Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 198

A Brexit Game of Chicken

The British, says the distinguished early modern historian Paul Langford, are “a polite and commercial people.” So if you come to dinner and rudely suggest you plan to bugger up Britain’s commercial interests, it should not come as a huge surprise when you receive a sharp rebuff, as Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the European Commission, recently discovered. At the end of April he went to dinner at 10 Downing Street in London to discuss Brexit with the British prime minister, Theresa May. A few days later someone close to the president, and surely with his consent, leaked a highly unflattering and incendiary account of the dinner to a German newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, with the added spin that May was living in another galaxy and totally deluding herself about the prospects for a happy divorce from the EU. Brexit could not be a success, he told her.

Britain is in the middle of an election campaign, so Junker’s preening and clumsy diplomacy was a gift to Theresa May. On May 3, standing in front of the famous black door of No. 10, she delivered a corruscating response, rebuking the EU for “threats against Britain” that, she said, “were deliberately timed to affect the result of the general election.” At local elections the next day her Conservative party crushed rivals throughout the country, humiliating the Labour Party and wiping out the right-wing anti-European party UKIP.

Expect something similar in the general election on June 8. With a helping hand from Juncker and the EU Commission, Theresa May is now clearly established as the firm voice and iron hand of Brexit. No wonder that German chancellor Angela Merkel is said to be furious with Juncker for his gross ineptitude.

Still, conventional wisdom says that the insults and accusations flying around at the moment are only to be expected. Aside from May wrapping herself in the Union Jack and speechifying with anti-EU rhetoric—catnip for a huge swathe of British voters across the political spectrum—both sides of the Brexit negotiations are engaging in chest-thumping and spleen-venting before the real talks get going. Take the divorce bill for example. EU: We want €60 billion. UK: We don’t owe you a penny. EU: Ok, make that €100 billion… and so on and so on. Behind the scenes, however, the two lead negotiators, David Davis for the UK and Michel Barnier for the EU—wily, experienced politicians both—are already said to be establishing cordial relations in preparation for tough but essentially professional and pragmatic negotiations.

Pragmatism has always been a British speciality on the world stage. It is a quality that may yet turn difficult Brexit negotiations into a success. Read one of Britain’s most perceptive commentators, Danny Finkelstein, for example, on how the key to UK success will be in making the EU think it won the debate.

But there are two reasons why the negotiations are still more likely than not  to end in acrimony and disappointment. First, article 50 of the Lisbon treaty, the mechanism for leaving the EU (drafted ironically by a British diplomat, Lord Kerr), is so heavily weighted in favor of the EU itself that it will be difficult for Europe to resist the temptation to overplay its hand, increasing the chances that Britain choose to walk away without a deal.

Second and as important, an approach of common sense and “let’s all be reasonable grown ups about this” fails to take into account the variable that no-one can control or even accurately predict: raw emotion. EU politicians and officials (but not European populations) at root really believe in the EU project, are genuinely affronted by Britain’s exit, and will go to extraordinary lengths to protect the broader European enterprise. This commitment is more about heart than head. Many European officials want to meet out a punishment beating. So while, for example, Barnier and his team may strike a bargain, they cannot control what happens when that deal gets to the European Parliament, which has a veto under article 50. In Britain, too, anti-EU sentiment is visceral, as the Brexit vote itself demonstrates. There will be no appetite there for a new Diet of Worms.

Luckily for Britain, readying itself to play poker with Brussels and preparing for a future if that game turns out to be a bust should be the same thing. Clearly Britain has a number of trump cards in the negotiations. Financially, the EU will take a huge hit from Brexit. As Bloomberg News points out, not only is Britain the second largest net contributor to the EU budget, the EU is losing its second largest economy as well as the prestige and reach of the City of London, which accounts for 37 percent of all global foreign-exchange trading, 39 percent of the world’s trading in over-the-counter derivatives, and is the biggest center for international bank lending. Add in that Britain’s defense spending is the EU’s highest, that it (along with France) possesses a nuclear weapons capability essential to Western security, has three of the world’s leading intelligence agencies (MI5, MI6 and GCHQ), and has diplomatic influence through its permanent membership of the UN Security Council, leadership role in Nato, and the “special relationship” with the United States, few if any would dispute that the EU will be poorer, less influential and perhaps even less safe after Brexit. A generous settlement by the UK will alleviate and address many of those concerns, but Britain will need something substantial in return. The EU has to decide whether an advantageous trade deal is worth the compromise.

