The Olympic Games were Emmanuel Macron’s chance to show off France – and himself – to the world. On 31 May, just before Macron called the legislative elections, credit rating agency Standard and Poor’s downgraded France to an AA rating, citing concerns over the state of the debt the Macron government incurred during Covid, and “political fragmentation” which would make achieving economic growth harder. Since then, an inconclusive election and the continuing rise of Le Pen’s National Rally have only further exhibited France’s crisis.
Macron had hoped to use the Olympics to rectify this situation. He wanted to broadcast an image of a stable, harmonious nation, with its swimmable River Seine and an opening ceremony which remains a closely guarded secret, but which is being hyped as a major spectacle. This week, he also hosted several heads of state and major foreign CEOs (including Elon Musk) at a dinner designed to reassure the masters of the universe that France was a country worth investing in. Today, he was presumably intending to the put the finishing touches to this show. Instead, reality has broken through his Olympic dreamworld as a sabotage attack on the SNCF rail network left hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded around the country and transport in Paris buckling.
The Ministry of Transport told Le Parisien that the suspects included an “ultra-left, protest or environmental movement” and that they may have had some inside help given the “studied” nature of the attacks. It’s exactly what Macron wished to avoid. Instead of the first major images of the Olympics being a splash of Lady Gaga and Celine Dion in duet on the Seine, photos of burnt wires and packed-out railway stations are being shared across the world.
France’s polarised politics stops for nothing, not even the Olympics, and there may yet be more disruption to come. Macron tried call for a “political truce” during the games earlier this week and told the French people that he would not appoint a new prime minister until after they were over. It was always unlikely that this was going to be respected. The unions are threatening disruption, keen for revenge after Macron’s pension reforms, as well as the New Popular Front, who are eager to have their candidate for prime minister, Lucie Castets, take office as soon as possible.
Following the attacks on the train network, this truce which no one agreed to already seems to be over. One MP for the left-wing La France Insoumise, Antoine Léaument, has already written to the interior minister Gérald Darmanin over the attacks, calling for him to resign. And La France Insoumise has demanded Lucie Castets be made prime minister immediately in order to reverse the Macron government’s free-market reforms to the railway that date from 2018. Macron himself appears increasingly incoherent. His insistence that he will not appoint a new government till the Games are over is baffling given that the elections – set by him for three weeks before the Games started – caused the political chaos in the first place.
The CGT union is also eyeing up the games as an opportunity to exercise its leverage. A last-minute deal was done between Olympic organisers and the dancers who were threatening to strike during the opening ceremony over unfair remuneration. But this morning, I spoke to Ahmed Berrahal, a bus driver unionised with the CGT in Paris. He thinks that the already stressed and under-resourced drivers could easily go on strike, having been denied the bonus they feel they deserve for their long and difficult hours during the Olympics.
The Games have already taken a lot of controversial preparation. Parisian security and infrastructure has been comprehensively overhauled, with the installation of facial-recognition cameras, building projects which have displaced many poorer residents, and the destruction of community gardens in poor neighbourhoods to make room for Olympic projets. It has also become the site of an internal political conflict as protests over the presence of Russian and Israeli athletes have bubbled up in recent days. Macron may have hoped to show the world a united, high-tech nation. Instead he’s revealed the truth: a bitterly divided country that holds its leader in contempt.
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