Courtesy of The Automatic Earth.
Dorothea Lange Saturday afternoon. 10 cent store, Siler City, North Carolina July 1939
Well, it’s not as if nothing ever happens. One government and one parliament down, all in one day. One planned, the other not so much.
Ukraine president Poroshenko dissolved parliament so he can have sole control for the next two months. And smile with a smirk at Putin when they meet tomorrow. Wonder what ‘progress’ they’ll make. Judging from all the accusations thrown around just today, and the plans announced, they’re not going to be short of material.
RT has the rebels claim they have thousands of Ukraine soldiers cornered, Kiev claims Russian tanks have entered the country on their way to Mariupol on the Azov Sea. A city where Ukraine did some unpalatable things earlier this year, by the way.
But the Ukraine battle is going to go on long enough to get back to on some other day, it’s not even close to being over. France is the potentially more interesting situation in today’s news.
French prime minister Manuel Valls has offered the resignation of his 4 month old (young?!) government. President François Hollande has accepted (after first insisting he’d do it) and ordered him to form a new one as soon as tomorrow. All this came after a hefty weekend in which Hollande and Valls’ policies were criticized by their own economy minister, Arnaud Montebourg.
The cabinet shuffle is aimed at getting rid of him, and of education minister Benoît Hamon and culture minister Aurélie Filippetti, who openly agreed with Montebourg’s criticisms.
Whether the shuffle would have taken place if Montebourg wouldn’t have included Germany in his tirade will probably remain an open question. What is sure is that Angela Merkel and the Bundesbank will, certainly in France, come under increasing fire for their insistence that all of Europe obey the harsh austerity measures Berlin has hammered into the EU and ECB.
And it’s not an easy position Hollande has maneuvered himself into. It may even be hopeless. It’s by no means sure that the new cabinet Valls is set to unveil tomorrow will be accepted by the French parliament. And that may be the end of that parliament too, and new elections. Which Marine Le Pen’s right wing Front National has already called for anyway.
And with Hollande’s approval rating at 17%, a more than 50-year low for a French president, that could mean big changes. Valls’ approval is at 36%, not sparkly either.
The critical voices are all part of Hollande’s own Socialist party, they’re just more left than he is. And that left is still a strong voice in France. Seeing it split into multiple factions cannot possibly be good for a president with that sort of ratings. He’ll soon be in single digits.
Then again, the right is growing stronger too. France is becoming a vastly more polarized nation, at a time when the truth about its economy is seeping through the cracks of the political system.
The options on the table are: Hollande and Valls stay in power, and continue to adhere to the Berlin/Brussels austerity model. If, and only if, they can guide a new cabinet through the National Assembly tomorrow. But they’ve now lost the far left wing of their own party, which is opposed to more austerity, though it does want the EU.
Option no. 2 is the far left gets the power, where it would have to either get Brussels to do a 180º on austerity or flip it the bird and start spending no matter what. Not an easy thing to when your central bank effectively resides in Frankfurt.
Option no. 3 is new elections, and the very real risk of Marine Le Pen and the Front National coming out on top. They want out of the euro and out of the EU.
Those new elections may well be written in stone already. The left has failed its constituents, because France is in the doldrums economically and there’s really no way out other than through means that will lead to mass protest. Which the French are very good at.
The left could try to save the very large entitlement programs, but that would mean ever more debt, and a potential rift with Germany and Brussels. The right would certainly tell everyone who’s not French to go stuff themselves, but it would still have to deal with millions upon millions of people who officially have jobs but in reality live off the state. Not to mention the workers, still organized in strong unions.
Does Le Pen want a civil war, or a revolution and counter revolution? She may think her party’s strong enough to do any of the above. Plenty of French will listen to a message that says Berlin should not dictate Paris, especially when it means poverty for the French people.
Can Brussels conjure up an autocrat, like they did in Italy, Greece, Portugal? That looks quite a bit harder to do in France. But we shouldn’t ignore the ruling classes under the surface, which have governed the country for a very long time, the landowners and industrialists who’ve all attended the same schools for generations. And who now, no doubt, start feeling the crisis too, even though its true numbers haven’t even been published yet.
France is a very proud nation. It’s also very large in the European context. Without it there is no EU, and no euro. We might just have seen the beginning of the end for both.