If the answer to that question is no, then beside these other losses the EU will have other challenges to face. The British, as Langford suggests, have always been an essentially commercial people. Daniel Defoe in the eighteenth century pointed out that “no place in the world has so much business done, with so much ease.” If Britain can no longer be a partner with the EU, it will surely become a fierce competitor: a pro-business, trade-oriented market economy with low tariffs and business tax rates. That set up will be a problem for the sclerotic, lumbering EU economic, social and political system. It may not be what many of those Britons who voted “leave” in 2016 wanted or expected from Brexit, but the consequence for Britain of its EU divorce will likely be more not less globalization.

Pensions Are a Problem in the Heart of Silicon Valley

Google’s booming hometown of Mountain View, California, which has a jobless rate of below three percent and a median family income in the six figures, may need to raid its rainy day fund to cover its unfunded pension liabilities for public employees. The Mountain View Voice reports:

Under a plan put forward by the city’s finance team, Mountain View would draw about half that amount ($6 million) from its reserve fund, a pool of money normally set aside for emergencies. But by doing so, they warned, the city would need to tweak its longstanding policy to keep at least 25 percent of its general fund in reserves, which could threaten the city’s AAA bond rating. That isn’t very likely, said Finance Director Patty Kong. She assured the council that bond-rating agencies would probably look favorably on the “positive action” the city took to pay off its pension costs.

Still, some council members said they were nervous about touching the city’s $26 million in emergency savings for something that was hardly an emergency. Councilwoman Margaret Abe-Koga suggested pulling money from the city’s other funds to keep its reserves intact.

Many local governments are getting squeezed, as Calpers, the state pension fund, demands higher contributions to cover exploding costs. But the fact that even Mountain View is struggling to come up with the money highlights how grim the situation is for the state as a whole. Not all California towns are home to huge wealth-creating enterprises and affluent tax bases; in fact, many inland areas have been hemorrhaging high-paying jobs for years.

Mountain View will probably be OK in the long run, but the tightening pension vise will exact a devastating toll on the public services of cities and towns elsewhere in the state.

Thousands of Turks Seek Asylum in Germany

The German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) has issued new guidelines likely to increase the number of accepted asylum applications from Turkey as thousands of Turks flee the country. As Hurriyet Daily reports:

Around 450 Turkish diplomats, military officers, judges and other public officers have applied for asylum in Germany, according to a report by Der Spiegel. [….]

Some of those who sought asylum in the country included NATO military officers stationed in Belgium and a military attaché at the Turkish Embassy in an African country, the report said.

Overall, more than 7,700 Turkish citizens have applied for asylum in Germany, it added.

Only 8 percent of the asylum applications were approved last year, but authorities from BAMF estimate that this rate will increase in 2017.

This won’t down well with Erdogan.

Many, though not all, of the officials are suspected of having links to the Gulen movement accused of plotting the 15 July coup attempt last year. Given the lack of evidence that the Turkish government has been able to provide for the culpability of Gulen himself, it seems unlikely that the Turks would be able to provide better evidence to the Germans that these lower-level figures committed any crimes. The purge or arrest of tens of thousands of suspected Gulenists and opposition figures (notably—for its absurdity— including tens of thousands of school teachers) gives Turks with connections to Gulen or the opposition every reason to flee the country and Germany every reason to grant them asylum as victims of political persecution.

The presence of hundreds or thousands of asylees wanted by the Turkish government will be just one of many outstanding issues dividing Turkey from Germany and Europe as a whole. Germany has already said that it won’t allow Turkish residents in Germany to vote in any referendum on re-instituting the death penalty; other European countries are looking to follow suit. Germany is also home to a growing number of journalists in exile, whose writings will be no less incendiary for a Turkish government which is trying to exercise ever greater degrees of censorship at home.

Fun times ahead.

The European Headache That Can’t Be Wished Away

Defenders of the EU status quo have allowed themselves a sigh of relief this weekend, after the election of Emmanuel Macron in France and the strong showing of Angela Merkel’s CDU in the German state elections. Meanwhile in Italy, the markets have considerably less reason for cheer. Financial Times offers a look:

Italy’s financial system remains one of the unresolved weak links in a European economy finally showing signs of recovery, with the government struggling in its effort to address a long stagnation that has eroded the ability of Italian businesses and consumers to repay debts.

