Grey Anderson

The president has advanced an impressively coherent plan of action: an arctic blast of budgetary austerity (a word Macron prudently shuns, in favor of euphemistic references to “medium-term structural deficit imbalance” and the like) to bring France into compliance with European guidelines; deep cuts to public-sector employment; a reduction in corporate tax rates; and demolition of French labor law—making good on Hollande’s progress in this direction—to be pushed through over the summer by means of executive ordonnances, extending the retirement age and punishing the unemployed who balk at accepting jobs generously offered to them.

As François Hollande’s ignominious presidency draws to a close, his party confronts its gravest crisis since it was refounded in 1971 out of the ruins of the French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO). Party membership has dropped to as few as 42,000 cardholders, a mere quarter of the 2014 figure. Municipal Socialism has imploded: today, the PS controls less than a third of large- and mid-sized cities, five of seventeen regions, and only twenty-seven of France’s 101 departments.