From the reflected glory of a successful Paris Olympics to the urgent need to salvage a viable new government from political turmoil, France is coming down to earth with an uncomfortable bump.
It was a smart call on the part of French President Emmanuel Macron to promise an “Olympics truce”, placing the unifying qualities of the Games ahead of nagging domestic and international issues.
Dating from Ancient Greece and a treaty signed by three city-state kings – Iphitos, Cleisthenes and Lycurgus – the truce originally provided for a laying down of arms, suspending incessant hostilities to allow spectators safe travel to and from Olympic events.
From the opening on July 26 to Sunday’s closing ceremony, its 2024 version in France has been impressively observed.
After mixed reactions to the bold, lavish and occasionally challenging inaugural ceremony beneath heavy rainfall on the Seine, the achievements of competing athletes have been inspiring, sometimes breathtaking.
The enthusiastic responses of those watching in Paris, or from afar on their screens, suggest that the Olympics broadly lived up to Mr Macron’s hopes for top-quality Games. France showed its ability to organise a major international event without serious hitches.
Much had been left to prove after the debacle of a botched handling of the 2022 Champions League final between Liverpool and Real Madrid in Paris. Ministers shamefully blamed ticketless Liverpool fans but an official report showed this to be false, citing woeful organisation by the European football body UEFA and French policing failures as responsible for the chaos.
With France’s unenviable record of terrorist attacks and street disorder, there were plenty of security concerns ahead of the Games. Threats potentially arose from the extremes of left and right as well as lone wolves with allegiance to ISIS.
In the event, policing and anti-terror tactics held up well, apart from the eve-of-opening disruption caused by sabotage of the French rail network. The only clue to the culprits remains an unverified admission of responsibility from a hitherto unknown, seemingly leftist or anarchist group.
The national mood in France was helped to no end by the triumphs of its participants. The aim was top five in the medals table and fifth place was achieved.
Leon Marchand became only the sixth swimmer in Olympic history to win four individual gold medals at a single Games. The judo champion Teddy Riner won three golds, one individual and two in team efforts.
As the country’s best-loved sporting figure, known affectionally as Teddy Bear, Riner had already been a popular choice to run with the former Olympic gold-winning sprinter Marie-Jose Perec as the last bearer of the Olympic flame before the Games opened. In a country desperately in need of positive signs of vivre-ensemble – different ethnic communities cohabiting in mutual tolerance – the sight of two black Guadeloupe-born stars performing this symbolic role was uplifting.
Now the Games are over, the artistic director Thomas Jolly’s inventive if arguably disjointed closing spectacle somehow blending class and clutter, ecstasy and excess.
The Games ultimately met Mr Macron’s desire for “a time for diplomacy and peace” inside his country. But as athletes and spectators leave for home, France now faces an unsettled future.
Just weeks before the Olympics began, an unseemly political mess was created by the snap election called by the President after voting for the European parliament produced resounding successes for Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally. Her candidates amassed more than 31 per cent of the vote, double that of Macronist contenders.
Mr Macron hoped legislative elections on June 30 and July 7 would provide “clarity”, by which he meant voters joining forces in a traditional “republican front”, with natural ideological enemies swallowing differences to keep the far right out of office.
It was a presidential call much less smart than the pledge of an Olympic truce. The strategy backfired, almost catastrophically, with Le Penists winning more than 10 million votes in each round. Just when far-right victory seemed alarmingly likely, a surge of tactical voting, withdrawals by left-wing and Macronist candidates foiling otherwise well-placed RN rivals pushed Ms Le Pen’s party into third place behind the left-green alliance New Popular Front (NFP) and Mr Macron’s Ensemble.
The problem was that the outcome produced no working majority. The NFP has the most seats, 193 out of a total of 577, but is already creaking with internal rifts between its three components parts: mainstream socialists, greens and the far-left France Unbowed (LFI). What is more, the President has almost as much distaste for the idea of a government led by an out-and-out left-winger as for the RN’s Jordan Bardella as Prime Minister.
A premier from his own party would be politically untenable given its poor performance at the ballot box. The word in presidential circles is that Mr Macron will declare his choice immediately after the coming weekend’s 80th anniversary of Allied landings in Provence and the liberation of Bormes-les-Mimosas, the commune in which is found the Fort de Bregancon, official Mediterranean retreat of French presidents.
It is at that eye-catching summer residence that Mr Macron and his family have been spending time since the Olympics opening, the President interrupting his working holiday to fly to Olympics events or the Elysee palace. It remains to be seen what progress he has made in seeking to avoid total deadlock in parliament.
The omens are not encouraging. Three distinct groups dominate the national assembly but have no common ground to make effective coalition seem possible. It may take another round of legislative elections to break the impasse but this cannot constitutionally take place before next summer.
Mr Macron will welcome whatever kudos come his way from perceptions of a memorable, well-run Olympics. Early polling suggests the number of French voters trusting him to deal effectively with the country’s pressing needs has risen modestly in the past month, up by two points to 27 per cent. The proportion of those feeling no such trust fell sharply, five points to 39, the lowest since January. But these ratings hardly signal a renewed wave of support for a president whose popularity has been in decline since he won his first mandate with a thumping victory over Ms Le Pen in 2017.
Whether the Olympic spirit of togetherness can help improve brittle relations between communities in France is also open to doubt. The notions of vivre-ensemble and a sense of belonging on the part of those of immigrant origin have rarely seemed more unattainable.
City officials talk of an extraordinary boost for the image of Paris that will give the capital a worthy legacy. But some residents of the poorer Parisian banlieues, or outer suburbs, voice scepticism. “We were the forgotten people of the republic before the Games and we will be forgotten after the Games,” one woman in the Seine-Saint-Denis banlieue and home to the Stade de France, the 2024 Olympic Stadium, told Britain’s Observer newspaper.
Mr Macron has drawn comparison between the Games and another massive event staged at the Stade de France, the 1998 World Cup final, in which France defeated Brazil 3-0.
The multiracial composition of the French squad led to it being nicknamed black-blanc-beur (black, white, Arab), a powerful evocation of unity but pitifully short-lived.
Anyone with knowledge of post-1998 France, and interested in healing the wounds of a divided country, will hope the same laudable sentiment has been generated by the Olympic medallists’ rich mix of ethnic backgrounds. But also that it proves more lasting.
