Today the National Assembly passed the social security budget by the narrow majority of 247-234 with 93 abstentions. Sébastien Lecornu secured the abstention of most Greens by making a last-minute concession on medical fees. Olivier Faure, on the strength of having forced a suspension of pension reform and extracted other concessions from Prime Minister Lecornu, was able to persuade most of the Socialist Party to vote in favor of the bill rather than abstain. The winning majority was thus a motley coalition of Socialists and Macronists. But the socle commun fractured completely: former PM Edouard Philippe has charted a path to the presidency that requires him to stand in frontal opposition to the president who nominated him. Bruno Retailleau has carried the LR into opposition and, indeed, a hair’s breadth from the RN, which joined LFI in rejecting any compromise budget from the beginning.
Faure is thus staking his presidential ambitions on presenting himself as a realist willing to compromise in order to avoid chaos. Philippe, by contrast, believes that he must cleanse himself of his prior association with Macron in order to mount a viable candidacy from the right of center (where he will be challenged by Xavier Bertrand). Retailleau and Wauquiez are fighting over the peau de chagrin that used to be the LR. If Lecornu’s canny dealings with all and sundry ultimately result in a budget before the end of the year, he too will likely run for president.
With la politique politicienne thus rising toward a crescendo during la trève des confiseurs, one imagines the twin naysayers Le Pen and Mélenchon eyeing each other warily en chiens de faïence, waiting for the pygmies to grind each other into the dust. Such is French politics these days.
Meanwhile, Le Grand Continent has published the manifesto of a Putin confidant, Sergei Karaganov, who states flat out that Russia is already at war with Europe, not just Ukraine, but that Europe has not yet realized it. This complements remarks made yesterday at Harvard by Russia expert Fiona Hill, who said that Russia is already at war with the United States, only the US has not yet realized it.
In other news, Donald Trump, in an interview with Politico, has made it clear that he is demanding nothing less of Zelensky than to settle with Russia on Russia’s terms. If Hill is right that Russia is at war with the US, it would thus seem that the US president is so unaware of this that he is urging pre-emptive surrender.