“ARROGANCE made flesh.” Left-wing lawmaker Clemence Guette’s reaction to President Emmanuel Macron’s emergency address to the French nation on Thursday spoke for most of the country.

France this week is plunged into a deeper phase of ongoing, almost existential crisis. To listen to Macron, it is everyone’s fault but his own.

“I won’t shoulder other people’s irresponsibility,” snapped the popinjay whose own authoritarian recklessness has concentrated social and political tensions into the fall of his government, inability to pass a Budget, threatened financial meltdown and a sense of national calamity.

At one point, I expected his substance-free speech to burst into Edith Piaf’s “Je ne regrette rien” as he refused calls to resign — which 60 per cent of the public want — and insisted he would complete the remaining 30 months of his term. One hundred and thirty weeks is a helluva long time in politics.

The no-confidencing of Macron’s Prime Minister Michel Barnier on Wednesday is far from peak-crisis. Macron spoke on the day of nationwide public-sector strikes.

Two-thirds of primary school teachers walked out. He had nothing to offer them or the many others taking action in the coming weeks other than to claim it was the far left and far right who “do not care about you.”

Boastful and desperate, he pointed to the restoration of the fire-ravaged Notre Dame cathedral and the Paris Olympics as if they were his own great achievements contrasted to the “chaos” brought by his opponents. He also accused them of undermining the “eastern front.” That is the war against Russia in Ukraine.

Macron’s biggest lie was to say that the radical left of Jean-Luc Melenchon and the fascists of Marine Le Pen have formed an unholy alliance, an “anti-Republican front” against ordinary French people. It is a calumny repeated in much of the media.

The truth is that it was the bloc of left and centre-left parties, the New Popular Front (NFP), that tabled the no-confidence motion this week after Barnier used executive powers to pass public spending cuts without a parliamentary vote.

There were no left negotiations with Le Pen’s National Rally (RN). There were between Barnier and Le Pen as he sought to keep her propping up his government. The RN has done that since it was given a say in choosing the hard-right conservative Prime Minister in September.

But the €60 billion of cuts and regressive tax increases on ordinary people meant that the RN, despite its strategic drive to win over business and wealthy conservative support, felt forced to refuse a Budget that would hit its existing popular voter base too hard and thus lead some to switch perhaps to the left.

So it ended up backing the left’s censure motion even though the wording also denounced “vile” anti-immigrant and racist measures by the government and its attempts at backroom deals with fascists. This is not some rotten pact of “the twin extremes.” It is the left taking the initiative so as to blow up the de facto alliance between Macron and Le Pen.

That engages explosive fault lines in not only French politics but across Europe also. Macron’s election in 2017 was supposed to mark the beginning of the great “liberal fightback.” A restoration of the centre against the menace of “populism.”

The term was used to lump together forces of the radical left with those of the racist right as two sides of the same coin of irrational rejection of the failing capitalist centre.

Eight years on, however, it is clearer than ever that there has been no such centrist restoration — as the US elections show — even if advances back then by the radical left, from Corbynism in Britain to Syriza in Greece, have been hurled back.

Macron suffered a humiliating defeat at the European elections in June. He answered with an emergency general election.

The aim was to use the threat of Le Pen, whose party topped the European poll, as a scarecrow in order to abuse good anti-racist and anti-fascist sentiment and to squeeze the left’s vote behind the centre’s. It backfired. The hastily organised NFP was able to win the most seats in the three-week campaign even though the RN also advanced.

With a high turnout, a majority of France showed it did not want a fascist prime minister, and it didn’t want Macron either.

His response was effectively to deny the outcome of the election. He refused to appoint a prime minister from the left alliance even when it came up with a compromise candidate, respected former civil servant Lucie Castets.

Then, as now, he was determined to block the reform programme of the left/centre-left. It promises modest but real reforms, such as the restoration of the pension age, a higher minimum wage and cutting against the free-market assault Macron has pushed on French society. He is fixated upon that not just as current policy but above all as his “legacy.”

He looked to a prime minister from the right who would be acceptable to the RN and also committed to pushing through anti-worker, anti-popular measures. While claiming to be beyond left and right, the Macronite centre leans on the far right in order to exclude the left. The fascists got in return an extreme-right interior minister and plenty of xenophobic, authoritarian and anti-Muslim measures.