Over the past year, bankers have worked vigorously to devise ways of selling off the exposure to non-performing loans held by banks using securitisation in which the loans are packaged up and sold on to investors.

However, significant securitisations of NPLs have failed to materialise and Italy’s loan problem is barely improving. The overall stock of bad loans for 15 Italian banks fell in 2016 for the first time in the past eight years, according to DBRS, the Canadian rating agency, which analysed the lenders’ results. Yet the proportion of so-called sofferenze — the worst class of bad loans, where banks are exposed to insolvent borrowers — had risen slightly.

There is a sliver of good news here in the overall decline of non-performing loans, but the larger problem is more troubling. Italian banks are still struggling to clean their balance sheets of toxic assets, and unlike Spain and Ireland, Italy has failed to develop a viable securitization scheme to attract private investors. The EU, for its part, has been of little help, resisting the previous government’s entreaties for a suspension of EU rules so that Rome could recapitalize its banks, while balking at Italy’s December decision to bail out the Monte Paschi bank.

In short, Italy’s financial sector remains weighed down by bad loans it cannot get rid of, causing a drag on the economy at large, and it may require further capital injections that Berlin and Brussels are unwilling to provide. With elections looming next year, that combination of economic stagnation and European stinginess is likely to fuel the anti-EU anger currently on the rise throughout Italy.

Indeed, as the FT notes elsewhere, the Five Star Movement’s Bepe Grillo is already using Macron’s election to double down on his anti-EU rhetoric and calls for an Italian exit—and the message seems to be resonating. The FT again:

“Europe will see another government coming out of the banks,” Mr Grillo wrote. “More precious time will be wasted to benefit this plastic formation, these dummies who are slaves of an impossible currency,” he added. […]

Five Star is currently slightly ahead of Italy’s ruling Democratic party in opinion polls, with the backing of about 28 per cent of Italians, making it one of the strongest populist parties in Europe. It has called for a referendum on exiting the euro.

Those cheering a few centrist electoral victories as proof that the EU is on solid footing, should look to Italy for what may be the EU’s next major battleground. If Europe’s technocrats cannot provide answers to the economic trials and populist discontent of Europe’s south, the fissures eroding the union will only continue to grow.

The Youth Vote and the Future of Europe

All across the big cities of Europe, the victory of Emmanuel Macron was greeted with a deep sigh of relief and some jubilation. The press has by and large been content to stick to a narrative about values: Macron’s “openness” and “liberalism” had defeated Marine Le Pen’s hidebound “nationalism”. And while most acknowledged that there were daunting challenges facing Macron, and indeed the European project writ large, today was a day for celebration.

But there is also reason for caution. The more readily pleasing narrative about the triumph of liberal values, so confidently trumpeted by the press, could be on shaky ground. Young people, it turns out, are increasingly not among the idealists.

Macron was projected to win more than 60 percent of the youth vote (ages 18-24) in the lead up to the second round of voting on Sunday. But that high level of support in the second round obscures that young people in France, as well as elsewhere in Europe, are increasingly favoring non-mainstream political parties.

In France, the communist candidate, Jean-Luc Melenchon, was the favorite among young voters ages 18-24, capturing 30 percent of that age group in the first round of elections on April 23. 24 percent of those aged 25-34 cast their vote for him as well. Melenchon surge in the final weeks leading up to the first round of voting buttressed by high support among first time voters. Thanks to the youth vote and first time voters, Melenchon came achingly close to beating the center-right establishment candidate Francois Fillon. When Melenchon ran in the last presidential elections in 2012, he only managed to garner 8 percent support among 18-24 year olds and 13 percent of those 25-34. His gains this year came straight out of the Socialists’ ranks.

