The phryge mascot is seen on the sail of Banque Populaire XI, part of the Olympic torch relay, Brest Harbour, western France, on June 7.OSCAR CHUBERRE/Getty Images
“It’s supposed to be a hat,” I overheard one American tourist telling another while sitting at an outdoor café on an unseasonably chilly recent summer evening in Paris.
“A hat?” his bewildered tablemate replied.
The 2024 Paris Olympics mascot has been provoking similar reactions since it was unveiled more than 18 months ago. Even many French citizens had a hard time figuring it out at first. Some commentators initially compared the red triangular character with a curled top to a clitoris. So, no one could blame foreign tourists loosely familiar with French history for feeling nonplussed about this unusual mascot choice.
“It’s called a phryge,” I offered, unsure whether my interruption would be welcomed. (It was.) “It’s based on a red cap worn during the French Revolution. It symbolizes freedom.”
“Oh! Like Napoleon!”
“No, not Napoleon. A bit before Napoleon. Different hat.”
Days before the opening of the XXXIII Olympiad, phryges (pronounced free-juh) have become as ubiquitous in Paris as smoky sidewalk cafés. The façade of Paris City Hall is covered in Olympics regalia; like many city landmarks, including la Place de la Concorde, its grounds were closed off weeks ago in preparation for the big event.
Homeless migrants have been bussed out of the city. The hysteria surrounding a bedbug epidemic in Paris hotels, which authorities said had been “amplified” by a Russian disinformation campaign, has faded. About 45,000 police and military personnel have been mobilized in the country’s biggest-ever peacetime security operation. And after a $2-billion cleanup, the Seine is – maybe – fit for water sports.
France might be fin prête – ready to go – for the Olympics, were it not for one critical detail: Rarely has a host country seemed so indifferent to welcoming the world’s greatest sporting event. There has been palpably little pre-Games excitement, and surprisingly muted media coverage.
That will change as competition begins, and as les Bleus, as the French national soccer team is known, goes for gold. But the lack of Olympics buzz may have something to do with the fact that the French spent their spring and early summer consumed by another national sport: politics. They’re simply exhausted.
Americans have nothing on the French when it comes to arguing rudely and loudly about their country’s political future. France has as many cable news channels devoted to 24/7 political coverage as the U.S., which invented the formula. And the on-air vitriol has reached new highs since recent legislative elections produced a hung parliament, reflecting France’s deep divisions and growing ungovernability.
France is suddenly looking more like Italy than, well, Italy – with a pizza parliament and no stable governing coalition in sight. The country seems set for an extended period of political paralysis at a time when its public finances are in disarray, raising market fears of a debt crisis. French voters, never the easiest to please, have turned overwhelmingly pessimistic about the future of their country.
More than anyone else, one person is to blame for the blahs of his compatriots.
President Emmanuel Macron put his already deeply polarized country through the wringer by dissolving the National Assembly last month, after his party suffered a stinging defeat at the hands of the far-right National Rally (RN) in European Parliament elections. Mr. Macron’s high-risk gamble shocked his political allies and rivals alike. This month, prominent French businessman and intellectual Alain Minc seemed to speak for many former Macron supporters who have grown weary of the second-term President’s increasingly erratic behaviour when he told L’Express, a French newsmagazine: “This dissolution is the result of a narcissism driven to almost pathological state, leading to a denial of reality.”
The French democratic ideal – embodied by the Republic’s liberté, egalité, fraternité motto and the phryges repurposed for the Olympics – has often seemed elusive. Since the Revolution, the country has known long periods of political upheaval, veering from revolt to restoration and back again. The institutions of the current Fifth Republic, created under Charles de Gaulle in 1958, were intentionally designed as a bulwark against political instability after the country saw no fewer than 24 governments in 11 years during the Fourth Republic, which began in 1947.
The Fourth Republic’s electoral system, based on proportional representation, was replaced in the Fifth with a two-round voting system intended to produce majority governments under a strong president. But the country’s rapid political fragmentation since Mr. Macron became President in 2017 has led many experts to argue that the institutions of the Fifth Republic are no longer fit for purpose. Institutional sclerosis has set in, though there is no consensus about how to fix it.
In calling the snap vote three years ahead of the next fixed election date, Mr. Macron said he was seeking “clarification” from voters. Instead, the election only muddied the waters. “We have come out of it with a less clear situation than before,” said Élie Michel, a research associate at le Centre de recherches politiques de Sciences Po in Paris. “Has Macron come out of this weaker than before? For certain he has.”
The record-short three-week campaign that culminated in the first round of voting on June 30 saw the RN finish in first place in 297 of the country’s 577 circonscriptions, or ridings, with a third of the overall popular vote. An ad-hoc alliance between Mr. Macron’s centrist Ensemble (Together) coalition and the New Popular Front (NFP), an inchoate grouping of four left-wing parties, succeeded in preventing the RN from winning a majority of seats in the second round of voting on July 7. The Ensemble-NFP alliance, referred to as the “Republican front,” saw one or the other of the groupings pull its candidate in more than 200 ridings in order to consolidate anti-RN support on the second ballot.
While the NFP came out on top on July 7, it fell more than 100 seats short of a majority. Until this week, the four parties that make up the NFP had been unable to agree on a nominee for the post of prime minister. When they finally did, Mr. Macron all but ignored their suggestion, as he awaits the NFP’s likely implosion amid a nasty power struggle between the far-left France Unbowed (LFI) and centre-left Socialists.
LFI’s de facto leader, the fiery former Trotskyist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is shunned by the rest of the political class because of his radical anti-capitalist and pro-Palestinian rhetoric. Mr. Macron has said he is open to forming a governing coalition with any of the other parties that won seats on July 7 – except for the RN and LFI, both of which he has deemed too extreme to talk to.
