Europe 1 says Mr Macron is toying with Article 16, which would give him powers of a Roman dictator to uphold the “regular functioning” of the French state, subject to judicial review after 60 days. Charles de Gaulle invoked Article 16 after the Algerian Putsch in 1961. Such drastic action today would risk civil resistance.
French business circles take comfort from the hard Right template in Italy. Economists warned in late 2022 that Giorgia Meloni was preparing a spending blitz worth 10pc of GDP. ‘Lo Spread’ jumped 150 points from its Draghi-era nadir. Corriere della Sera solemnly predicted a showdown with Brussels.
Nothing of the sort happened. Meloni was astute enough to pick her fights, focusing on migrants and the culture war. She needed money from the EU’s pandemic recovery fund, and she needed to keep the European Central Bank sweet so that it would ‘skew’ its balance sheet towards Italian needs. She understood the lesson of the Berlusconi coup, when the ECB manipulated bond yields to force regime change.
France is a different political animal. “It is out of the question that the French will ever follow our path in Italy. Le Pen will never swallow the austerity pill, and the ECB would never dare to play the spread game with France,” said Senator Claudio Borghi from Italy’s Lega party.
Even so, the National Rally has been tactically vague about its economic plan, a fudge that mixes Marine Le Pen’s anti-American, protectionist, welfare socialism with the protean market corporatism of the 28-year old Jordan Bardella, immigrant child of Italian and Algerian origins, and the party’s prime minister-in-waiting.
The manifesto lavishes economic confetti. If taken literally, it would add €80bn to the deficit and provoke war with Brussels. It is best understood as mood music.
Mr Bardella has quietly delayed most of the policies until after an audit of the public accounts, giving him political cover for a wholesale retreat later, should he win an absolute majority.
“Bardella has already sold out completely. It is not the patriotic economic model that I wanted,” said Bernard Monot, a former Euro-MP and once the party’s chief economic strategist.
“He’s changed the party’s position on fundamental positions. He’s pro-Zelensky and pro-Nato, just like Meloni. He is entirely compatible with liberal Atlanticism,” he said.
Mr Bardella assured business leaders that his party will uphold France’s treaty commitments. His body language all points to a concordat with capital. “I have come to reassure you. Financial constraints oblige us to make choices,” he told a MEDEF forum on Thursday.
To misuse an historical parallel – the National Rally is not fascist – it resembles the courtship between Adolf Hitler and German big business in the wild year of 1932, when corporate barons concluded that they could work with the Nazis after all. Hitler, in turn, dropped the anti-capitalist wing of his movement like a hot potato. The money flowed.
Mr Monot said there is nobody left in the party who understands economics, so it should prove easy for the MEDEF elites to co-opt the National Rally – but first there may be trouble.
“It is the Liz Truss syndrome, and it is going to lead to a French debt crisis. Bardella used to be my parliamentary assistant and I can assure you that this lad has no training and is not fit to be prime minister at a dangerous moment. That is why I slammed the door and walked out of this sect of know-nothings,” he said.