As the old saying goes, if you’re not a socialist before 30, you have no heart; if you’re still a socialist after 30, you have no brain. Many of France’s young people, who went to the National Front this year in unprecedented numbers, beg to differ. In the first round, Le Pen was the second most popular candidate among 18-24 year olds (21 percent) and was tied with Melenchon for second place (after Macron) in the 25-34 age group. In the final second round, Le Pen appears to have outperformed the polls, drawing as much as 44 percent of 18-24 year old vote. It’s quite an achievement. When Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine Le Pen’s father, ran for the presidency in 2002 (and also successfully entered the second round), he only managed to receive 13 percent of 18-24 and 17 percent of 25-34.

Part of Marine Le Pen’s growing appeal with the youth has to do with the establishment’s inability to address France’s endemic youth unemployment problem. In the first round, Le Pen won in areas with higher than average unemployment (10 percent)—parts of Northern, Southern, and Western France. In 2008, on the cusp of the economic crisis, about 17 percent of France’s young people (15-24) were unemployed. That number shot up to 26 percent by 2013 and has hovered around 25 percent since. An urban-rural divide is also contributing to Le Pen’s popularity with young people: while Macron won handsomely in Paris and other urban centers, Le Pen draws her support from smaller towns and villages, where unemployment also tends to be higher than in larger cities.

The future could be bright for the Le Pen brand. Marine Le Pen’s niece, the 27-year-old Marion Maréchal-Le Pen (whose views, incidentally, resemble more her grandfather’s than her aunt’s), is a rising star. A series of stumbles by Macron, or even an inability to break out of the miserable status quo, could drive more young people into their arms in the next elections.

And it’s not only the French youth that are growing disenchanted with centrists. The cross-country statistics are difficult to compare accurately, but there are signs that young people across the European continent are increasingly tempted by illiberalism. The Austrian presidential elections last year looked a lot like the French ones, with two non-establishment candidates competing in a tight race. The Green Party’s Alexander van der Bellen beat out the euroskeptic nationalist Norbert Hofer with 54 percent of the vote, but it was Hofer who won amongst young men: almost 60 percent of men under 29 voted for him.

In the Dutch parliamentary election in March, the center right party of Prime Minister Mark Rutte beat out the challenge from the far-right Geert Wilders. Yet some exit polls found that the same proportion of young people voted for Wilders’s PVV as Rutte’s VVD—approximately 21 percent for each.

Further east in Hungary, university students—the better educated among the youth—are flocking to the extremist Jobbik party. (Jobbik’s anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic rhetoric would even make Jean-Marie Le Pen blush.) One study found 41 percent support for Jobbik among students aged 18-21.

Nationalists in Central and Eastern Europe tend to do well with first-time voters (who often happen to be young), and unrepentant neo-fascists don’t do too shabbily either. In Slovakia in 2016, a quarter of first-time voters chose the extremist People’s Party-Our Slovakia. The head of the party, Marian Kotleba, has proudly sported a WW2-era uniform worn by Slovakia’s fascists, and has referred to Roma as “Gypsy parasites.”

Populist far-right nationalism has been a fixture of Europe’s politics for decades, but these parties’ now-proven ability to capture a growing number of young voters will have profound consequences for the future of the European project. Europe’s youth are furiously demanding change—any change—especially in countries most affected by the economic crisis and saddled with persistent youth unemployment. In Greece, for example, youth unemployment skyrocketed to 60 percent in 2013 and has remained above 45 percent since. This means that a college graduate in 2008, when the economic crisis hit, has likely been unemployed for almost a decade. It is no wonder that young Greeks are increasingly euroskeptic and the majority, 60 percent according to a recent poll, want the EU to return powers to the national governments.

The EU is at risk of creating a new lost generation—adrift without purpose, apathetic, without vision, and ripe for firebrand politicians to mobilize them. For too long, the establishment has taken the youth vote for granted, convinced that open borders and Erasmus programs would transform the next generation into Europeans first and foremost, letting them leave behind the demons that tore the continent apart in their grandparents’ times. The last few European elections—the French one not least among them—have demonstrated that young people’s support for liberal values, democracy, and the EU is no longer a given.

France’s new president is the youngest elected French leader since Napoleon. By virtue of his age, he has a unique opportunity to convince young voters that the European project can work for them. Of course, he also has to deliver on his promises—something that is anything but assured. The hill ahead is formidably steep. It won’t be an easy climb.

But if he fails, the future could belong to Le Pen.

