Why the French are dreaming of a Donald Trump à la française

A year ago Donald J Trump was still roundly disliked by the French commentariat. Even the conservative Le Figaro newspaper held its Gallic nose in disdain, running a haughty article headlined “Trump, vulgarity runs rampant.”

The left still loathe the president of the United States but for the right in France he has become a role model.

The same Le Figaro now writes approvingly of Trump and admits it got him wrong. “We expected an isolationist Trump, focused solely on American interests,” it declared on Friday. “But in nine months, the president has established himself as a peacemaker in multiple international crises.”

The French perhaps more than any European nation have never got The Donald. The political class in France are bland, humorless and conventional, as is most of the mainstream media.

The British populist politician Nigel Farage once said of the American president: “There’s a lot of humor with Trump. It’s quick-witted repartee, which he is a master of. He’s very funny. He’s enormous fun to be with.”

It’s hard to think of any French politician who could be described as “enormous fun,” certainly not Emmanuel Macron. The only thing enormous about the president of the Republic is his ego. And his list of failures.

Macron has run France into the ground and reduced the country – and himself – to a laughing stock. The French did not appreciate the sight of Trump mocking Macron in Egypt at the start of this week. But their anger wasn’t directed at the American president, as he wondered with a smirk why Macron was being so “low-key.” For the French, the ridicule of their president is richly deserved.

The contempt for Macron is arguably most profound within France’s business community. They believed his promise in 2017 to relaunch the country’s economy after five years of shambolic socialism under president Francois Hollande. Macron was hailed as the “Mozart of Finance.”

Eight years later France finances are out of control and last month two rating agencies downgraded the country’s debt.

If French conservatives are to break this socialist stranglehold they will need to do more than simply win an election. They must launch a counter-revolution.

A few weeks ago a book was published in France titled Bosses: the Trump Temptation. Its author, Denis Lafay, interviewed numerous business leaders in France and discovered that they dreamed of a Donald à la française. It was more than his business approach; they also approved of his “strong rejection” of the mainstream media, public spending, international institutions and wokeism. Above all, wrote Lafay, they admired Trump’s personality. “His virility, his taste for combat, his culture of deal-making, his resilience and finally his very authoritarian side, which reassures them.”

One suspects that France’s business leaders are more desperate than ever for a Donald of their own after the events of this week in parliament. Centrist Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu announced on Tuesday that his coalition government was suspending the pension reform bill of 2023 until after the 2027 presidential election. The main plank of this bill raised the age of retirement from 62 to 64.

The Socialist Party celebrated. Their 66 MPs had threatened to join a motion of no confidence in the government if the bill wasn’t suspended. Lecornu capitulated to the blackmail. Patrick Martin, the president of Medef, the largest employer federation, said it was “a sad day for France,” and lamented the fact that a minority socialist party was dictating government policy.

The Socialist Party’s representation in parliament has dwindled from 295 MPs in 2012 to 66 today, but they have been marching through France’s institutions for decades. They control the Supreme Court, the State Council, the National Audit Office, the state-owned broadcaster and much of the judiciary.

If French conservatives are to break this socialist stranglehold they will need to do more than simply win an election with an absolute majority. They must launch a counter-revolution, as Trump and J.D. Vance have in America, purging the institutions of the left-wing dogma that has taken root since Francois Mitterrand’s presidency of the 1980s.

Earlier this week a conservative magazine called Frontières ran an editorial headlined “A plea for a French Trump.” It listed his achievements this year, including the deportation of illegal immigrants and the classification of Antifa as terrorists, and contrasted Trump’s administration of seasoned experts with their own “incompetent elites.”

France, declared the editorial, “deserves a Trump and the government that goes with him to restore its greatness.”

Making France great again won’t be easy given how low the country has fallen this century. So if there is a French Trump out there, bonne chance.