France Implodes Again: Global Schadenfreude, Market Yawns, and the Eternal Return of Political Kabuki

Paris, Thursday — The French government has fallen faster than a soufflé in a wind tunnel, and the rest of the world, nursing its own political hangover, is watching with the kind of sympathetic grimace usually reserved for a friend who just face-planted on the dance floor. Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne handed in her resignation after a bruising no-confidence vote over President Emmanuel Macron’s pension reform—an event that, in any other country, would be labeled “regime change” and trigger a flurry of stern editorials about “institutional stability.” In France, it’s just called “Thursday.”

From Berlin to Buenos Aires, the collapse is being decoded like a Rorschach test for national neuroses. In Washington, where Congress can’t even agree on the color of the carpets, the spectacle of a government imploding over retirement age is being met with the smug relief of a gambler who just watched someone else lose their shirt. “At least we only shut down the federal government over border walls,” one Senate aide whispered, downing an espresso that tasted of both caffeine and schadenfreude.

Chinese state media, never one to waste a teachable moment, has framed the debacle as proof that liberal democracies are “structurally incapable of long-term planning,” conveniently omitting the part where Beijing’s own demographic iceberg is already bobbing on the horizon. Meanwhile, in London, the tabloids are running side-by-side photos of Parisian riot police and the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony, captioned: “How to do fireworks properly.” Subtlety, after all, is a dish best served with sarcasm.

The markets, those great weighers of human folly, yawned. The CAC 40 dipped a polite 1.4 %—barely enough to jostle the champagne flutes in La Défense. Analysts noted that French debt spreads versus Germany widened “within the range of normal Gallic melodrama,” which is trader-speak for “they’ve seen this film before.” One Frankfurt banker, asked if the eurozone should be worried, shrugged: “Italy exists. We’ll cope.”

What makes this implosion globally resonant is the sheer predictability of the script. Macron, the ex-banker who once promised to turn France into a start-up nation, discovered that neither TED-talk charisma nor EU subsidies can out-argue a population that regards retirement at 64 as an existential insult. The French, it turns out, would rather immolate a government than work an extra coffee break. It’s a national pastime up there with debating the correct length of a baguette.

Yet the broader significance lies not in the fall but in the shrug that follows. When the world’s sixth-largest economy treats cabinet reshuffles like seasonal fashion, it normalizes the idea that governments are disposable—fast fashion for the body politic. Emerging markets, long lectured on fiscal discipline by Parisian technocrats, are quietly savoring the irony: if France can’t balance its books without street theater, why should they listen to sermons from the IMF?

Climate negotiators in Dubai, already sweating through another round of pledges, now worry that France’s political vacuum could stall EU climate legislation just as the planet edges past another half-degree. One delegate from the Maldives, whose country is literally disappearing, quipped that the French seem more concerned with disappearing pensions than disappearing islands. Dark humor, after all, travels well when the alternative is drowning.

Back in France, the ceremonial hunt for a new prime minister begins—think “The Bachelor,” but with worse catering and more references to the Republic’s values. Potential candidates are polishing their best “I alone can fix this” soundbites, while labor unions polish their megaphones and the public stocks up on yellow vests like it’s Black Friday. The choreography is as rehearsed as a ballet; only the libretto changes.

So the tricolor flutters on, slightly askew, above ministries where the coffee machines have already been unplugged. The world will keep spinning, the markets will keep shrugging, and somewhere in a smoke-filled brasserie a philosopher will declare that collapse is merely reform in a trench coat. The rest of us will order another glass of Sancerre and toast the eternal French talent for making political disaster look like performance art. Santé.