{"text":[[{"start":6.74,"text":"I live in Paris by the Place de la République, so last Saturday was lively. I spent the afternoon among the high school students demonstrating with their revolutionary cardboard signs. By 6pm, a different crowd occupied the streets. Our courtyard reeked of police tear gas. Outside, the boulevard was full of casseurs (wreckers), a group that historically accompanies French demonstrations. I watched teenage boys smash the shutters of the supermarket across my street and pillage it, mostly for stuff they didn’t particularly want. One kid walked out cheering with a crate of Volvic mineral water. Others chucked around packets of crisps. A higher-value rioter staggered out with armfuls of spirits. Police were nowhere to be seen."}],[{"start":51.56,"text":"I considered wading in to defend the supermarket as a one-man force of order, but decided against it. With my neighbours cowering inside, I was the only middle-aged person on the street. Not wearing a tracksuit or hoodie, I looked suspect. One boy ironically suggested I call the police. Instead, I went back upstairs and spent the evening listening to smashing glass."}],[{"start":73.58,"text":"In 25 years in Paris I’ve never seen such public disorder, nor such extreme and uncompromising politics. Polls predict that far-right leader Marine Le Pen — boosted by Saturday’s mayhem — will be elected president on May 2, despite potentially campaigning in an ankle tag after being convicted of embezzling European parliamentary funds. This would be the far right’s first ascent to power in any of Europe’s big three of Germany, France or the UK since 1945. She could face a financial crisis: France’s annual budget deficit has been stuck for years at about 5 per cent, borrowing costs have hit 24-year highs and no political solution is in sight. How did France reach the brink of ungovernability, and where might it go?"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":118,"text":"In France, the first question to ask about revolutionary action is always: is this real or just theatrical? The French are raised to revere and re-enact their past uprisings. Alexis de Tocqueville, describing worse violence in much the same neighbourhoods in 1848, wrote, “here is the French Revolution beginning over again, for it is always the same one”. The youthful protesters last Saturday honoured their forebears. “Be young and shut up”, read one sign, reusing the ironic slogan of 1968. They chanted the 1920s Italian slogan, “Siamo tutti antifascisti”, and, “We decapitated Louis XVI, we’re going to restart, Macron”. Apart from anything else, they were having fun. It’s easy to mock the people who filmed Saturday’s protests and violence, but all French revolutions are intended, in part, as spectacles."}],[{"start":172,"text":"The French tend to talk radical but act conservative. This is a country where 57 per cent are homeowners, and many people spend their lives looking forward to retirement. They rely on the state. They want it to function. Revolutionary language is in part just a bow to French heritage. Even many of the voters who backed radicals in past elections quietly wanted an overeducated technocrat to win. Then they could spend five years protesting against him. The 1968 “revolution” culminated in the election of centre-rightist Georges Pompidou, product of the École Normale Supérieure."}],[{"start":206.48,"text":"But last Saturday was a dramatisation of a new French political alignment, in which technocrats, with Emmanuel Macron as their final incarnation, risk being chased from the stage."}],[{"start":217.2,"text":"High school students had been protesting for weeks against failings in French education. On Saturday, most of the demonstrators represented the far left. They were telling the indebted state to spend more. “We don’t have the means — liar” mocked one banner. Their favourite target, besides Macron, was the police: “The whole world detests the police!” The protesters’ patron is far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who tries to co-opt the street now that trade unions no longer control it. Currently polling at about 17 per cent for the first round of next spring’s presidential elections, he may reach the run-off against Le Pen."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":252.64,"text":"The protesters barely referred to her, acting as if she didn’t exist. So did the small group of “ultra-left” “Black Bloc” members, who come to demonstrations to attack the state. One of them may have helped burn down Limoges’ beautiful town hall."}],[{"start":269.04,"text":"The vast majority of “wreckers” are largely apolitical youths, many of immigrant origin but born in France, out for macho thrills. These were not the “Islamic extremists” whom Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke of this week. Still, they did Le Pen’s work for her: their gleeful destruction provided a tableau of the disorder she has always warned about. So the biggest presence in the French political scene watched on Saturday from the gods, preparing to pose as the strongwoman who would restore order. Both she and Donald Trump have used the riots to attack immigration."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":306.24,"text":"On Sunday morning, our local shopkeepers totted up the damage. The guy who runs the Manga store where one of my sons used to buy his weekly stash, and later sell it back second-hand, told Le Parisien newspaper: “It’s over. They took everything. My store was a free shopping centre. I was 17 when I came here, I’m 48 now, but the story ends here.” Some shopkeepers said they would arm themselves. Others just cried."}],[{"start":332.68,"text":"In centre stage, Macron’s state managed to appear simultaneously repressive and weak. The French riot police routinely use tear gas, stun grenades and rubber bullet launchers, even against peaceful schoolchildren. The policy seems to be to do everything short of killing — France’s last two major riots, in 2005 and 2023, broke out after youths died in confrontations with police. Yet on Saturday, while the casseurs ran amok, desperate shop owners phoning the police got no help."