French riots mean election run-off will be choice of two extremes

What is happening to the France we knew, or thought we knew?

The riots of early October were bad enough, but the outbreak of anarchy on October 17, with over 3,000 businesses looted or damaged, was staggering in its savagery.

With the presidential election now under six months away, the implications of this unrest are sobering.

Some have said the Fifth Republic itself is in danger – President Emmanuel Macron implied as much in his solemn address on October 18 – but it is hard to see any consensus about the Sixth Republic that would replace it.

A tale of two halves

France is a polarised country; it is not alone in the western world in being so, but the polarisation has been aggravated by the weak government practised by Mr Macron since his petulant decision to hold snap legislative elections in 2024.

He is now weaker than ever: it is almost surprising that he has not resigned, because it is hard to know what he can expect to achieve between now and next May.

Some of what happened in France recalled the riots in London in 2011, which followed the fatal police shooting of Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old mixed-race man, in Tottenham, north London (an inquest later confirmed that his killing was lawful).

Opportunists – some of them middle-class students – took the chance to go on a looting spree.

Extreme leftists sought to manipulate demonstrators against the then Conservative-led coalition government.

Although many French demonstrators had legitimate reasons to be unhappy, anarchists, or quite simply thugs and vandals, exploited their grievances for reasons of politics or for personal gain.

Money as the root cause

As is well known, the unrest began with the condition of state schools: pictures flashed around the world of sagging ceilings, scurrying rats, cockroaches and damp walls.

What is wrong with France’s education sector is indicative of much that is wrong in the French state: it is not the amount of money that is spent, but how well it is spent.

France has for a long time been living beyond its means: debt is 119% of GDP (in Britain it is 92%) and the public sector is ridiculously large and unproductive.

This – notably the cost of servicing all that debt – keeps taxes high and disposable incomes down.

And when disposable income is down, the problem of pouvoir d’achat (purchasing power) comes to the fore.

Not all of this is within Mr Macron’s, or any French politician’s, control.

Adding fuel to the fire

One of the greatest grievances is the price of fuel, whether for vehicles or for heating: that is mainly the fault of Donald Trump, who decided to wage what is turning out to be an unwinnable war against Iran.

With parts of the country still smouldering, Mr Macron perhaps unwisely confirmed his detachment from the reality of modern France by going off on a three-day tour of the Gulf.

We were told that he was going to plead with the Kuwaitis and others in the region to send more oil and diesel to France – which is all very well if he can get the oil out.

Mr Trump is a curse not just to France and other European governments, but to most of the civilised world.

It is hard to know what Mr Macron, even by acting as he does in concert with his EU partners, could do to deal with this.

So the grievances are likely to go on, unless a heavy defeat for the Republican Party in the mid-term elections of November 3 forces Mr Trump to capitulate to Iran in some measure.

The perfect storm

One hates to resort to cliché, but what Mr Macron is now facing is a perfect storm.

I have referred here before to one of the greatest French novels of recent years, Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission, published in 2015, by a horrible coincidence, on the morning of the Charlie Hebdo massacre.

It imagined the 2022 presidential election ending up with Marine Le Pen and a Muslim Brotherhood candidate in the second round, and with the eliminated centrist parties urging their voters to support the latter – who then wins, and proceeds to turn France into an Islamic state. Houellebecq’s point was that most mainstream politicians cared so little about French culture and its way of life that they would rather sacrifice it than see Ms Le Pen get into power.

Although there is unlikely to be an Islamist candidate up against Ms Le Pen next May, a choice of two extremes is looking more and more likely to be presented to the French people when the election comes.

The risk to Macron

So shocking, however, has been the October rioting that even if a genuine centrist – such as Edouard Philippe, the former prime minister and current mayor of Le Havre, who is the best placed of the centrists in the polls – made it to the final two, Ms Le Pen’s hard-line pronouncements about her determination to restore order might prove irresistible, especially if the unrest continues.

After all, she has unreservedly condemned it, while Jean-Luc Mélenchon joined the Paris march and blamed the police for the violence.

And many of those identified by Mr Macron – the ‘far-left groups’ he says were behind the violence – seem to be in sympathy with only one main French political figure, and that is Mr Mélenchon – a 75-year-old who campaigns for a retirement age of 60.

Some political analysts have said that with voter turnout among 18 to 25-year-olds often low, the association of Mr Mélenchon with the student protests may well provide the final lift he needs to get into the last two against Ms Le Pen.

If that has been his calculation, it may yet prove a highly successful one.

I struggle to see Mr Mélenchon winning the election because too many French people understand that capitalism, rather than an imitation of the old Soviet bloc, underpins their standard of living.

One fears that the unrest is not over yet, and that if a hard-right president is elected next year as a consequence of it, the challenge for that president may be of a different order.