Macron’s story has become a Shakespearean tragedy

This week has been a tale of two presidents. On the one hand there is Donald Trump, who has masterminded a peace deal between Israel and Hamas which, the world hopes, will end the conflict in Gaza.

Even Trump’s long-standing detractors acknowledge his role in bringing the warring parties to the negotiating table. “Trump’s unique style and crucial relationships with Israel and the Arab world appear to have contributed to this breakthrough,” explained the BBC.

It hasn’t been such a good week for Emmanuel Macron. On the contrary it’s been the most humiliating few days of his eight and a half years in office. On Monday his Prime Minister, Sébastien Lecornu, tendered his resignation after 27 days in office. It was the shortest premiership in the 67 years of the Fifth Republic. Lecornu resigned 12 hours after unveiling a new coalition government that was so unpopular he felt compelled to throw in the towel.

Then late on Friday evening Lecornu was reappointed prime minister. He explained that he had accepted “the mission entrusted to me by the President of the Republic to do everything possible to give France a budget by the end of the year.” It smacks of desperation. Macron has run out of options and run out of candidates.

As Macron’s presidency falls apart so his friends and allies are turning on him. On Tuesday one of his former prime ministers, Édouard Philippe, urged Macron to leave office “in an orderly manner.” Another, Gabriel Attal, said that he “no longer understands” Macron’s thought process.

Rumors about Macron’s state of mind first surfaced in 2022 when he was re-elected president but a few weeks later lost his absolute majority in parliamentary elections. On a trip to the US in December that year he confided that he had for a while been in a “very serious depression.”

His behavior in recent days has left the French bemused; not just the public but also members of his dwindling inner circle. Speaking anonymously to Le Figaro, one Élysée insider said: “No one has any news. He is more than ever in a parallel universe.”

Macron appears to be in a state of denial about the gravity of the crisis facing France. The country is mired in debt, violent crime is soaring and on Thursday official figures showed that immigration reached record levels in 2024. There are now 7.7 million immigrants in France, more than 11 percent of the population.

It is chaos, but you wouldn’t know it to see the President. “Macron’s problem is that, with him, everything is always going very well,” said one of advisors.

The rise and fall of Emmanuel Macron is one of the more remarkable political stories this century. The liberal global elite breathed a sigh of relief when he was elected in 2017. An adult was back in the room, they cheered, ready to clear up the mess made the previous year by Britain’s vote to leave the EU and America’s vote for Donald Trump.

Macron was pictured walking on water on the cover of the Economist, and TIME magazine simpered its way through a lengthy interview with the President. It compared Macron and Trump: one “the scholarly French globalist” and the other “the brash, anti­-globalist septuagenarian.”

TIME stated that the “battle of ideas between the two has only just begun.” In essence this was Macron’s progressivism against Trump’s anti-progressivism, which is tiresomely characterized by his enemies as populism.

There was little doubt which side TIME was on. “If Macron is proved right,” it gushed, “France could emerge as a far more important global power than it has been in decades.”

Sorry, TIME, your man lost. Macron has ruined France. Not just its economy and its social cohesion, but also its reputation. It has no global power and Macron has no authority. His approval rating has fallen to 14 percent (Trump’s is 40 percent) and 70 percent of the French want their president to resign.

Macron cuts an increasingly tragic figure, alone in his palace, like Macbeth in his castle, tormented not by Banquo but by Trump.

“Whether purposely or not,” said Trump earlier this year, “Emmanuel always gets it wrong.”

Out, out, brief candle!