French government collapse: Will Macron learn any lessons?

France has gone through so many prime ministers lately that they should just bolt a wind turbine to the revolving door. At least then the political instability could maybe bring down the people’s rising power bills, particularly given that the tax on energy just jumped from 5.5% to 20%.

Francois Bayrou is the third handpicked puppet of French President Emmanuel Macron, who’s at around 15% popularity himself, to get turfed within a year, and the fourth over the past two years. He called for a no-confidence vote on himself a couple of weeks ago, effectively begging opposition lawmakers to put him out of his political misery after finding himself in the apparently impossible situation of trying to find €44 billion to cut from the French budget.

So Bayrou found himself in front of parliament on Monday, right before the vote, pretending to plead with lawmakers not to shove him off the ledge and into the political abyss from which Macron fished him out in the first place. MPs enthusiastically seized the opportunity to pay tribute to Bayrou, but what they delivered looked more like a highlight reel of slam dunks – with Bayrou as the basketball. They accused him of everything from degrading France’s finances while claiming to be investigating them, to racking up new expenses while hand-wringing over the mounting bills.

Bayrou gets to now go back home to the south of France and enjoy a lifetime of gold-plated entitlements for having been a prime minister for all of about ten seconds. It turned out that 364 lawmakers voted against him, with just 194 awarding him their confidence.

It’s been a long time coming. Bayrou really hasn’t seemed too interested in hanging in there for a while now. Why else would he have proposed, back in mid-July, canceling a couple of paid state holidays every year for French workers as a means of pinching a few pennies? Or clawing back benefits that French workers have paid into their entire lives under the explicit agreement that if they pay massive taxes during their productive life, then the government will guarantee their comfort on the back end or when they need a social safety net.

In the run-up to this vote, Bayrou was also riffing on the idea of saving a few more cents by canceling health coverage for things like doctor-prescribed spa trips. Admittedly, I was surprised when first I arrived here a couple of decades ago to learn that French social security pays for people to flop around in spring water up in the Alps, but it’s hard to imagine that’s what broke the bank or tops the list of idiotic big-ticket items.

Quick reminder that the French people didn’t actually choose Bayrou. Macron did. And since Bayrou is resigning, it’s back to the drawing board for the French president to try to find another puppet who can make the budget cuts that he and Brussels are demanding, but also appease the opposition enough – notably the anti-establishment right and left populists that can band together for a majority vote – to avoid having to make another trip to the polls. Failing that, it will be back to the voting booth again to test whether the French are finally fed up enough to saddle Macron with polling frontrunner Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party’s control of the government’s purse strings.

Despite France’s problems at home, Bayrou distracted himself by lecturing Trump about America’s issues, even as the ground was giving out from under him, whining about Washington’s “bulldozer politics” compared to France’s respect for its citizens – which must be why Bayrou was so keen to take a gig that those same citizens didn’t actually elect him to do.

A few days ahead of this vote, Bayrou’s finance minister, Eric Lombard, was basically trying to keep his job and government in place by scaring up support, floating the ridiculous specter of an International Monetary Fund intervention, before having to backpedal. It’s absurd scaremongering since Italy and Japan have higher debt-to-GDP ratios and France is a long way from ever qualifying for, or needing, IMF help, according to virtually every economic expert. But the vibe is like, ‘You’d better let us do what we want with the budget because otherwise the globalists are gonna lock us in our rooms under a curfew.’

So what’s the plan now, then? This is where yet another scare tactic comes in to grease taxpayers’ wallets, drumming up the need to throw more tax money into the defense sector ‘for Ukraine’, and hoping that does the heavy lifting of boosting the economy. Arms dealing as the path to economic salvation. Then what’s next? Drug dealing? Literal state prostitution?

Meanwhile, France remains politically blocked, and faces another round of protests on Wednesday under the battle cry of Block Everything. But the truly revolutionary idea would be to unblock this hot mess. And that doesn’t look set to happen anytime soon.