Macron’s Olympic delusion

All the world’s a stage and the Olympic Games in Paris is the greatest stage of all for the comedian president. Emmanuel Macron declared a political truce amidst the political nervous breakdown of France, so that his show could go on. The opening ceremony spectacle last night culminated in Macron declaring the Games open and the lighting of the Olympic cauldron. The president ordered Thomas Jolly, his personally selected director, to outdo London 2012. Off stage, France is in crisis.

France doesn’t have a real government. There’s no calculus showing how one might even be possible in a fractured new National Assembly of more than a dozen factions who loathe each other. The left and the right are plotting an opportunistic adventure to lower the pension age. Extreme greens are attacking the police to stop the construction of agricultural reservoirs. Gangs rule the cités. Tant pis. The Olympics has bought Macron time to indulge his narcissism and distract attention from his colossal political miscalculations and the threats posed by its consequences to the credit of France. 

Like Alfred E.