Emmanuel Macron's last act: France's pretty-boy Napoleon faces his Waterloo
2 weeks, 2 days ago

Emmanuel Macron's last act: France's pretty-boy Napoleon faces his Waterloo

Salon  

At this point, Americans shouldn’t need reminding that the institutions of so-called liberal democracy are in profound crisis, and that the crisis is getting worse rather than better. If the downfall of onetime liberal dreamboat Emmanuel Macron in France seems like a startling headline — he remains in office, but has effectively lost control of government — and the crumbling of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition nothing more than a footnote, there’s plenty more chaos to contemplate. After his increasingly amorphous political party — which has gone through three different names in seven years — lost its parliamentary majority in an election last June, Macron faced a quandary: Under France’s unusual parliamentary system, the elected president appoints the prime minister, but the latter must command enough votes to stay in power. They only barely wriggled back into power after the long reign of Angela Merkel, the dominant figure of 21st-century German politics — another Euro leader with an undeserved reputation among liberal Yanks — and never seemed in control of Germany’s domestic and foreign policy crises. If Scholz’s distinctly unsuccessful chancellorship is likely to doom the fragmented German left to an extended period in political exile, Macron’s predicament presents opportunities for the NFP, a loose alliance of left-liberal, social democratic and socialist parties that holds the largest number of seats in the French parliament.

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