{"text":[[{"start":4.88,"text":"The writer is a columnist at Le Monde"}],[{"start":7.84,"text":"It is the sort of admission no government official would ever want to have to make. But on Monday morning, after a weekend of rioting and destruction across the country, a sombre French interior minister could not hide the truth: yes, Laurent Nuñez admitted, in some cities the police had lost control. Shop owners were left alone confronting hordes of looters. Town halls were vandalised."}],[{"start":33.96,"text":"Understandably shocked, politicians and commentators spent the rest of the day debating who was to blame for this spectacular failure of law and order — but in doing so they missed the bigger picture: France is adrift, politically, fiscally and socially."}],[{"start":48.36,"text":"Nuñez submitted his resignation to President Emmanuel Macron, who turned it down. Somebody, after all, has to be in charge. His resignation would have reinforced the feeling that the whole country is spinning out of control. The presidential election is six months away and no serious political decisions will be taken in the meantime. To be honest, no serious political decision has been taken for the past two years, since Macron made the disastrous decision to call a snap election that failed to produce a majority in the National Assembly. Parliament still has to pass a budget that cuts spending when protesters are demanding the opposite."}],[{"start":84.84,"text":"Still very active on the foreign scene, at home the president is now a lame duck so detached from real life that he spent Friday evening with his wife at a Céline Dion concert while Black Bloc extremists were getting ready to cause havoc on the streets of Paris the next day. Even the presidential campaign seems out of control with a field of 30 candidates dominated by two firebrands who have been around since last century and may well end up in a second-round duel: Marine Le Pen on the far right and Jean-Luc Mélenchon on the far left. Mélenchon initially tried to capitalise on the chaos, but at this point Le Pen looks like the main beneficiary. The centre, meanwhile, was hollowed out long ago. Macron could have tried to build a new political force, but he had other priorities."}],[{"start":129.52,"text":"France’s fiscal crisis is less visible but possibly even more challenging. Decades of uncontrolled public spending — France has not had a balanced budget since 1974 — and years of “whatever it takes” after the pandemic have pushed the public deficit to 5.4 per cent of GDP this year. The national debt has reached 119 per cent, its highest level since 1946, and keeps ballooning. The 10-year yield spread between French and German government bonds has also risen to levels not seen since the Eurozone debt crisis. The current unrest, if it continues, will scare away investors. This is a bad but not unsurmountable situation. Remedies do exist — but who will muster the political courage to launch the necessary reforms?"}],[{"start":177.02,"text":"Riots are nothing new in France, of course. In some respects, the Gilets Jaunes, or yellow vests, revolt that ended six years ago was worse than last weekend’s clashes. Radical groups, not exclusive to France, have sprouted elsewhere in Europe. What makes this situation different is the accumulation of crises that the country is facing simultaneously, not to mention two foreign wars which weigh heavily on European economies and fuel political tensions. “Polycrisis” is also on the mind of concerned secondary school students whose spontaneous protests a few weeks ago were the impetus for wider unrest. Their anger at dilapidated schools, absent teachers and a tortuous path to higher education reflects a widespread sense of anxiety about an uncertain future."}],[{"start":223.16,"text":"In that sense, their movement differs from the student uprising of May 1968. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, one of the leaders of that revolt, nailed it in a recent radio interview: 1968 was a joyful moment of hope, he recalled; there was a promising future the students wanted to be part of, and which they wanted to shape. This generation, gripped by the fear of jobs being destroyed by AI, sees a bleak future overshadowed by the climate crisis and a broken international order. While their grandparents are safely retired, these young people will shoulder the rising cost of pensions and a spiralling national debt."}],[{"start":257.74,"text":"University students, teachers and even resurfacing Gilets Jaunes soon joined the leaderless school protests with their own demands in response to the rising cost of living and unaffordable petrol prices. On Saturday in Paris, a few streets away from the rioters, more than half a million people from all walks of life demonstrated peacefully. This may yet be a silver lining to this grim French October. But a way out of the political and fiscal dead end which made them take to the streets in the first place has yet to be found."}],[{"start":292,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1792549879_3575.mp3"}