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":363.52,"text":"Macron has governed as a high-handed leader — “Jupiterian”, in his own description — who rarely consults. “Macron’s Achilles heel is that he’s not good at dealing with negotiation,” Philippe Aghion, the French economist who won last year’s economics Nobel, told me. “They don’t know how to deal with social movements. Or they don’t have the patience.” This is a Macronian flaw, but it’s also baked into France’s “vertical” political system, says the philosopher Gaspard Koenig. He pulls out his copy of Tocqueville’s Recollections, about the 1848 revolution, and reads: “But there is one institution that cannot be destroyed: centralisation.” Koenig says that demonstrators typically aspire only to replace France’s mighty leader with a different mighty leader."}],[{"start":406.6,"text":"Macron looks as ineffectual as his police. It’s hard to say now what he has achieved in almost a decade in power: France’s economic growth has been anaemic as usual, and his biggest achievement, a modest raising of the pension age from 62 to 64, later had to be frozen after opposition. His approval rating has hit an all-time low of 15 per cent, say pollsters Ipsos Bva."}],[{"start":429.76,"text":"France currently appears economically ungovernable. The government has struggled even to pass budgets since Macron lost his parliamentary majority in 2024. His premier Sébastien Lecornu has called himself “the weakest prime minister of the Fifth Republic”."}],[{"start":445.06,"text":"France’s deficits are becoming a slow-burn crisis. Public debt of 120 per cent of GDP would be manageable if parliament could agree to start cutting the deficit. Jean Tirole of the Toulouse School of Economics, the economics Nobel laureate for 2014, says: “I think what financial markets are worried about is the fact that nothing is happening.” He contrasts France with Greece during its 2010s’ debt crisis: “The Greeks at some point realised that things were very bad. I’m afraid we are not at this stage.” Popular support for balanced budgets appears weak. Government spending is 57.3 per cent of GDP, joint highest in the western world with Finland, and Tirole notes that even with deficits of 5 per cent, many accuse Macron of “austerity”."}],[{"start":494.4,"text":"There’s another presence on the French political stage, usually glimpsed only in the shadows: Russia. Unit 61240 of Russia’s FSB security services spies on France, and frequently launches cyber attacks. Russians also spread misinformation about everything from a supposed plague of bedbugs to fake news about centrist candidates. The French presidential election will keep Moscow busy. But Russia hardly needs to stir the French pot given the quantity of fake news and conspiracy theories that France generates indigenously."}],[{"start":528,"text":"The French have long been world champions of gloom in surveys, but Odoxa’s latest study registered a new record: 90 per cent are pessimistic about France’s economic future. They may finally be ready to gamble on radicalism. Bookmakers make Le Pen odds-on favourite to become president."}],[{"start":544.52,"text":"That’s quite a turnaround for a party that long carried a whiff of Vichy. The Front National was founded in 1972 by Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie, repeatedly convicted of Holocaust denial and inciting racial hatred, together with men such as Pierre Bousquet, a former member of the Waffen-SS’s French Charlemagne division who defended Hitler’s chancery in Berlin in 1945. Le Pen père led the party until 2011 yet was always considered an unelectable extremist, known as “the devil of the Republic”."}],[{"start":575.16,"text":"His daughter replaced him as leader, and later expelled him from the party and changed its name to Rassemblement National. She has conducted a successful campaign of so-called “dédiabolisation” — de-devilisation — by extinguishing the taint of Vichy. Whereas her father admired Vichy’s leader Marshal Pétain, she honours de Gaulle. She has cleansed the party’s statements of antisemitism, although it keeps popping up unofficially. The investigative website Mediapart accuses her deputy Jordan Bardella of making antisemitic online comments as a teenager, something he denies. The party’s former parliamentary vice-president Caroline Parmentier faces similar accusations; she denies antisemitism. And neo-Nazi scandals regularly hit minor RN figures, including one parliamentary candidate in 2024 who dropped out after a photograph of her in a Nazi cap appeared on social media."}],[{"start":633.32,"text":"Le Pen attacks Muslims and non-white immigrants, not Jews. British historian Julian Jackson, author of the biography of de Gaulle that inspired the biopic seen this summer by millions of French people, says: “The distancing from Vichy doesn’t mean they’ve distanced themselves from the form of nationalism, of which Vichy was one example, which I would broadly call exclusionary, anti-foreigner, inward-looking. The language they use about immigrants and Muslims is so similar, if you look at the way the extreme right of the ’30s talked about Jews. You just change Jew to Muslim, you’d get the same: ‘They can’t integrate into France, they have double identity, they don’t belong to us.’ I think it’s totally superficial, the clean-up.”"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":680.24,"text":"Some still consider the RN the “devil of the Republic”. But now there are rival devils. Mélenchon has that status for most in the centre and far right, and Macron for far left and far right. This tarnishes everyone associated with Macron’s project. Until recently, the broad centre’s best hope for beating Le Pen was Macron’s former prime minister, Édouard Philippe. But he’s polling at about 15 per cent. Catherine Fieschi, author of Populocracy and longstanding expert on the RN, says: “I think Philippe doesn’t have it in him. He has this grand bourgeois demeanour that is not going to play with a majority.” Bookmakers give centre-left candidate Raphaël Glucksmann, a low-charisma intellectual, about a one-in-20 chance. Aghion is hoping for the emergence of “a figure . . . a kind of new de Gaulle”."