I’m catching up, after a week focused on the mid-term elections in America. And can’t resist the fact that Macron’s four hours of sleep a night has caught up with the Neo-Liberal masquerading as a ‘Reformer’, with the help of The Financial Times Corporatist hirelings!
Anne-Sylvaine Chassany does her best to continue the theme, via a kind off trivialization of Macron’s fading ‘brand‘:
Has Emmanuel Macron run out of puff?
How does one define the fact that a key minister left in a ‘huff’, to continue the theme. Never fear Ms.Chassany repeats the Party Line with a certain zest, even though, over time, it is growing shopworn. But she can’t resist the imperative of Political Melodrama as the vehicle of her iteration of a well worn theme. Bruno Cautrès offers this political fool’s gold, with the help of an anonymous source, within the Palace Walls : Chassany/Saint-Simon?
“Macron has positioned himself as the saviour of the world and the one who would change the lives of the French,” said Bruno Cautrès, a political scientist at Sciences Po, the research university. “But domestically and abroad, he seems helpless. He’s paying for over-promising and there isn’t much he can do to fix this, other than to wait for reforms to bear fruit at home.”
Some members of the Macron team depict the presidential pause in less dramatic terms. “He has lows, we all have them,” said one. But another spoke of a “breakdown,” partly linked to the steady decline in the president’s approval ratings, which are now below those of his unpopular predecessor François Hollande.
Those declining poll numbers act as a reminder, to all who are conscious, that 36.5% of voters found Macron so odious that they rendered their ballots uncountable, in the final vote! More misplaced Macron Triumphalism, the Financial Times’ ‘Party Line‘. More Political Melodrama and then this concluding paragraph:
Some fear that if Mr Macron is cut down to size, it will embolden France’s populists on both the right and the left. This is the theory, promoted by the French president himself, that he is Europe’s last holdout against the new politics of insurgency. But his stumbles could also give hope to members of France’s old political caste. In particular, some in the centre-right Republicans party might see an opportunity to lure back disillusioned voters. Mr Macron might be losing steam, but France’s old political order still hopes to ride its way back to power.
https://www.ft.com/content/10b84660-e101-11e8-a6e5-792428919cee
Macron’s self-proclamation as the bulwark against the Populist Menace from both ‘Right‘ and ‘Left’ is a maladroit pastiche, of the infamous scene recorded in a drawing by David:
https://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/napoleon-crowning-himself-emperor-pope
Neo-Liberalism is and can never be anything other than a destructive nihilism, a toxin to the Republican Tradition as presented by J.G.A. Pocock’s ‘The Machiavellian Moment Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition‘
https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10861.html
Next stop:
Headline : Emmanuel Macron shoulders a heavy burden as Angela Merkel bows out
Sub-headline: All is not lost for the French president’s ambitious EU reform plans
https://www.ft.com/content/c4004214-e0e2-11e8-8e70-5e22a430c1ad
Almost Marx
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