame at the liberation in August 1944, or Napoleon’s self-crowning there in December 1804. France’s youngest head of state since Napoleon III expected his own apotheosis today.
Instead, the former whizz-kid banker finds he has developed a perverse Midas touch: everything he handles these days turns to soot and ashes in his mouth. Over the last six months, Macron has blundered from one setback to another defeat, culminating in the current paralysis in France’s political system.
Poor results for his Renaissance Party in the European Parliament elections in June triggered him into calling early elections for France’s own national assembly. His supporters promptly lost their majority and France. The hard left and the hard right can’t agree on anything except stymieing Macron by voting down his hand-picked prime minister, Michel Barnier, and his austerity measures – which were meant to reignite French entrepreneurship and cut the state’s huge deficit, projected to exceed 6 per cent of GDP.
So instead of De Gaulle’s vision of the French president as the guarantor of the Fifth Republic’s stability, Macron has become the embodiment of systemic failure and chaos.
France is obviously too important as our major neighbour for its agonies to be ignored – and Britain, or France’s neighbours, like Germany, cannot overlook how much our woes have in common with Emmanuel Macron’s. Across Europe, conventional parties of centre-left and centre-right are no longer able to win enough votes to form a government on their own or at the head of a coherent coalition.
Germany’s odd thrupple coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and free market Liberals has just collapsed, in the wake of the roaring success of the nationalist AfD party in recent, regional elections. This was as much a reflection of the country’s sharp economic downturn as the AfD’s playing up anti-immigration policies – and suggests it will be hard for the centre-right Christian Democrats to form a classic coalition in Berlin after next February’s election.
Across Europe to the east, Romania’s own political crisis reared after its Constitutional Court cancelled the country’s presidential election as a nationalist, anti-EU, and anti-Nato jack-in-a-box candidate looked likely to win.
At first sight, Labour’s thumping majority in our general election in July bucked the trend in the EU. But with the nosedive in Sir Keir Starmer’s personal ratings since then – and Labour’s rapidly sinking poll numbers – post-Brexit Britain seems to align with the EU’s members in a sour public mood about our country’s governance.
In fact, all of western Europe’s once industrialised economies are suffering similar symptoms, including the haemorrhaging of highly skilled jobs at the same time migrants from sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East risk their lives to get here. Waning affluence is the key to public attitudes to immigration shifting in the west European states, which still remain magnets for people from the global south.
In reality, Europe, including Britain, is trapped as the world’s third-ranking economic unit between the top two: the USA and China. This is a face evident in the ways we handle the race to decarbonise the global economy.
The shift to a net-zero economy is taking a huge toll on German carmakers as well as any other energy-intensive industry. It is one thing for governments to promote “green” alternatives but quite another for European companies to actually design and manufacture cars people want and can afford to buy, for instance.
Compare this to China and the US: whatever Donald Trump’s climate scepticism, his No 1 booster, Elon Musk, has made his Tesla into the signature Western-manufactured electric car. China might be pumping vast amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere but its manufacturers are churning out solar panels and electric vehicles that have cut swathes through European markets.
Meanwhile, the EU and Britain remain faithful to the free trade shibboleths of the increasingly redundant Washington Consensus, ahead of threatened tariffs under Trump 2.0.
Trying to mix free trade with net zero regulation is a real contradiction which is becoming a living nightmare for European societies squeezed by the kind of external competitive and technological challenges which they haven’t experienced before and still haven’t thought through.
The challenges are many, and the paths through unclear. President Macron is today’s high-profile European leader battered by these surging problems besetting France. In some ways, his triumphant restoration of Notre-Dame is symbolic of our general crisis across Europe. Just as King Charles’s coronation was a masterpiece of public theatre, so reopening a pristine Notre-Dame shows how good we Europeans are at the past!
For all that I welcome the return of Notre-Dame as the spiritual centre of Paris – its reconstruction is a tribute to former glories rather than a sign that France in particular, or Europe in general, is about to enjoy a renaissance. Today’s ceremonies are a wake for an old France, maybe for old Europe too.
