It is difficult to see how France will emerge from next month’s election peacefully. Flames are licking at the edges of the Republic and the man who lit the tinder was Emmanuel Macron when he called a snap election for 30 June and 7 July.
Macron held a most unpresidential press conference on Wednesday in which he lashed out at his enemies but offered no explanation as to why he reacted the way he did on Sunday evening. There are some in France who believe it was a temper tantrum. Emmanuel Macron has suffered few humiliations in his effortless rise to the top. Sunday’s battering in the European Elections was the first and his response was one of petulant rage, like the small boy who destroys his toys on being denied what he wants. As Robert Menard, the mayor of Beziers, explained to an interviewer, Macron’s ‘narcissism is stronger than his political logic’.
France is fracturing along class lines
He has unleashed chaos; in a week of mayhem, Wednesday was the most deranged day yet.
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