The Party of the Ivy League

Democratic Congressmen are three times as likely to have attended an Ivy League college as their Republican counterparts, according to a new tally from the Chronicle of Higher Education—a striking shift from the year 2000, when Ivy Leaguers were equally represented in both caucuses.

This might reflect in part the growing Democratic dominance of congressional delegations from the Northeast, where the Ivy League is located. But it also illustrates, in a striking and original way, a broader trend that was discussed at length in the 2016 election cycle: the transformation of the Democrats into a party of the cosmopolitan establishment and the Republicans to the party of populism and nationalism (in tone if not necessarily in practice).

The Chronicle also finds that while Democrats were once more likely than Republicans to have attended public universities (48 to 41 percent in the Congress before the Gingrich revolution), that is no longer the case—Paul Ryan’s Republicans are eight points more likely than Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats to have earned their degree from a publicly-run institution. Although the Democratic Party has grown more vocal about increasing public funding for state universities, is is increasingly selecting candidates who were educated at private schools.

The time horizon for the shift is also noteworthy. The key inflection point seems to have come around the turn of the century. Throughout George W. Bush’s presidency, the educational pedigree of Democratic representatives grew more elite, while the GOP’s grew more modest. The divergence peaked around the time of the Tea Party wave—since the 113th Congress, the Republican share of private school graduates and Ivy Leaguers has ticked back upward.

Should the Democrats worry about becoming the Party of the Ivy League? Having an elite education doesn’t by itself preclude a candidate from winning the trust of working class voters (just look at Donald Trump, who has announced that he attended “the best school in the world,” or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose name is emblazoned on a suite at a Harvard dormitory). But after the Democrats lost an easily-winnable election in part because of an over-reliance on boutique academic liberalism that did not seem to particularly resonate among non-professionals, the party’s Ivy League shift might be seen as a symptom of a broader problem.

Is China Trying to Play Trump?

Is Donald Trump softening his South China Sea policy to solicit Beijing’s cooperation on North Korea? That question was raised last week when the New York Times reported that the Defense Department had recently rejected three proposals for freedom of navigation operations (FONOPs) in the South China Sea.

According to the Navy’s top Pacific commander, however, three does not make a pattern—or a policy change. :

“There is nothing that has significantly changed in the last two or three months,” Admiral Scott Swift told reporters in Singapore, referring to the U.S. Navy excursions it says it conducts to ensure freedom of navigation.

“We just present the opportunities when we have a ship in the area and there’s an area of interest … They are either taken advantage of or they’re not.” […]

Swift said there has been no change in the importance the United States placed on the South China Sea issue.

“We are on track to conduct over 900 ship days of operations this year in the South China Sea,” he said.

Fair enough. But one statement may not dispel a building perception that the Trump Administration is taking it easy on Beijing. Bill Bishop put it best in his must-read Sinocism newsletter today: “Is President Trump subordinating every other issue in the U.S.-China relationship to the North Korean one, giving Beijing both more leverage than they should have as well as leeway on many other challenging and pressing issues in the relationship?”

Indeed, there are reports that the Chinese, at least initially, believed they could play Trump by extorting concessions in exchange for largely symbolic pressure against Pyongyang. According to the Japan Times, China proposed an unconventional quid pro quo ahead of last month’s Mar-a-Lago summit: China would help pressure North Korea, the offer went, if Trump fired Admiral Harry Harris, the PACOM commander whose Japanese ancestry and hardline stance on the South China Sea have long rankled Beijing:    

The Chinese leadership headed by President Xi Jinping made the request, through its ambassador in the United States, to dismiss Adm. Harry Harris, known as a hard-liner on China, including with respect to the South China Sea issue, the source said.

China’s envoy to the United States, Cui Tiankai, conveyed the request to the U.S. side, to coincide with the first face-to-face, two-day meeting between President Donald Trump and Xi in Florida from April 6, but the Trump administration likely rejected it, the source said.

The news of China demanding Harris’s dismissal should be treated with healthy skepticism, given the thin sourcing. But if it is true, it’s a sign that Trump is not a complete pushover. Harris still has his job, and has been pledging that new FONOPs in the South China Sea could happen very soon.

Still, Trump skeptics have found a lot of grist for their mill since the Mar-a-Lago summit: Trump has stated that he does not want to “cause difficulty” for Xi, and has already walked back his pledge to label China a currency manipulator while implying flexibility on a trade deal. Now, the Washington Post reports that he may be stalling on an arms package to Taiwan for fear of upsetting Beijing.

