French President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged in his New Year's address to the nation on Tuesday that his decision to dissolve parliament, plunging France into a political crisis, had backfired.
“I must recognize this evening that the dissolution has, for the moment, brought more divisions to the (National) Assembly than solutions for the French,” he declared, adding that he “takes full part in to this.”
This is the closest the French president has come to apologizing for his decision last June, which triggered early legislative elections. They produced a hung parliament, with the National Assembly divided into three main, sharply opposed blocs, none of which had the majority needed to govern alone.
President Macron has since had to rotate three prime ministers — Gabriel Attal, followed by Michel Barnier, then the current prime minister, François Bayrou — in order to find a consensus capable of overcoming parliamentary divisions, to adopt a budget for 2025 and avoid the risk of another government collapse.
The French president expressed hope that lawmakers will form ad hoc majorities to pass laws and said “our government should be able to follow a path of compromise to get things done.” His speech began on a lighter note, returning to the Paris Olympics and Paralympics, which temporarily distracted attention from France's political woes.
“Together, this year, we have proven that the impossible is not French,” said President Macron, speaking on video clips of the Games. They “showed a France full of audacity and panache, madly free,” he declared.
He also celebrated the reopening of Notre-Dame Cathedral, magnificently rebuilt after the catastrophic fire that brought down its spire and reduced its roof to ashes in 2019. He called the reconstructed monument a “symbol of our French will.”
Some of the revelers who flocked to the Boulevard des Champs-Élysées in Paris for a musical, video and pyrotechnic spectacle ushering in 2025 said they hoped for brighter prospects for France.
“It's been complicated: the dissolved parliament, the somewhat chaotic state of things and the current climate with the war in Ukraine and everything that's happening in the world. It’s a little anxiety-inducing,” said Xavier Lepouze, who came with his wife, Angélique, from the Normandy region west of Paris.
“We would like to have peace, calm,” he said. Seeing the joy and happiness in people's heads and on their faces, because we feel that everyone is gloomy on a daily basis, so there is a real need for positivity.
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