Bloomberg: Macron's Decade in Power Turns France Into Europe's Weakest Link

NEW YORK, October 5. /TASS/. Nearly 10 years of President Emmanuel Macron’s rule have turned France into Europe’s "weakest link," Bloomberg reported.

Macron came to power in 2017 as a business-oriented politician who sought to bring about an "economic and political revolution" in France. However, the president’s political movement will "be effectively over" after he leaves office in 2027, and the promised "revolution" never led to a change in France’s economic policy, in which government spending plays a significant role compared to other Western countries, the article noted.

"After a decade of political missteps and global cataclysms that made government spending his (Macron’s - TASS) go-to solution, popular anger is rising, growth is sinking, debt is soaring and investors are dumping French assets in a global bond market rout that has made it the euro area’s weakest economic link," William Horobin, the article’s author, pointed out.

According to him, the final battle to preserve the legacy of "Macronomics" will be the passage of next year’s French budget in parliament. Even if the minority government puts together a credible budget proposal, Macron’s potential successors, opposition leaders Marine Le Pen Le Pen and Jean-Luc, who are leading in the polls, could roll back all of his reforms. "The messy end" to a decade in power contrasts with the proclaimed vision of making France "the powerhouse of a retooled Europe with the heft to stand for itself as [US President] Donald Trump undermines NATO from within," the author stressed. The conflict in Ukraine and the difficulty of balancing relations between the US and China only increase the likelihood that populist political forces will come to power in France, which "threatens to overtake what’s left of the post-World War II order," he argued.

According to Horobin, key moments of Macron’s presidency include the attempt to reform fossil fuel taxation in 2018, which led to mass protests by the Yellow Vest movement, a radical increase in government spending following the pandemic and energy crisis, costing the treasury approximately 262 billion euros, and the decision to call for early parliamentary elections in 2024. France’s public finances and Macron’s political capital have not recovered since then, the author emphasized.