France – Is it Time for the Sixth Republic?

France is facing a social, economic and political crisis not witnessed in almost seven decades. Under the “autocratic rule” of President Emmanuel Macron, the country lies somewhere on a spectrum between “spiraling political crisis” (Financial Times), “big trouble” (Economist) and yet, another government collapse.

With a new, if fragile, government now cobbled together in crisis mode, the French are bracing for more anti-austerity protests and labor union strikes. And this while the country’s finances are “out of control” and a budget for 2026 is nowhere in sight.

An earlier wave of protests – under the aegis “Let’s block everything” – failed to achieve its ambitious goal, but to the surprise of the government, it did attract twice the number of participants expected. It seems that the elitist, unpopular, unresponsive Centrist regime of Emmanuell Macron is merely clinging to power – not governing.

As the French are prone to exhibit:

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.                                                                                                (The more things change, the more they stay the same.)

France can’t seem to find a way out of the mess its president has enabled; he called “snap parliamentary elections” last year, and then promptly ignored the will of the French people.

If Macron had respected the results of the elections that he himself initiated, he would have had to charge either a left-wing bloc, with the most combined votes, or the new-right Rassemblement National (RN), which obtained the most votes for a single party, with building a new government. But, the man with an ego rivaling the size of the French debt and a popularity base becoming miniscule (clearly rejected by a preponderant majority of his people) felt he knew better. Since then, Macron has tried to impose his will against a parliament that no longer agrees with his orientation embracing the European Commission’s position: “hold onto power at any cost.”.

So, here we go again. Absolute gridlock at the political center; and in the streets, the familiar burning-rubbish bins, baton-charging police with teargas fog; and yet, another futile attempt by the compulsive Macron to succeed with what doesn’t work: installing a new – his fifth in less than two years – prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, who has no majority in parliament and thus, cannot possibly pass the neoliberal austerity budget Macron wants – ostensibly — to extract France from the increasingly pernicious debt crisis he helped to create. His plan: appease the wealthy; squeeze the rest with cuts to pensions, healthcare, public holidays, etc.

And yet, perhaps things aredifferent this time — as in, even worse. Maybe this crisis is not just bad-as-usual but a sign that something larger is looming, something that reshapes the political landscape.

Consider historic comparisons: the French Revolution – the big one of 1789 – also started with a debt crisis. And mainstream media are starting to allude to “1958.” That was the fatal year when France’s previous constitution – the blueprint of the hapless Fourth Republic established following WWII – suffered “dysfunctional” arrest, replaced by the current iteration, the Fifth Republic. “Macron’s choices,” the Financial Times notes wryly, “have led to political turmoil not seen since 1958.” Précisément.

In the decade before 1958, French governments of the Fourth Republic changed roughly every six months. Former President Charles de Gaulle orchestrated the Fifth Republic precisely to end this chronic instability. Wrecked by the worst combination of narcissism and over-reach since Napoleon III, the Fifth Republic is now plagued by paralysis and volatility. Emmanuel Macron played no small part in engineering its near collapse. Félicitations, Monsieur le Président.

Meanwhile, Macron’s governments (plural) is generating massive popular unrest because of burgeoning social inequality and anxiety combined with his authoritarian and manipulative rule. How bad is it? Jean-Luc Mélenchon – leading the non-Centrist (“populist”) left party La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) or LFI – is calling for a Sixth Republic, yet another fundamental recasting of the French Constitution and political system.

So, are the French in for an agonizing two more years of Macron’s ego trip with one needless and ever-increasing crisis after another?

Or is De Gaulle’s proud creation – the Fifth Republic — now ruined by a bombastic and incompetent epigone, on the verge of becoming an Ancien Regime? It is precisely Macron’s idea of “stability” that is so reprehensible – keeping a president (with virtually no support) in power to impose governments with increasingly less support, that a clear majority of the French have rejected.

So, what kind of change is warranted? If one listens to the parties – on the New Left (LFI) and the New Right (RN), rather than the so-called “center” – the French actually voted for an end to neo-liberal lecturing from the European Commission elite. They also agree on the need to regain France’s real national sovereignty. On migration and economic policy, the left and right do disagree, but there is no doubt that, on both issues, the center is both deeply unattractive and likely resented.

But consider the fact that history is often filled with irony: the “faux-Gaullist” Macron may be swept aside by concerns De Gaulle recognized as a rebuke by the French in that annus horribilis of 1958. That crisis was not only about France’s brutal and failing colonial war in Algeria. It was also about France’s one-sided, terribly disadvantageous relationship to the EU’s predecessor, the ECSC, and the at least equally detrimental one with both the US and NATO.

The EU already receives explicit criticism from both the RN and the LFI. Leaders from both parties propound that one of their aims is to stop wasting money on Brussels. Both attack the EU’s disgraceful failure to protect the economic interests of its member states against the US tariff war. Indeed, for Bardella, Ursula von der Leyen’s recent fiasco with Trump amounts to “democratic betrayal.”

With respect to NATO, the latter is what remains of the US “empire” in Europe since WWII. And as you would expect in the de facto dual NATO-EU system — the EU plays the vassal to US suzerainty.

The crisis of the Macron regime is not merely about budgets, debt, pensions, public holidays, fiscal austerity and social inequality. There is a more fundamental geopolitical dimension to the issues in which France needs to reclaim control over its genuine national sovereignty and recast its relationship with both the EU and NATO. Anything less than that is merely “tinkering at the margins of political reality.”