France sizzles as silly season gives Macron some breathing room

August is here, and in France the silly season, billed as the time of le retour des serpents de mer (cousins, one imagines, of the Loch Ness Monster), is in full swing. 

The papers vie for our attention with stories about the difficulties of getting passports renewed, 20km tailbacks on the autoroutes and speculation on whether or not Brigitte Macron, now into her 70th year, will dare be seen in a swimsuit at the Fort de Brégançon, the President’s sumptuous Mediterranean retreat. 

It’s not as if there is any shortage of serious issues to be confronted. The heatwave that saw temperatures last week reach as high as 42 degrees Celsius has yet to abate. Most of the nation is baking hot and there has been hardly any rain, leading to water shortages in many departments and a continued shrivelling of crops. 

Even in Brittany – traditionally one of the wettest regions of France – the interminable hot weather has taken its toll. The grass has stopped growing and cows are being fed with last winter’s hay. Herds gather round their water troughs and look for shade beneath the trees. Farm dogs loll by the roadside, too fatigued to engage in staring contests with motorists. 

Covid, meanwhile, is making a comeback, increasing pressure on doctors, nurses, pharmacists and hospital managers. The general perception seems to be that it won’t be as bad this winter as last and there will be no need for lockdowns or mask mandates. But this could well be whistling in the dark. 

In the same way, outside of grumbling over the price of diesel, there have been no public manifestations of alarm about the looming European energy crisis. It is as if the French believe they can muddle through by the simple expedient of turning their radiators down a notch, from 22 degrees to 21, starting on the first cold day of autumn. The fact that 40 per cent of the country’s nuclear power plants are currently offline is barely noted. They will come back on stream when needed – you’ll see. Vladimir Putin’s mindgames with the EU – gas one day, gone the next – are deplored, but, outside of corporate boardrooms and the Department of Energy, viewed more as a problem for Germany and Poland than for France. 

You would think that with inflation at 6.1 per cent and rising and with prices in the shops at near record highs, the populace would be heading towards a Les Misérables moment. But not a bit of it, or at any rate, not yet. Perhaps they take comfort from the fact that the economy is still growing, albeit at a snail’s pace, and that the rate of inflation in Germany and the UK is significantly worse. 

The most likely explanation for this uncharacteristic insouciance is that the ongoing crisis of everything is happening in high summer, when the French are on holiday and more concerned with the beach-readiness of their bodies than with intimations of doom. Come the autumn, the mood could turn nasty almost overnight.

As President, Emmanuel Macron is duty-bound to take on board the entire range of issues, but to date there have been no indications of panic from inside the Élysée. Rather, the one-time banker, now two months into his second term, looks to have taken the summer off from domestic issues, preferring either to fly the flag, as in his visit last week to West Africa, or to relax at the Fort de Brégançon, where he may or may not play host to a selection of world leaders. 

Instead, it is being left to his third prime minister, Elisabeth Borne, to rally the troops at home and to seek solutions to internal problems before they get hopelessly out of control. Borne, formerly a top civil servant, has invited all 41 government ministers and their spouses to dinner in the garden of her official residence, l’Hotel Matignon, on Wednesday evening. The purpose, she says, is to show that she is “leading the collective,” but it will also be a moment in which to relax in the wake of a testing and frequently tempestuous session of the newly-elected National Assembly. 

Opposition deputies from left, right and centre have in recent weeks taken full advantage of the discomfiture caused to Macron by the loss of his majority in the Palais Bourbon. The combined (if not united) Left, urged on by the ostensibly mercurial but in fact entirely predictable Jean-Luc Mélenchon, have been bent on disruption, as if taking their lead from the Rev Ian Paisley. On the opposite side of the hemicycle, the far-right, under the glare of Marine Le Pen, has sometimes joined in the fun but, in a bid to show that power, not profile, is the goal, has done its best to appear both responsible and respectful of parliamentary protocols. 

The latter strategy has left the centre-right Republicans caught in something of a dilemma. They desperately need some profile if they are ever to recover anything like their old swagger and have shown themselves willing to do whatever it takes to put them back in the public eye. It is not impossible any longer to imagine Le Pen, even as she prepares to give up her party’s overall leadership to take a central role in the Assembly, doing deals with whoever succeeds in restoring visibility to the Republicans. 

By the same token, it is not entirely fanciful to posit a future realignment of the Left, bringing various of the more moderate Socialist factions and the Greens together with En Marche/Ensemble/Renaissance or whichever name is eventually given to the Macronistes once Macron himself has left the picture. 

All that, however, is for the future. In the meantime, France is in trouble, riven by disagreements as profound as any to be found in the UK or Italy. With the country and, more importantly, the Assembly, en vacance, the President will be looking for some way to undo the triple-tied Gordian knot bequeathed to him by external threat (Ukraine), the economy (inflation and energy supplies) and political deadlock (Le Pen and Mélenchon). The heatwave isn’t helping. Anyone who didn’t believe in climate change before believes in it now. But at least, try as they might, his enemies can’t pin that one on him. 

How Macron emerges from the summer break, whether as a second-term President bent on burnishing his image abroad or as a hands-on leader working with his government and the broader Assembly to come up with practical solutions to practical problems, will be the big theme of the autumn political season now only five weeks away. He needs to get cracking.