The France of President Emmanuel Macron, who is really the egomaniac-in-chief, is somewhere on the spectrum between “spiraling political crisis” (Financial Times), “big trouble” (The Economist) and terminal collapse. Again.

Barely a week after a new, if fragile, government was cobbled together in acute crisis mode, the country is bracing “for big anti-austerity street marches and labor strikes,” while the state’s finances are “pernicious” and the budget for 2026 a big question without an answer. In Paris, for instance, the Metro is semi-comatose; in the country as whole, a third of teachers are on strike.

An earlier wave of protests – under the slogan “Let’s block everything”– did not quite achieve that ambitious aim, but it did attract double the number of participants the authorities had expected. In that respect – even if they were different in their ideological background – the French protests resemble the recent ‘Unite the Kingdom’ rally in London. On both sides of the Channel, decrepit, unpopular, unresponsive Centrist regimes are barely hanging on now.

As the French have taught us to say “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” (“The more things change, the more they stay the same”). Especially after Macron’s two irresponsible and egotistic decisions of 2024, France can’t find a way out of the mess he has created: first, he called snap parliamentary elections to then, second, ignore the will of the French voters.

If Macron had respected the results of the elections that he himself initiated, he would have had to charge either a left-wing bloc, with the most combined votes, or the new-right Rassemblement National (RN), which obtained the most votes for a single party, with building a new government. Yet the man with a vast ego and an incredibly shrinking popularity base, clearly rejected by a preponderant majority of his people, felt he knew better. Since then Macron has tried to impose his will against parliament. The problem? Parliament won’t agree.

So, after what the YouTube channel of venerable........

© RT.com