Forget Le Pen 2027

If Emmanuel Macron has any sense he will be back in the office this morning. Sunday night’s celebratory shindig was good while it lasted but the Fifth Republic has never faced such a parlous future, either socially or economically. One can only hope that the attack on a priest in a Nice church on Sunday morning, barely mentioned by the media, is not a harbinger of things to come for Macron’s second term.

Of more general concern for France is the economic situation. Everything is rising, from the cost of petrol to the price of a baguette, and the war in Ukraine will only deepen the crisis in the months ahead. In an op-ed in last Thursday’s Le Figaro Agnès Verdier-Molinié, the director of an independent think-tank, expressed her dismay that throughout their campaigning neither Macron nor Marine Le Pen had addressed the ‘chasm of our public finances’. In 1980 France’s national debt was 21 per cent of its GDP and in 2022 it is 112.9