France is no longer staring at the abyss—it is in it.

 

France is approaching a full-system meltdown, and this time it is not the usual Parisian spring of barricades and slogans. What began ten days ago as another round of angry demonstrations has already mutated into something the Fifth Republic has never faced: a simultaneous legitimacy crisis of the presidency, the parliament, and the street. The country is not merely protesting; it is auditioning for failure.

1. The spark nobody noticed

On 9 September Prime Minister Michel Barnier handed Emmanuel Macron his resignation. Within hours—literally the same afternoon—Macron appointed a little-known loyalist, 46-year-old Interior veteran Bruno Retailleau, as the new premier. No consultation, no cooling-off period, no bipartisan courtesy calls. The message could not have been clearer: the president has stopped pretending he can govern from the center and is now governing from the Élysée bunker.
The country answered that night. Power substations were torched in Bordeaux, rail lines cut in Toulouse, 80 000 riot police deployed inside Paris alone. By dawn France’s three largest unions had called an unlimited general strike and the far-left and far-right were using the same word: “illegitimate.”

2. The five-layer onion of collapse

Layer 1 – A cabinet shuffle that shuffled the country

Retailleau is the fourth prime minister in 14 months. Previous turnovers were mocked as “musical chairs.” This one triggered a national shutdown because every bloc in the National Assembly read the appointment as a declaration of war: Macron will rule with his own cadre, parliament be damned.

Layer 2 – The election that broke the machine

The fuse was lit on 9 June 2024, the night of the European Parliament vote. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) won 31 % of French ballots, doubling its 2019 score. Macron dissolved the National Assembly that same evening—no cabinet debate, no party caucus, a solo tantrum. He gambled that voters would recoil from the far right if forced to choose quickly. Instead he produced the most fragmented lower house in the Republic’s history: 577 seats split among three mutually hostile blocs, none above 190. The constitution gives the president the right to name a premier, but the assembly the right to fire one. That mechanical contradiction is now operating in real time.

Layer 3 – The coalition that died on election night

French politics has an old emergency brake: when the far right surges, center and left pool their single-member-district votes. It worked in July; the RN came third, the left-wing New Popular Front (NFP) first, Macron’s centrists second. The minute the ballots were counted the brake handle snapped off. Jean-Luc Mélenchon demanded the premiership for the left; Macron’s camp ruled out “extremists”; Le Pen vowed revenge for being “cheated.” Result: no governing majority, no possible coalition, only a countdown to the next no-confidence motion.

Layer 4 – The economic free-fall nobody can stop

France has run a budget deficit every single year since 1974. Public spending is now 51.4 % of GDP, the highest in the OECD. The three props that once financed the French model have snapped:

• Industry: apart from Airbus, France fields no world-scale champion in AI, semiconductors, cloud, batteries or biotech.
• Françafrique: Sahel regimes have expelled French troops and renegotiated uranium, oil and port concessions; Paris has probably lost USD 500–800 bn in privileged cash flows.
• Luxury soft power: as Chinese consumers develop domestic premium brands, the 30 000 % markup on a handbag is collapsing.

With no growth engine and no spending room, the next government must either cut welfare or raise taxes on a population already flirting with 9 % unemployment. In the French mental map both options lead straight to 1789.

Layer 5 – The demographic timer

Roughly 10 % of mainland residents are first- or second-generation immigrants from North and sub-Saharan Africa, concentrated in the banlieues that circle every large city. Those suburbs have youth unemployment above 30 %. When the CRS (riot police) go in this week they are not facing 1968-style students chanting “Sous les pavés, la plage!” but 15-year-olds with TikTok, fireworks and no belief that the Republic has a place for them. One more debt crisis, one more pension reform, and the banlieues become the match that lights the périphérique.

3. What happens next

The street can probably be bought off for a few weeks with wage subsidies and tear-gas fatigue. The bond market cannot. France’s 10-year spread over German Bunds has already doubled since August; another downgrade would push it past 80 basis points, the level that triggered the 2012 ECB intervention. But the ECB, under its new anti-fragmentation rules, can buy Italian or Spanish debt only if the country in trouble signs up for a structural reform program. Macron cannot survive signing a Brussels memorandum that legislates pension cuts and social-spending ceilings. He would be out of the Élysée faster than Charles X in 1830.

4. The takeaway

Macro history rarely announces itself with trumpets; it slips in through a door left ajar. France’s door was the hasty appointment of Bruno Retailleau, a move so cavalier it convinced every opposing force that the system is no longer self-correcting. Once the belief sets in that elections, debates and no-confidence votes are mere choreography, the only remaining recourse is the street, the strike and, ultimately, the sovereign debt market. All three are now activated.

The protests will ebb; the structural deadlock will not. France has exhausted the political middle, exhausted its African rent, exhausted its luxury rent, exhausted the patience of its own young. What is left is a pure contest over who gets blamed when the credit card is finally declined. In that sense the Fifth Republic has already entered its pre-revolutionary phase. The only question left is whether the end will be called a Sixth Republic, or something more dramatic.