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French sour

The troubles are economic, too: France’s biggest and best-known firms are struggling. Inflation is stubbornly high. And the country is having trouble luring foreign investment.

It’s not just the political and economic conditions that look bad, either. In a recent poll, 87 percent of people in France said they thought the country was in decline. French people had long shown considerable faith in their social model, but even that’s eroding now, too. Other surveys show citizens’ trust in public services—hospitals and schools, for example—is falling fast.

What’s happened?

Marc Weitzmann is a French journalist and the author of 12 books, including Hate: The Rising Tide of Anti-Semitism in France. Weitzmann says French people have seen their country as being in decline for decades, if not centuries. But now many of them don’t believe the government knows how to manage it. This is partly a result of the collapse of President Emmanuel Macron’s power, but it’s also the result of a much bigger shift: The French political system has reached the end of an era, and no politician has yet been able to offer a convincing, let alone successful, vision for what comes next.

After the end of the Cold War, the traditional left-right divide became less and less important. The next generation of elites pursued economic globalization and technological innovation, but that agenda hasn’t produced broad prosperity and peace—and other social problems, like immigration, have only gotten worse. Macron ran on a platform of getting past old ideologies, but all he’s given France is technocratic rule—which hasn’t been successful or popular. Neither, Weitzmann says, is the problem uniquely French: A political era has ended throughout the West, and no country seems to have found a way forward …

• “People in France don’t trust the government as being able to make these institutions work. Most French people used to expect it to make everything work—public hospitals, public schools, the police, and so forth. When people lose trust in any institution, they blame the government—and they lose trust in the state. People see problems in schools or hospitals, and they wonder why the government isn’t doing anything to reform them.”
• “When Nicolas Sarkozy ran for president in 2007, many people liked him because he seemed to represent a new, youthful trend and the possibility of a new political culture—though others disliked him precisely because of this. But he failed as a president, and that reawakened the feeling of decline. Macron is even less popular now than Sarkozy was—and Sarkozy was not popular. Macron is an emblematic technocrat, more robot than flesh and bone. It’s hard to know what he really thinks or what his personal life is like. He lacks discernible personality.”
• “In the ‘90s, Western leaders thought they could talk to the Chinese and build a new world. They thought they could carve out a Palestinian state and an Israeli state. None of it worked out. The failure of that attempt brought us to this point. In a way, the attacks of September 11 ended the fictions of the 1990s. The old political class—whether in Europe or the U.S.—lives in a historical vision of what their job should be, but that model doesn’t work anymore.”

At the peak of the crisis, some 13,000 arrived in Germany a day. Once they’d entered the Schengen area—the 29 European states joined without internal borders by the Schengen Accords in 1985—migrants could move between countries more or less freely. Soon enough, the countries began closing these borders, temporarily reintroducing the controls Schengen ended. Since then, the European Union has fortified its external borders and even paid countries like Türkiye and Libya to stop migrants from reaching the EU.

Critics of Schengen claim it’s eroded European borders, letting too many migrants move freely within the European Union. Others charge that Schengen has made the EU’s external borders inaccessible, forcing refugees to make the journey across the Mediterranean in unsafe boats. Which is it? This week, in the member’s dispatch, we take a look at the question via Isaac Stanley-Becker’s new book, Europe Without Borders: A History …

• U.S. President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress celebrated disruption without addressing consequences. While promoting government cuts, tariffs, and Ukraine policy changes, the president avoided discussing their costs—dismissing market concerns explicitly as “a little disturbance.” He offered no details on potential peace terms with Russia or any further context for understanding his administration’s increasingly apparent alignment with Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
• According to U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, President Trump will “probably” announce a compromise with Canada and Mexico regarding the recently imposed 25 percent tariffs as early as Wednesday. The potential agreement would likely involve scaling back at least part of the tariffs, with Lutnick suggesting Trump would “meet them in the middle.” The announcement follows two days of stock-market declines driven partially by investor concerns about possible trade wars.
• The former Los Angeles Fire Department chief Kristin Crowley lost her bid for reinstatement after the City Council voted 13-2 to uphold Mayor Karen Bass’s decision to demote her. Crowley defended her handling of January’s devastating Palisades fire, claiming the department was underfunded with critical equipment shortages. She argued the mayor made “false accusations” about her preparation and communication. The fire killed at least 12 people and destroyed nearly 7,000 structures.

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