We’ll see how things develop in the coming weeks. Presumably, there are limits to the U.S. President’s patience. At some point, if the North Korea crisis remains unsatisfyingly stalemated, Trump may turn on his Chinese counterparts. After all, transactional diplomacy depends on actual transactions occurring.

The Cruelty of Blue

Years of false promises, years of “compassionate government”, years of ignoring arithmetic, comes to this: Puerto Rico in the grip of a massive, man-made disaster. The New York Times:

Angel González, a retired schoolteacher facing a 10 percent cut to his pension, is beginning to wonder whether his three-person household will have to cut back to one cellphone and take turns using it.

Santiago Domenech, a general contractor with $2 million of his savings tied up in bonds Puerto Rico just defaulted on, once had 450 employees. Now he has eight. His father-in-law, Alfredo Torres, owns Puerto Rico’s oldest bookstore, but it has been going downhill for two years.

“The government is bankrupt,” said Bernardo Rivera, 75, a private bus driver who sometimes earns only $40 all day. “Everyone is bankrupt. There is nothing left. People who do not have jobs do not take the bus to work.”

This could have been avoided by sensible and timely cuts, by turning a deaf ear to public sector union demands for wages and salaries, by a series of small but definite steps away from the blue model, welfare state governance. But the press, certainly including the NYT which is now reporting the disaster, would have attacked any politicians taking these steps as “harsh”, or “cruel to the poor”.

Now Puerto Rico is in a deeper hole, with much more suffering than any of the moderate cuts would have imposed.

Unfortunately, a number of cities and states on the mainland are walking down the Puerto Rican highway toward bankruptcy and disruptive adjustment. There, the liberal press is still hailing the politicians who are willing to plunge their cities and states into chaos for the sake of popularity: the press often calls them bold, innovative and visionary. They have a lot of ideas about the things they want to do with other peoples’ money, while people who insist that budgets must be cut, and that pension obligations be met, are still being attacked for everything from racism to sadism.

It is a lot of fun until the music stops.

Merkel On Course to a Victory?

It is still a long way until the election, but it looks increasingly that barring unforeseen circumstances, Angela Merkel will win a fourth term as Chancellor of Germany. Bloomberg:

As Merkel’s preferred candidate Emmanuel Macron won France’s presidential election, her Christian Democratic Union posted an unexpectedly clear victory in a much smaller contest in Schleswig-Holstein. It’s a confidence booster for the CDU ahead of elections next Sunday in SPD-led North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state with 18 million people and the main bellwether before the federal ballot.

Her greatest weakness domestically is based in the resentment against her dramatic “Germany welcomes you” message to migrants and refugees, but that issue seems to be fading away. Government policy has toughened, and Ms. Merkel hasn’t repeated her call. The SPD has no credibility to fight her on the migration issue, and the populist AfD, weakened by infighting, continues to flounder around in the shallow end of the polls.

With Le Pen beaten back in France and Merkel cruising toward re-election in Germany, there is stability at Europe’s core. Britain may be seceding, Italy sulking, and Poland and Hungary running wild, but the core of the Eurozone seems stable for now.

This is good news, but probably not good enough. We must hope that after the German elections the next Merkel government will be ready to take a fresh look at the blighted and depressed landscapes of Southern Europe from the Rust Belt of France through Italy and Greece.

Merkel may be running on a platform of stability, but to succeed afterward, she will have to embrace change.

A Stay of Execution for Europe—At Best

Lots of joyful commentary has accompanied Emmanuel Macron’s win in France, but it’s all more a stay of execution for Europe—not a pardon.

France is still the Sick Man of Europe, unable to reform, unable to assimilate immigrants, unable to play its role as the necessary partner and counterweight to Germany. Can France under Macron recover its poise, dynamism and develop a program for European progress that can convince the Germans that real change must come?

The odds are against it; Macron does not have the backing of a strong party, and he needs a working majority in the National Assembly to get legislation through. More, the French population remains deeply skeptical of what many there call, dismissively, “neoliberal reform.”

Not since Charles de Gaulle has a French president been elected in a less propitious moment. All the problems that wrecked the Hollande presidency are sadly still there.