It’s been a busy year for President Emmanuel Macron: the world watched him preside over the Paris Olympics, D-Day commemorations and the reopening of Notre-Dame cathedral. But on the domestic front it’s been a veritable "annus horribilis" – marked by political turmoil, loss of influence and all-time low popularity.
A year ago, in his New Year televised address, President Macron announced a year of "French pride".
In some ways it delivered.
In June, France welcomed WWII veterans from the US, Canada, UK, and its former colonies to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy, in what will likely be the last major ceremony in the presence of the men and women who freed France from Nazi rule.
Later that month, the Paris Olympics and Paralympics defied the naysayers and saw France pull off a spectacular opening ceremony on the River Seine, while fears over security and the capital grinding to a halt under the weight of millions of visitors failed to materialise.
And 2024 was bookended with spectacular images of Notre-Dame Cathedral rising from the ashes. The Gothic wonder reopened, more or less as Macron had promised, within five years after a devastating blaze.
Millions watched on as Macron gathered a host of international dignitaries including US president-elect Donald Trump and Ukraine’s Volodymr Zelensky under the same, albeit freshly painted, roof.
But a subsequent controversy over Macron’s “god-like” insistence on replacing the cathedral’s original and undamaged stained-glass windows with something more modern, was a prescient reminder of the French leader's failure to read his country's mood.
Mounting discontent
In that same New Year’s address, Macron also laid out his vision of "rearming the nation" to face the challenges of the year ahead.
It would be economic, industrial, political, technological... even “biological”.
Feminists weren't the only ones uncomfortable at being called on to breed for France. More broadly, 2024 saw the country lurching from from one crisis to another.
Farmers, who like French trade unions punch well above their numbers, kicked off the year with an unprecedented revolt over soaring costs and EU-imposed constraints. The government announced concessions, including a U-turn on the use of pesticides.
There were further roadblocks in November in protest over the Mercosur free trade deal which France now opposes in a move away from many of its traditional European allies such as Germany.
In May, rioting in the French overseas territory of New Caledonia over a proposed change to voting rights left 14 dead and an estimated two billion euros worth of damage to an archipelago already in economic crisis.
The voting reform was later abandoned, but Macron and his governments have not managed to resolve the institutional crisis in its former colony.
Deadly unrest in New Caledonia tied to old colonial wounds
2024 ended badly in another French overseas territory – the Indian Ocean archipelago of Mayotte – devastated by Cyclone Chido. The government has promised to rebuild its poorest department within two years but the psychological wounds and sentiment of being abandoned will take much longer to heal.
In a further blow to his image, Macron was filmed on a recent visit to Mayotte telling residents they would have been “10,000 times more in the shit” if they hadn’t been part of France.
Meanwhile promises to “rearm” the economy through reindustrialisation, including the construction of more EPR nuclear reactors, appear to have hit a wall. Hopes of turning the former rust-belt north of France into a hub for electric vehicles and recycling batteries are on hold.
The country's hefty €3.2 trillion debt burden, one of the largest in the EU, is making borrowing even most costly.
Troubled European waters
On the international scene, while war continued in both Ukraine and Gaza, Macron helped bring about the US-led ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah in its former protectorate of Lebanon.
Closer to home, the president's stress on the importance of European sovereignty and strategic autonomy has gained resonance since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. But the Franco-German partnership under Olaf Scholz is not what it was under Angela Merkel.
Macron's comments in February that France and its NATO allies should not rule out sending troops to Ukraine drew sharp rebukes from the US and Germany in particular. And the prospect of sending French boys to fight in Ukraine wasn’t popular at home either.
Dissolving parliament
But the rockiest waters have certainly been on the domestic front. And while in France it is customary for the president to preside and the government to govern, the current mess is of Macron’s own making.
It began in January, when he attempted to breathe some fresh air into his second term by naming Gabriel Attal as France’s youngest-ever prime minister.
The gamble didn’t pay off and Macron’s centrist camp suffered a severe blow in the 9 June European elections, winning less than half as many votes as the far-right anti-immigration National Rally (RN).
Having promised to halt the rise of the far right when running for president in 2017, he immediately, and unilaterally, dissolved parliament to “let the people decide”.
Two weeks later the people did, and in a further blow to his authority, his centrist bloc was beaten by the left-wing NFP coalition that had formed in extremis to fight off the RN.
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The decision to dissolve parliament left the Assembly fractured into three blocs, none with an outright majority, triggering France’s worst political crisis since the Fifth Republic was founded in 1958.
Refusing to name a prime minister from the left-wing NFP, Macron finally landed on the conservative former minister and EU commissioner Michel Barnier. He was felled in a vote of no-confidence after just three months in the job when opposition parties voted against his government’s proposed austerity budget.
No stepping down
Centrist politician François Bayrou took over from Barnier on 13 December. Bayrou was reportedly not Macron's pick but, in a sign of the president's waning influence, was pressured into naming the 73-year-old.
“Emmanuel Macron even lost his power to appoint the prime minister, who has appointed himself,” far-right figurehead Marine Le Pen told Le Parisien. “He doesn't have much left.”
Macron, however, remains defiant. In a televised address on 5 December, he refused to take the blame for the fall of Barnier’s government and ruled out stepping down before the end of his term, saying he would carry his “full mandate” through to 2027.
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He faces the prospect of tax increases in the 2025 budget – a red-line for his pro-business platform – and his flagship pension reform, which raised the legal age of retirement from 62 to 64, is under review.
“The shadow of the dissolution will weigh heavily on these [New Year] wishes” said political scientist Philippe Moreau-Chevrolet, noting that the president is “really cornered” and has to try and restore momentum in what remains of his second five-year term.
Just how long remains to be seen. Some of his opponents consider his resignation before 2027 inevitable.
