The 860-year-old cathedral has been repaired in a time frame many thought impossible. But rather than basking in success, President Emmanuel Macron is mired in political crisis.
When the president of France speaks at the reopening on Saturday of the fire-ravaged Notre-Dame Cathedral, the jewel in the heart of Paris, it should by rights be a delicious moment of glory.
Few had believed it was possible to repair the 860-year-old monument in the short time-frame President Emmanuel Macron announced the day after the 2019 disaster.
Glory, however, is eluding the French leader as he presides over a country in profound crisis, with a fallen government, no budget and so much political division that there seems no clear path forward. Increasingly, Mr. Macron is hearing not professions of gratitude but demands for his resignation.
“I don’t see what can happen to put him back up on his horse,” said Vincent Martigny, a political science professor at the University of Nice, Côte d’Azur. “He has the smell of a never-ending ending.”
Many blame Mr. Macron for the country’s current political mess. After his party was trounced in the European elections last June, he shocked his cabinet and the country by calling for snap elections for the 577-seat National Assembly. The result, he promised, would offer the country some “clarification.”
Instead, voters elected a messy, deadlocked Parliament, with seats divided into three camps — none with a clear path to pass bills — and two emboldened extremist parties, both of whose leaders are challengers for the president’s job.
“Macron is a victim of his own narcissism,” said Alain Minc, a political essayist and long-term informal adviser to French presidents. “He was in denial of reality.”
The result was the overwhelming vote by opposing lawmakers on Wednesday to bring down the government of Mr. Macron’s prime minister, Michel Barnier, just three months into its tenure. That gave it the distinction of being the shortest-lived government in the history of France’s Fifth Republic, formed in 1958.
Mr. Barnier will stay on in a caretaker role for now, the French presidency announced on Thursday. But Mr. Macron is under pressure to quickly name a new prime minister who might offer the country some stability. Whomever he chooses, few believe a new government will manage to navigate the minefield of a bitterly divided Parliament.
“We are looking at years of stalemates,” said Jean-François Copé, a former conservative budget minister and supporter of the just-fallen government. Mr. Copé was the first of a growing number of centrist voices to call for Mr. Macron’s resignation. “It’s just a catastrophe,” he said.
Mr. Macron’s term lasts until 2027, and he has called the idea that he might resign early “political fiction.”
“I was elected twice by the French people,” he said this week during a state visit to Saudi Arabia, where he spent some of his time brokering deals for French businesses. “I’m extremely proud, and I will honor this trust with all my energy to serve my country until the very last second.”
But it is clear that Mr. Macron’s position is greatly weakened.
Elected in 2017 as France’s youngest president, then just 39, Mr. Macron promised to bring a fresh, middle-ground approach and business-friendly policies to the country.
But his equivocating “at the same time” approach came to irk many, and his highly personalized, top-down style of government — which was generally dismissive of the powerful lower house of Parliament, where his party at first held a strong majority — earned him the derogatory moniker “Jupiter.”
In the 2022 parliamentary elections, Mr. Macron’s party and its allies lost many seats, emerging with only a relative majority. Then last summer, after the snap election, they lost even more.
That forced Mr. Macron to name a prime minister from the mainstream conservative party, not from his own, and build a fragile coalition between his allies and the remnants of the traditional conservative party.
Although Mr. Barnier said he spoke to the president daily, he also made it clear he was his own person, and took positions like proposing a temporary tax on big businesses and the super rich that clearly broke with Mr. Macron’s pro-business stance.
Since the summer, Mr. Macron’s once-broad portfolio has been winnowed to what the Constitution and tradition officially set out: the handling of foreign affairs and the command of the army. National columnists have written about his near-disappearance and sulky withdrawal. People in his own party have been cited in newspapers as saying that he is increasingly isolated.
The hugely successful Paris Olympics offered Mr. Macron a brief reprieve — some called it an “enchanted interlude” — during which he became his nation’s fan-in-chief. It showed his compatriots what the country is capable of when it dreams big. But it was not long before the jubilation was replaced by political rancor and classic French pessimism.
In his entourage, officials pointed out what they say is the paradox of the Macron criticism: After years of accusing the president of acting like Jupiter and railroading Parliament, detractors now blame him for the mess made when he left the lawmakers alone.
A friend of Mr. Macron’s and former lawmaker in his party, Patrick Vignal, said the president was feeling bruised last summer by his party’s poor election results. But he said he believed Mr. Macron would regain his élan, particularly if he ventured outside of Paris and connected with people on a new grand project.
“He’s a warrior,” Mr. Vignal said from the southern city of Montpellier. “He still has three years. Making him resign would serve no one, and I believe he can return to the field, just as he did during the Yellow Vests crisis.”
The Yellow Vests were motorists who blocked roundabouts across the country to protest, initially, a gas tax and, eventually, their broader sense of abandonment. The protests posed the biggest challenge of Mr. Macron’s first term, and in response he faced the protesters head-on, touring the country to talk to citizens in town hall-style events. He called it the Great National Debate.
The Yellow Vest crisis was an all-time low for Mr. Macron’s popularity. Polls show his approval rating is now close to that same level, and calls for his resignation are increasing like a drumbeat — not just from the extreme left and the far right, whose self-interest is clear, but also from moderate voices.
Some of the arguments are structural. Constitutionally, the Fifth Republic was devised to run with a strong president overseeing a strong majority in Parliament, argued Mr. Copé, the former Conservative minister who is now the mayor of Meaux. Without that, and with compromise in French politics considered weakness, stalemates become inevitable, he argued.
“There is no other alternative but for Macron to resign,” Mr. Copé said.
Others noted that replacing Mr. Macron would not change the makeup of the lower house of Parliament, which is fixed by the Constitution until at least next July, when new elections can be called.
“We would still be without a budget, without a government,” said Benjamin Morel, a lecturer in public law at Panthéon-Assas University in Paris. “It would be the same old mess, and French political sociology is such that it’s not even clear today, in the event of another parliamentary election, that we’d have a majority again.”
If not glory, the reopening of Notre-Dame should at least offer Mr. Macron a brief respite. He has called the moment, like the Olympics before it, “a jolt of hope.”
But the Olympics, like all glory, was fleeting.
“The reopening of a church is not enough to save him,” said Mr. Martigny, the political analyst. “He will need a miracle.”