The radical left France in Revolt (LFI) denounced the arrangement as a presidential coup against the electorate. It launched a popular campaign involving petitions and demonstrations to impeach Macron, though centre-left elements in the NFP alliance drew back from that.

Melenchon vowed to bring down the Barnier government and hammered home the message that it was illegitimate. Despite attempts by conservative forces in the Socialist Party (PS) to blunt that push, Barnier has indeed just fallen. As Melenchon says, it is, in reality, a censure of Macron.

The leader of LFI in the National Assembly, Mathilde Panot, immediately called for Macron to go. Le Pen pointedly refused to do so. She said that she would work, without preconditions, with whoever Macron next appointed as Prime Minister — the fourth this year.

That illustrates the crucial difference. The radical left is pursuing an insurgent politics of rupture with Macron and his policies. Le Pen is opportunistically presenting herself as a disruptor when it suits (most of her voters wanted the government out) while at the same time as a responsible opposition who will pursue a conservative, capitalist policy when in office.

Just like Giorgia Meloni in Italy. She dropped anti-elite rhetoric on the economy in return for the EU adapting further to her anti-migration crusade and on racist exclusion so she can tell Italy she is achieving her programme.

In conditions of a rising curve of strikes and social protests, the left in France is in a position to build on the achievements of the summer and to exploit the contradictions inherent in Le Pen’s duplicitous position. She is this weekend mollifying conservative critics who say she has been reckless.

Bigger dilemmas face Macron. Does he appoint a more right-wing prime minister to win Le Pen’s good graces? Does he renew efforts to peel away centrist parts of the left bloc, such as the large minority right wing of the PS?

A “technocratic” government without a parliamentary majority? Then there is the nuclear option of a state of emergency under Article 16 of the constitution or a law from 1955 last used during the Algerian war.

The clock is ticking. The European Commission and bond markets have put France on notice because its budget deficit at 6.1 per cent is twice what the euro permits. Borrowing costs are approaching those of Greece.

The rejected Budget was supposed to bring the deficit down to 5.6 per cent. Now, the 2024 Budget will be rolled over for weeks until a replacement is put in next January or later. A run on the bond market could lead to Liz Truss territory.

Michelin — a totem of French industry — has announced plant closures. It is adding to a mood of de-industrialising malaise in just the way Volkswagen’s shuttered factories are doing to Germany, which is facing its own crisis election.

In both countries and across Europe, including Britain, there is a pervasive sense of a hollowed-out, technocratic centre out of touch with those who have not so much been “left behind” but rather dragged through one violent reorganisation of their lives after another in the name of capitalist modernisation.

Resentment is intense in regions and towns that have gone backwards, while a few gilded cities have attracted investment.

Macron is not alone in turning to increasingly anti-democratic measures to deal with this crisis of legitimacy. There is the strengthening of the repressive arms of the state — remember the Yellow Vests revolt? There is also the shredding of the norms of parliamentary democracy with its fabled checks and balances.

The president of US ally South Korea has provided the starkest illustration this week. Facing a parliament moving against him and 100,000 people demonstrating weekly against a range of unpopular measures, he tried to introduce martial law in the name of saving the country from supposed subversion by Pyongyang in the north.

Macron cited fighting Russia as his excuse, just as the EU is trying to construct a €500 billion arms programme to compensate for any cut to Nato and its wars by Donald Trump.

The outgoing president of Georgia is another one who has a problem with the outcome of a parliamentary election.

So what is at stake in France and, thus, Europe is beyond a governmental crisis and signs of increasing social revolt. It goes to the heart of the crisis of democracy and legitimacy.

Forces on the left are demanding that Macron appoint a prime minister from the left/centre-left bloc. Militants are also urging support for the strikes and for generalising them against Macron with social and political demands.

That all raises old questions rarely asked in recent years about truly democratic alternatives of popular participation and control that serve working people.

The constitutional architecture of the French Fifth Republic was meant to prevent any such alternative from being considered. But it is under pressure, not just its arrogant president.