how France came to be in turmoil (again). Also:
| Charlie Kirk, a close ally of Trump’s, was shot and killed at an event.NATO jets shot down Russian drones over Poland. |
Plus, was there life on Mars?
A Trump ally was fatally shot in Utah
Charlie Kirk, a close ally of President Trump’s and the founder of America’s pre-eminent right-wing youth organization, was shot and killed while speaking to a large crowd at a university campus outside Salt Lake City. He was 31.
Officials had taken two people into custody yesterday as part of their investigation, but both were released. One of them, a local political activist, was charged with obstruction of justice. Here’s the latest.
Background: Kirk co-founded Turning Point USA in 2012. He became one of the most influential young right-wing figures in the U.S. Read more about him here.
| Marine Le Pen lost to Emmanuel Macron in two presidential elections in 2017 and 2022. Benoit Tessier/Reuters |
How Macron failed to curb the far right
For the past decade, the far right has been edging closer to power in France. And for the past eight years, the overarching response of President Emmanuel Macron has been the same: to make France more business-friendly, on the theory that a growing economy could serve as a bulwark.
It hasn’t worked. France’s growth has been modest. Its debt has ballooned. And with every election, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally has kept gaining support.
This year, there was an attempt to try something different: a 2 percent tax on France’s ultra rich — the 1,800 individuals worth more than 100 million euros. Most French people support the idea. Macron opposed it.
Today, France is in turmoil (again). Macron appointed a new prime minister (again) after the last one lost a confidence vote over austerity measures. Protesters blocked roads (again). The far right is polling higher than ever.
The wealth tax was a chance to combat the notion that Macron’s business-friendly France benefits only the rich. It wouldn’t have solved the debt problem — but it would have had tremendous symbolic value.
The contention of the far right (which is pushing for its own tax on financial wealth) is that elites are looking out only for one another. Many in France feel this is precisely what is happening. Far from weakening the far right, Macron may have inadvertently strengthened it.
Business-friendly vs. democracy-friendly
A former banker, Macron ran on an unabashedly free-market platform when he first beat Le Pen in 2017: Make it easier and cheaper for companies to invest in France. They’ll create jobs. That’s how you win back voters from the far right.
Over the past eight years, he has cut corporate taxes and payroll taxes and abolished an existing wealth tax. All this cost the French treasury tens of billions of euros. At the same time, he raised the retirement age.
Then France’s debt level — never low — surged during the pandemic. It’s now widely seen as unsustainable.
It’s against this backdrop that the government collapsed this week. It was unable to pass a budget that sought to freeze welfare spending, scrap two public holidays and cut pretty much everything except military spending.
Few disagree that something needs to be done. But “there is a sense of injustice,” my colleague Liz Alderman, The Times’s business reporter in Paris, told me. “There is a feeling that these business-friendly policies have not trickled down,” and that ordinary people carry a disproportionate burden.
The 2 percent tax has become a symbol of that perceived injustice. It passed the lower house of Parliament, which is dominated by the far left and the far right. But in the upper house, center-right lawmakers and Macron supporters blocked it, calling it a far-left measure that would cause rich people to flee France.
I spoke to Olivier Blanchard, former chief economist of the I.M.F., who wrote an open letter in support of the tax this year in an effort to debunk that notion. The estimated revenue (which ranges from 5 billion to 25 billion euros a year) wouldn’t come close to addressing the deficit, he said. But France will have to raise taxes to get its finances under control, and, he said, “If you want to convince ordinary people to accept cuts, it would be wrong, morally and politically, to exempt the wealthiest.”
Same approach, same results
In Britain, the center-left prime minister, Keir Starmer, has also resisted pressure to impose a wealth tax, as has Germany’s center-right chancellor, Friedrich Merz. (Two in three Germans also say they want the wealthiest people to pay higher taxes.)
In France, there is now some momentum to revive a version of the idea, in Parliament and on the street. But Macron’s latest choice of prime minister, a loyal ally who has been in every cabinet since 2017, does not look like a candidate of change.
There is no guarantee that higher taxes on the wealthy would stop the far right. What does seem clear is that the same approach is likely to keep generating the same results.
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| MORNING READ |
Was there life on Mars? Maybe. A new study of a Martian rock found by NASA’s Perseverance rover discovered minerals that could be a byproduct of ancient microbial life. NASA is not saying that it has found traces of Martian microbes, but analysis of the rock raises that possibility.
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| ARTS AND IDEAS |
Free speech and a comedian’s arrest
The Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan was arrested in London last week after several of his posts on X were deemed by the police to be inciting violence against transgender people. In one post, he wrote that anyone who sees a transgender woman in a “female-only space” should “make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”
Right-wing politicians assailed “thought policing” while transgender advocacy groups warned of hate crimes on the rise. The episode intensified Britain’s debate over free speech. Read more.
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