Emmanuel Macron and the Weimar temptation

It is becoming impossible for markets to price the political risk of Emmanuel Macron’s capricious character. If we have learned anything from a decade of galactic grand-standing, it is that he will not accept defeat lightly. He must always be the master of events.

Mr Macron will not settle down to a workable cohabitation with a government of his enemies. He refused to share power after losing his parliamentary majority in 2022, instead abusing a loophole in the French constitution (Article 49.3) to ram through his agenda by decree, at the limits of authentic democracy.

“He has used 49.3 to govern like the Americans used the B52 bomber in Vietnam,” said French novelist Marc Dugain.

There must be a high risk that he will refuse to share power again in the grimmer circumstances that await after his snap election: either by resigning out of pique and bringing down the temple upon a French nation that has proved itself unworthy of him, or by escalating with yet another wild demarche.

Mr Macron has already reached for the nuclear card, warning of “civil war” if France falls either to the Trotskyist Left or to the neo-fascist Right that he himself did so much to strengthen.

Is this project fear pushed to parody, or the softening-up rhetoric for use of Article 16 of the French constitution, which accords him the powers of a Roman dictator on his own say-so? The Elysée denies any such plan but the story swirls in the Paris media.

Marine Le Pen’s National Rally is undoubtedly jejune, full of cranks, unfit for government and at times unhinged. One of its policies until days ago was to rip up every wind turbine on the soil of France. But I do not think that it poses a danger to the rule of law or to the integrity of the National Assembly.

The greater danger comes from the opaque manoeuvres of the president himself. Mr Macron did, after all, write his dissertation on Niccolò Machiavelli, the theorist of deception and the dark arts.

Eugénie Mérieau, a professor of public law at Pantheon Sorbonne, says the constitution of the Fifth Republic is a “carbon copy” of Germany’s Weimar constitution.

This is a rare distinction shared with Russia, though the Russian variant at least makes it harder to mistreat parliament. Vladimir Putin has never gone so far as to dissolve the Duma for his own political convenience.

France has a long history of dissolutions that went wrong. The petulant double dissolution of Charles X in 1830 set off street revolution and swept away the Bourbon Restoration. “I would rather chop wood than be a king under the conditions of the King of England,” he said. Chop wood he did.

Prof Mérieau said France’s hybrid, semi-presidential system is inherently unstable and eats away at the power of parliament. The president can dissolve the legislature, unlike his US counterpart. “It inclines to authoritarianism. The guardrails are quite weak,” she told Le Media.

The chief restraint is the temperament of the president. Are you dealing with a George Washington, able to resist monarchical temptations, or a Bonaparte?

Article 16 lets the president invoke emergency powers on his own authority, and exercise those powers at his own discretion, a combination that distinguishes France from every major country in the democratic world.

Prof Mérieau said it is more or less identical to Article 48 of the Weimar constitution, used repeatedly to circumvent a fractured Reichstag, ending in the infamous turn of events in 1932 and 1933.

Charles de Gaullle invoked Article 16 in 1961 following the Algiers putsch by retired army officers. The crafty general used his state of emergency to ram through a host of unrelated measures, and he kept it going for almost six months with added warnings of communist “revolution from the inside”, a usefully vague and elastic notion.

In theory, Article 16 requires a dual trigger. There must be both a “grave and immediate” threat and a breakdown in the regular functioning of the state. Calling a snap election out of wounded pride and then making matters worse, hardly meets the threshold. If invoked, judicial reviews kick in after 30 and 60 days.

In reality, Prof Mérieau said the courts have repeatedly been accessories to abuse, actively facilitating the persecution of Jews under the Vichy regime.

The French constitutional council is full of political appointees from the old establishment parties. They almost define the French deep state. Mr Macron is an enarque product of their milieu. The pitchfork insurgents on Left and Right are not.

It has become fashionable in the French and British press to compare Mr Macron’s gamble with David Cameron’s Brexit referendum in 2016, as if they were remotely comparable.

Brexit was to decide whether Britain’s should be a self-governing nation state under its own law-making parliament and courts; or whether it should be a subordinate state, under an upper level of government in Brussels that cannot be removed even when it persists in error, with laws made in Strasbourg that are enforced by a supreme court in Luxembourg beyond appeal.

There are compelling arguments for and against Brexit. But it is clear that once Britain opted out of the euro, it embarked on a course that was bound to lead to an in-out referendum at some point. Monetary union requires an apparatus of budgetary surveillance, financial controls, bail-out funds and reams of legal acquis. It changes the EU completely.

There is no future in this structure for a country that is not part of the euro. Only a fool thinks that the UK could have clung on to the cosy pre-2016 arrangement indefinitely, or that London could have continued to be the financial capital of somebody else’s currency.

Mr Macron’s snap election is of a different character. He is acting only in his own imagined self-interest, in a chaos of his own making. At every stage over the last seven years, he has promoted the far-Right as his preferred foil, cynically smashing the moderate parties on both sides to get his way.

He thought he could play this trick one more time. It has finally caught up with him.

Perhaps it is churlish to mention Le traître et le néant (The Traitor and Abyss), a book by two Le Monde journalists that draws on a hundred sources to portray him as a manipulator, willing to betray mentor, party and convictions, for no other purpose beyond power.

His fans refused to believe it. They believe it now.