Is France on the Brink?

AP Photo/Aurelien Morissard

France is a mess. It can't keep a government in power. Its inability to pass a budget makes the U.S. process look stately and reasonable by comparison, and its borrowing costs now exceed Italy's. The business climate is atrocious, and its pension and welfare system is making state finances groan under pressure. 

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And, of course, its immigration policies make it all worse. 

The powers that be are powerless to improve things, but they seem to agree on one thing: they must fight the "far right" by any means necessary, including trying to kick the top candidate off the ballot, luckily without success. 

For the moment, the "far right" should be the furthest problem from their mind, if they cared about France and not their own power. But that would be asking too much. 

In the midst of all this political chaos, the French are doing what the French do best: riot, which is a national sport. And one that particularly appeals to the growing Muslim underclass, which has joined in and amplified the "fun."

At issue, supposedly, is the sorry state of French schools, which apparently do have serious problems. Test scores are falling like a rock, just like in every other industrialized country, but it has nothing to do with money, which is what everybody is asking for. France sits firmly in the middle of the OECD spending rankings, so it's a priorities problem, just as in every other industrialized country. 

"Students," a term used loosely here, are rioting and demanding better conditions in their schools. Which is ironic, since they are currently burning them down, in the classic left-wing style of politics. Destroy things, and then complain that they suck. 

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One reason the populist right has been gaining popularity in Europe is the institutional failures of the current elites, and their only response is to decry the rise of the far-right and far-left. In France, the worries are that the extremist left will lead to the rise of the extremist right, which is of course at some level entirely correct, but they fail to grasp that the problem is that the center-left is the reason. 

Immigration restrictionism wouldn't solve all of France's structural problems, but it would certainly make most of them less acute. The elite argument for mass immigration is that the population is aging and a younger workforce is necessary to fill the labor gaps and ensure that the welfare state has the resources necessary to continue. 

You need a better ratio of producers to consumers to keep the system fiscally viable, and the ratio is declining from a bad 1.7:1 to a disastrous1.3:1, meaning every worker will have a retiree on their back and has to pay for all those services. 

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It's a good theory, but it doesn't work out well when the immigrants you are bringing in are culturally incompatible and also welfare clients. If they work, they don't do high-value jobs, so they are often net burdens, not producers. 

The image of this young policewoman, pursued by a howling mob screaming its hatred, thrown to the ground and assaulted, is unbearable.

These acts deserve exemplary punishments. Let her know that tonight, millions of French people offer her their warm support.

It's a disaster, and when you add immigrant rioters to the more traditional French protesters, the result is, literally, incendiary. As in setting both property and people on fire. 

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Unfortunately, France needs a Milei, and their choices are mush, paralyzed politics, or misguided economic policies mixed with a healthy rejection of transnationalism. 

The latter won't fix most structural issues — Le Pen isn't exactly a free-marketeer — but it might ease some cultural divides. 

Unfortunately, the Milei solution is an outlier, as is Nayib Bukele, and both only gained power after their countries tried every bad solution first. It's the "hit bottom" problem. And hitting bottom is painful and to be avoided where possible. 

But it's not clear that this is an option, and it's not certain that hitting bottom will be followed by recovery. We love the recovery stories and applaud them, as we should, but recovery is often the exception. Wander the streets of most major American cities and see the results of hitting bottom and never recovering. 

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It's a toxic brew, this mix of problems and "solutions" that solve nothing. Macron may still be able to strut and look presidential, but he presides over a declining society. That would be bad enough, but with the growing Muslim population, there won't even be a fairly unified French population to pick up the pieces should the seemingly inevitable collapse occur. 

In the meantime, France burns. 

Editor's Note: The Democrat Party has been infected by socialism, and it's spreading FAST. Democrats are claiming there's nothing to worry about, but we know the truth.

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