As the United States devolves into kakistocracy and Kiev trembles under the threat of massive Russian retaliation for the first use of long-range American and British missiles against Russian territory, the National Assembly in France continues to go through the motions of amending the Barnier government’s harsh austerity budget, even though everyone knows that the dozens of amendments debated over the past month will be wiped away when Barnier is ultimately forced to secure passage by resorting to Article 49.3. But now Marine Le Pen has at last unsheathed her sword: if the budget decreases the purchasing power of French families, she will join with the left-wing opposition to bring down the government in a censure vote once the door is opened by the invocation of Article 49.3.
The threat is not an empty one, even if Le Pen finds herself at the moment on the back foot, under threat of being ruled ineligible by a court for misappropriation of EU funds. And now Jordan Bardella, her protégé–or should one say créature, to borrow a term from the vocabulary of the Ancien Régime–has compounded her difficulty by saying that no one with a criminal conviction should serve as a deputy under the RN banner. Did young Bardella fall into a trap set by a clever interviewer, or did he really mean to threaten to sideline his boss and thus clear his own path to standing as the party’s presidential candidate in 2027? Most likely Bardella’s statement was a blunder, but in either case it will no doubt make for an interesting conversation when he and Le Pen next meet.
Meanwhile, France seems all but rudderless as the world hurtles toward chaos. Germany is facing an interregnum until elections can be held next March. The war in Ukraine is heating up in anticipation of an endgame that will begin as soon as Trump takes office. The EU is threatening China with sanctions for allegedly supplying drones to the Russians for use against Ukraine, while North Korean troops are already heading into battle in Kursk, which Ukrainian forces hope to hold as a bargaining chip in the negotiations into which Trump could quickly force them. The Starlink system on which they depend is controlled by Trumpist sycophant Elon Musk.
This is probably the most dangerous moment in recent European history, yet both the French and German governments are distracted by internal turmoil and apparently oblivious to the catastrophe unfolding in Washington.
These are desperate times.