JONATHAN MILLER: What DOES the endlessly self-regarding Emmanuel Macron hope to achieve by potentially handing the French PM’s job to Marine le Pen’s 28-year-old TikTok star protege?

The endlessly introspective Emmanuel Macron intended the Paris Olympics as the pinnacle of his presidency.

But on Sunday evening, visibly shaken by the humiliating defeat of his hand-picked candidates in that weekend’s European elections, the French president took to national television to denounce the terrifying rise of what he called the “far right” and warned him for the threat this poses. posed to ‘our Europe’.

And then he dropped the bomb: the dissolution of the National Assembly, the French parliament, which was elected only two years ago.

France was thus plunged into a political crisis and a whirlwind election campaign just a month before the opening ceremony of the Games.

What Macron expects to gain from this remains unclear.

French President Emmanuel Macron announced early elections today and denounced the far right on live television

Jordan Bardella, chairman of the National Rally, a French nationalist and right-wing populist party, could oust Macron

Bardella, only 28 years old, has stormed the political landscape with his masterful behavior during the party’s European election campaign

Does he actually want to lose and hand the government to the right, in a repeat of 1986, when Socialist President Francois Mitterrand cunningly allowed conservative Jacques Chirac to take over as Prime Minister?

Chirac then made such a mess of leadership that Mitterrand then emerged as the country’s savior.

Or even more cynically, could Macron exploit a loophole in the constitution, believing that after his party inevitably loses the election, he can resign midway through his second term, thereby bypassing the two-term limit for presidents and becoming eligible for a third term?

Whatever the case, the vote will undoubtedly be a long-awaited reckoning for a president who believed himself to be akin to Jupiter, king of the gods, and who, after first being elected, was rejected by the political and media elites of the world was considered to represent the president. a new era in competent, technocratic governance.

At the time, he was even pictured on the cover of the globalist magazine Economist walking on water.

But the truth is that Macron has presided over a France in catastrophic decline.

In 2017, his presidency began as it would continue, with a disastrous decision to cut taxes for the rich and raise the price of the diesel that ordinary French people depend on to get to work.

The policy was so poorly reviewed that commentators drew parallels with Marie Antoinette’s apocryphal suggestion that the breadless masses should eat cake.

Following the results of the European elections, a protest took place in Paris today against the French right-wing National Rally party

His utter incompetence sparked two years of violent riots by workers in yellow jackets – the Gilets Jaunes – which only ended with the Covid lockdowns.

Meanwhile, anti-Semitic incidents have increased by 300 percent this year and a succession of rabid Islamists have burned churches and beheaded a teacher who had insulted a Muslim student.

And cities, including Nice and Beziers, have banned young people under the age of 13 from going out unaccompanied after 11pm, such is the problem with youth violence.

This increase in gang violence has been linked to rising immigration.

Last year alone, more than 320,000 first residence permits were issued to non-European aliens, equivalent to the population of Nice.

Parts of the country, such as the northern Paris suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis, have become home to hundreds of squats occupied by migrants and asylum seekers.

In the run-up to the Paris Games, thousands of people were evicted from these informal slums to make way for the Olympic Village.

Yet Macron’s attempts to crack down on immigration have been both inconsistent and long overdue.

Unions CGT and Left Party called for national protests after National Rally made significant gains in European Union parliamentary elections

This series of failures has reportedly so irritated Macron’s wife Brigitte, who is almost 25 years his senior, that she has attempted to lead a Soviet-style “purge” of his senior advisers.

The disaster at Sunday’s European elections was, in other words, a convulsion in a country at a breaking point.

The far-right National Rally, formerly the National Front, won almost 32 percent of the vote, beating Macron’s Renaissance Party by almost 15 percent.

The remaining votes were divided between a colorful circus of ultra-leftists, crazy Greens, animal rights nuts and traditional socialists and conservatives.

Also notable was the heavy defeat of environmentalists, who won 13.5 percent of the vote in the previous euro polls in 2019, but only 5.7 percent this time – proof that voters have had enough of the Net Zero dogma .

“France has entered a new political moment,” admitted Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Corbyn-like leader of the ultra-left.

So much for the losers. But what about the overcomers?

How did Marine Le Pen, the figurehead and former president of National Rally, emerge triumphant over Macron after losing the presidential elections to him in 2017 and 2022?

Marine Le Pen, president of France’s far-right National Rally, has set her sights on a presidency in 2027

This week’s results are a sign of both her political resilience and her skillful repositioning of the party.

But they are also a cruel sign of Macron’s arrogant inability to show even the slightest empathy with ordinary French voters.

Le Pen’s second presidential challenge to Macron, in 2022, failed, not least because heavily subsidized French media and TV stations criticized the sitting president, while demonizing her as an “extremist” or even a “fascist ‘ – which she is not.

In any case, its economic policy is left-oriented.

What she is clear about is her unequivocal opposition to uncontrolled immigration by groups that do not share or respect French social values.

Her other masterstroke was the promotion of Jordan Bardella, the victorious leader of National Rally, an extraordinary young politician, still only 28, who has stormed the political landscape with his masterful execution of the party’s European election campaign.

As Le Pen focuses on her 2027 presidential bid, the sharp-jawed Millennial is the most likely contender for the premiership.

Le Pen lost to Macron in the 2017 and 2022 elections, but the political dynamics in France appear to be about to change

Completely different from typical French politicians, the personable, martial arts-loving Bardella grew up in a crime-ridden tower block in the northeastern Paris suburb of Drancy, the only child in a family with an immigrant background. His mother’s family came to France from Turin in the 1960s, while his father’s family came from Algeria.

A precocious student, he graduated from high school with honors and briefly attended the elite Sorbonne University in Paris before dropping out to focus on politics.

Out of admiration for Le Pen, he joined the National Front, the predecessor of the National Rally, in 2012.

He has made his mark by campaigning in what seemed the party’s least promising areas – the deprived suburbs in “the forgotten areas of the Republic” – and has warned that French civilization “could die… because it will be submerged in migrants’.

He has triumphantly courted new voters and established himself as the new face of the French right.

The collapse of Macron’s presidency and the rise of Le Pen have opened up a new and unprecedented political dynamic in a country that has been in decline for years under the leadership of a political elite that has become increasingly distant from the people it governs.

Macron is becoming more and more like Louis The Duke replied: ‘No sir, it is not a rebellion, it is a revolution.’