The awkward truth is that Macron is already drowning

Despised and mistrusted, the President is ricocheting from crisis to crisis

You can tell whenever Emmanuel Macron is flailing, because a new set of pictures crops up on the Instagram account of the Elysée official photographer, starring Le Président in the guise he wants to project, like a limited-edition über-Ken doll. Sometime during the second month of the war in Ukraine, for instance, we got Zelensky-Macron: unshaven, in a special-forces T-shirt and a hoodie, staring intensely at what were visibly meant to be momentous documents. At regular intervals since 2017, we’ve had nuclear submarine captainMacron; holiday-Macron, in Bermuda shorts; and start-up-nation-Macron, in rolled-up shirtsleeves, surrounded by tech entrepreneurs who all looked like his 3D-printed clones.

This Bastille Day bank holiday weekend, we got air-force-Macron, flying over Paris in a Patrouille de France, Dassault-made Alpha Jet, during the rehearsals for the parade he was about to preside over. The message was that no matter his lack of a majority in the National Assembly, he is fully in charge.

This could not be further from the truth. Having seen a fractured parliament unite in common detestation of him, he is now facing up to five years of having to fight for every piece of legislation, on top of a summer and autumn of demonstrations and strikes for better pay.

In short, Macron is drowning. Unable to process the election result, he sank into a deep funk for weeks. Now, as if this month hadn’t already been bad enough for him, some key points of Uefa’s report on the disastrous Champions League final at the Stade de France last month have been leaked, confirming the damning findings of an earlier French Senate one.

Home secretary Gérald Darmanin’s claim that there were 30,000-40,000 additional Liverpool fans with fake tickets was revealed to be total fantasy. Uefa, like the French Senate, says there were 2,700 at most. Yet in the postelection reshuffle, Darmanin was rewarded with an extended portfolio.

The lack of coordination between local and national bodies, from the police, gendarmes and intelligence services to transport, local hospitals and emergency services, firemen, volunteers, etc – normally routine in an event involving tens of thousands of spectators – was utterly avoidable. Wilful ignorance of the character of the British compounded the trouble: the Liverpool supporters were pigeonholed as dangerous hooligans and seen as a greater danger than the roaming gangs of local yobs. The fatal incapacity of French officialdom to change tack fast in response to circumstances did the rest. Police union representatives told me that, in some cases, their colleagues were specifically instructed not to leave their appointed posts even when supporters were being brutalised and robbed by local gangs. “Préfet Lallement [the Paris area prefect of police] insists on rigid chain of command obedience, and is feared,” one said.

The all-purpose response, the one nobody here can fault you for? Blame the English!

Emmanuel Macron was elected both times not so much because the French like him, but because, as a former top of the heap mandarin, he was expected to be competent at restoring the once very real efficacy of the vaunted French bureaucracy. Instead, at every turn, he has called on consultants such as McKinsey to sort out the problem, at double the cost expended by his predecessors.

Can this last five years? The theory among the Paris political class is that Macron doesn’t really mind letting the opposition sink enough of his bills, hoping that the public will see them as obstructionists at a time of crisis. Then, sometime between now and the winter, he will blame them and call a snap election.

Will this work? All we can be sure of is that, until then, he will continue to star in his own social media-constructed alternative reality, unable, back in the real world, to get anything much done.