The French word “polycrise” was coined in the 1990s by the philosopher Edgar Morin and his co-author Anne Brigitte Kern to describe a set of overlapping crises, each of which makes the others worse. Translated into English as polycrisis, it became popular among analysts of the successive economic, political and environmental challenges that have buffeted Europe over the past decade.
It seems particularly apt now in the country where it was coined. The violent scenes on the streets of French cities have been matched by a fiscal squeeze, with a budget deficit of 5.4 per cent of GDP, rising national debt and nervous bond markets. Meanwhile the country’s politics are paralysed. President Emmanuel Macron cannot muster a majority in the Assemblée nationale, budget negotiations are stalled and public services face a prolonged period of austerity and cuts. In response to the unrest, Macron has turned to executive actions, restricting demonstrations and accusing far-left groups of sedition, while his prime minister has imposed curfews in Paris and Lyon.
Protest organisers accuse him of authoritarianism, while Marine Le Pen charges the government with losing control. The centre ground Macron has occupied during his two terms in the Élysée Palace looks fractured and demoralised. It currently trails both Le Pen’s far-right National Rally and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-left France Unbowed.
Our Europe Correspondent Naomi O’Leary has been on the streets of Paris all week, talking to people caught up in the violence and examining the tensions beneath it. She explains how a student movement campaigning over underfunded schools converged with a revived Yellow Vest movement whose grievances stretch from fuel prices to farming, and why it remains unclear whether the looting that followed, which damaged at least 3,000 businesses, had any political motive.
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She also sets out the electoral arithmetic behind efforts by mainstream politicians to pin the blame on Mélenchon, whose place in a second-round run-off is widely expected to hand victory to Le Pen.
In her latest analysis, Naomi turns to what the past week reveals about Macron himself as his decade in power draws to a close. Elected in 2017 on a promise to transcend France’s old divisions and revive growth, he now leaves a country even more polarised than before, with long-term borrowing costs above 5 per cent for the first time since 2002. His televised address after the riots was widely judged to have said very little, and his decision to leave almost immediately for the Gulf drew criticism even from one of his own advisers. He returned with deals to secure gas and diesel supplies for the winter, only to find that the questions awaiting him were about order on the streets rather than energy.
“France may calm the violence in the short term, but the country is infused with long-term dread,” writes Lara Marlowe in her analysis. She writes that France Inter radio hosted a debate between philosophers asking if France is heading towards civil war.
Our editorial sets out the stark choices facing French voters as they approach next spring’s election. Few across the political spectrum dispute that the country’s problems must be tackled. The disagreement lies in how, with the right favouring deep spending cuts, the left arguing for debt cancellation and higher taxes on the wealthy and the centre struggling to reconcile pensions, welfare and rising defence costs with heavier taxation. Whatever the outcome, the consequences will be felt well beyond France, across a European Union in which it plays a pivotal role.
The economies of many Irish towns are built on tourism, but how do they cope when the visitors leave? In the opening instalment in a new series, Dara Bradley looks at Clifden, Co Galway, where the only thing keeping some businesses open is loyalty to staff.
In Opinion, Liz Carolan wonders why people continue to be fascinated by the disgraced tech entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes; Daniel Geary warns us not to mistake protest votes for support for the Democrats in the US midterms; and in a week that saw a big fall in share prices of the big AI players, Cliff Taylor reflects on Ireland’s position as “an intensely interested bystander in what is shaping up as a big financial drama.”
Finally, we lost one of the most influential figures in Irish music on Friday with the death of Dónal Lunny – a founding member of Planxty, The Bothy Band and Moving Hearts. As our obituary puts it, “traditional music owes much of its propulsive force, its appetite for innovation and its wide-lens perspective to a singular musician who has played a key role in propelling it to heights previously unimagined.”
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