Not that he is in the driver’s seat any more. Ensemble lost more than 80 seats and ended up in second place on July 7 with about 150 seats, a somewhat stronger showing than expected, but nonetheless a humiliating defeat for the President’s seven-year-old centrist political movement. Gabriel Attal, who resigned last week as Mr. Macron’s prime minister, remains for now at the head of a caretaker government. But the two men are barely on speaking terms. Mr. Macron resents Mr. Attal’s naked ambition; Mr. Attal is still smarting after Mr. Macron decided to dissolve the National Assembly without even consulting him.
Meanwhile, a behind-the-scenes battle is already under way among Mr. Attal, former prime minister Édouard Philippe and acting interior minister Gérald Darmanin to become their movement’s nominee in the 2027 presidential election.
If the July 7 election results prompted celebrations in progressive Parisian circles, the partying was premature. The Republican front may have deprived the anti-immigration, Euroskeptic RN of victory this time around, but it also served to feed into the political narrative that RN Leader Marine Le Pen has long nurtured: namely, that the country is controlled by the Paris-based globalist and multiculturalist elite that puts its interests ahead of those of France’s white Gallic majority.
Ms. Le Pen now appears better positioned than ever to win the 2027 presidential election if, as expected, she makes her fourth attempt for the Élysée Palace. A poll conducted this month showed her finishing on top on the first ballot with a lead of almost 10 percentage points over her potential rivals, most of whom are expected to face bitter nomination fights within their own parties.
Ms. Le Pen is unlikely to face any challenge from within the RN, especially now that her 28-year-old protégé, Jordan Bardella, has been forced to take the fall for what he himself described as “casting errors” in the selection of RN candidates. A photo of one RN candidate wearing a Luftwaffe cap emerged only days before the vote; other candidates made overtly racist or ill-informed comments that went viral, feeding doubts about the party’s basic competency and ability to govern.
Yet, despite all that, the RN made huge gains. It won 143 seats, up 54 seats from the 89 it won in 2022 and the eight it captured in 2017. (The new seat count includes a handful of députés from centre-right Les Républicains, or LR, who ran on a joint LR-RN ticket.) Under France’s system of public financing, the RN now will dispose of more resources than ever – or about €15-million ($22.5-million) a year.
The RN won more than 10 million votes in each round of voting, far more than any other party or coalition. “It is now the largest party in France with the largest number of seats in parliament,” noted Science Po’s Mr. Michel. “People are voting for its policies. It is no longer a protest vote; it is a vote of adhesion.”
While the RN’s support was once confined to the deindustrialized northeast and poorer communities along the Mediterranean coast, the party has now broken through everywhere outside France’s major cities. Its initial base of conservative Catholics has expanded to include most working-class voters aged between 35 and 60. It has also made major inroads among young people, seniors and even high-income voters, said Mathieu Gallard, research director at Ipsos France. “It has progressed among every category of voters,” Mr. Gallard noted. “Ms. Le Pen’s normalization strategy has really had an impact.”
The strategy, often referred to as la dédiabolisation, or de-demonization, began in earnest after the 2017 presidential election. Ms. Le Pen’s attempts to put a kinder, gentler face on her party included a name change (from the National Front) and the adoption of a highly populist economic platform. Surging inflation after the pandemic fuelled the RN’s rise, as it promised to slash France’s value-added tax. So did Mr. Macron’s 2023 move to raise the retirement age to 64 from 62, which the RN vowed to repeal.
Ms. Le Pen has chafed at the use of the far-right label to describe her party, telling CNN this month that the RN is “between the centre-right and centre-left with regards to ideas.” Still, RN’s staunchly anti-immigration platform can hardly be described as centrist. It calls for the deportation of undocumented immigrants, an end to birthright citizenship and the adoption of the principle of “national preference” in the provision of social assistance and publicly-funded health care. “The RN remains the party that is the farthest to the right on the political spectrum in France, and it maintains an anti-liberal tone,” Mr. Michel said.
Opposition to immigration has driven RN support more than any other single factor, added Ipsos’s Mr. Gallard. Other factors include a feeling of pessimism about France’s future and a strong antipathy toward Mr. Macron. “The RN is perceived as the most effective opposition to Emmanuel Macron,” Mr. Gallard said.
Under France’s constitution, legislative elections can be held no more than once a year. So, the RN’s next shot at winning the National Assembly will not come until mid-2025 at the earliest – though Ms. Le Pen has her sights set mostly on 2027.
In the meantime, Mr. Macron is unlikely to accept his sudden lame-duck status without a fight. He has a penchant for high drama and may try to reboot what is left of his presidency by holding a referendum on a set of institutional reforms. That is what Charles de Gaulle did after massive student protests in 1968 rocked the country and his government.
It matters not that de Gaulle’s gamble failed and that, feeling humiliated, he resigned the presidency with three years left in his term. Mr. Macron is nothing if not a risk-taker. Besides, his 2017 platform included a promise to reform France’s electoral system. He could resuscitate the idea now and call a referendum on his proposals, if only to remain relevant even as the rest of the political class looks beyond his presidency.
For now, however, France is on hold. Its caretaker government led by Mr. Attal can manage day-to-day affairs, but it cannot table major legislation. The country’s already powerful bureaucracy will accrue even more influence amid the paralysis in parliament. A technocratic elite will, in effect, run the country.
This is not what the revolutionaries who donned those phryges more than 230 years ago likely had in mind when they rose up against Louis XVI. But, then again, they probably never dreamed the hats they wore in defiance of the king would one day be anthropomorphized and become an Olympics marketing tool, either.
C’est trop drôle.