}],[{"start":727.12,"text":"For now the question has become how Présidente Le Pen might govern. Many predict Melonisation: that faced with the realities of power, Le Pen will moderate, like Italy’s supposedly far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. But Marion Van Renterghem, author of the new book Femmes extrêmes, about Meloni, Le Pen and German far-right leader Alice Weidel, emphasises French-Italian differences. Van Renterghem says Italy’s moderate internationalist President Sergio Mattarella, who can bring down the government, “limits Meloni’s aspirations and speech. She’s also limited by having to hold a coalition together. And Meloni is profoundly attached to the Atlantic alliance.”"}],[{"start":766.94,"text":"More fundamentally, notes Van Renterghem, Italy has no past as a global power. France does. And Le Pen, like de Gaulle, places herself in that tradition. She will distance herself from what remains of the western alliance."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":780.18,"text":"That means first of all abandoning European support for Ukraine. Le Pen says she will stop French financial aid to Kyiv within six months of taking power because France can’t afford it. “The honest thing to do with [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy is to . . . warn him in fact that, listen, we can’t do more,” she told the FT this month."}],[{"start":800.82,"text":"She has a Putinist past. After she supported Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, the First Czech-Russian bank lent the party €11mn. Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, in the run-up to France’s presidential election, she had to bin 1.2mn election leaflets showing her shaking Vladimir Putin’s hand. Whether she still supports Putin is probably irrelevant, says Fieschi. “It doesn’t matter in the sense that you don’t have to be pro-Putin to decide that you don’t want to lay out another dime for Ukraine, that you don’t care. It’s not your war. It’s not your Europe.”"}],[{"start":837.3,"text":"Europe is another divide between Meloni and Le Pen. Meloni has been pro-European largely because the EU has granted and lent Italy €166bn from its Next Generation fund, notes Fieschi. By contrast, France is the EU’s second-largest net contributor. Le Pen wants to cut its payments, curb the European Commission’s powers, and push the European Central Bank to finance large-scale borrowing. “If you read Le Pen’s autobiography, there’s a real detestation of the EU,” says Van Renterghem."}],[{"start":868.1,"text":"Le Pen will also seek conflict with French Muslims, other immigrants, and even French citizens of immigrant origin. Immigration is her party’s central historic theme. She plans to hold a referendum on changing the constitution to give French citizens “national preference” for social housing, welfare and government jobs. (This would break European law)."}],[{"start":886.9,"text":"France already bans the hijab for girls at school; Le Pen wants to ban it for adult women in public places, too. This raises the spectre of police patrolling the streets ordering women to remove their veils. Many police might be keen. The pollsters SciencesPo Cevipof estimated that 67 per cent of soldiers and police voted RN in the second round of legislative elections of 2024."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":913.56,"text":"Will Le Pen seek a confrontation with financial markets, too? Maybe even she doesn’t know. “She doesn’t understand a damn thing about economics,” snorts Aghion."}],[{"start":923.9,"text":"Her economic positions seem contradictory. This month, suddenly sounding extremely serious about the debt, she proposed holding a referendum on a “golden rule” that would force parliament to pass only budgets compatible with shrinking the public debt-to-GDP ratio. Simultaneously, she touts some tax cuts and spending increases. Even if she wanted to reduce spending, she, like Macron, might find it impossible to get it through the Assemblée Nationale. (She probably wouldn’t control parliament.) Mélenchon and the street could fight her as they do Macron."}],[{"start":956.18,"text":"For France, “prevention”, choosing to move towards a balanced budget, would be painful but the best option, says Tirole. Continuing to run high deficits risks a financial crisis. That’s often the moment when political parties and citizens embrace reality and accept cuts. In 2015, Greece took a third bailout from the European Stability Mechanism that locked in tough fiscal tightening."}],[{"start":979.42,"text":"However, there’s a third route: France could become Argentina. That would mean defaulting on debt and electing nationalist governments that fight with markets. Some French voters appear tempted. Tirole was shocked that Mélenchon’s proposal not to repay the part of the national debt held by the French central bank “took centre stage in France for days and weeks”. Tirole calls this “wishful thinking”."}],[{"start":1000.46,"text":"He says: “If we went the Argentinian way, we would lose Europe. We would have to quit the Eurozone, go back to the franc. A default, by the European treaties, is not allowed . . . I just don’t see Germany saying, ‘OK, we’re going to help France keep having deficits and retiring at 62.’”"}],[{"start":1018.94,"text":"I’m writing this with a surveillance helicopter flying over my neighbourhood. The supermarket across the street remains boarded up and closed. For this Saturday’s demonstrations, the government is deploying military troops. But what’s coming next year could make 2026 seem tranquil."}],[{"start":1035.46,"text":"Simon Kuper is author of ‘Impossible City: Paris in the Twenty-First Century’"}],[{"start":1040.06,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning"}],[{"start":1052.06,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1792825062_5898.mp3"}