Eric Zemmour is trailing in the polls, but a new idea may just change his fate: that of promoting the unity on the right.

The dream is not new, and has been around ever since Nicolas Sarkozy siphoned votes from Marine Le Pen. Les Républicains influencers like Laurent Wauquiez and Eric Ciotti, without openly saying it, see the only chance for the right to win in merging their electorate with that of the far-right.

The alliance of the right has also been promoted by Le Pen’s niece, Marion Maréchal. She and her friends are waiting for Le Pen to quit if she fails in these elections, to make way for their ideas for an alliance of the right, writes Cecile Cornudet. The moment seems right, just when the conservatives seem to lack any great ideas of their own. In this vacuum nationalism seems to be the only answer, warns Eric Le Boucher in L’Opinion.

So Zemmour is fishing in this bigger pond now. Over the weekend, during three meetings there were on display three who left Marine Le Pen’s party to join Zemmour. They are not first-rank politicians, but are important enough to get noticed. There is also one departure from Les Républicains. Will there be more deserters? The pressure will be on for Pécresse and Le Pen. Le Pen in particular may have to negotiate bribes, as more may be tempted to depart. But her ship is not sinking just yet. If she can hold on and even advance in the polls to have a chance to come in second, she may be granted a life line for these elections, though many in her party doubt that she has what it takes to become president. This is what ultimately inspires their drive to find a new leader. Key to what will happen next is Le Pen’s niece. If she comes out in favour of Zemmour, expect more to jump ship. If she does not endorse either, will she cooperate or challenge Zemmour?

The left went through a similar process of self-destruction due to a lack of identifying ideas. It was Emmanuel Macron who took over to unify the centre to the left in 2017. Is the same now happening on the right?

Sir Tony Blair was the UK’s last successful prime minister, who fell over a grave misjudgement, but whose rise to power and strategic approach to government holds lessons for his successors. We agree with the substance of Sir Tony’s analysis on the state of UK politics right now. The real failure of the Johnson administration is not bad behaviour, but lack of a political strategy to prepare the UK for the future. Sir Tony talks about the UK descending into a lower league. We would not frame it in terms of national competitiveness, a popular metaphor reminiscent of the debate in the first decade of this century. We think this is not about competitiveness but productivity - an overlapping but not identical category.

But Sir Tony is right in his central assertion that there are three areas to which a UK government would need to have a strategy: how to manage Brexit; how to manage the climate change; and how to prepare for the technology shifts that are currently taking place. We have argued that the Johnson administration dropped the ball on all of these issues. The profoundly depressing aspect of the party-gate story is that it is purely tribal. This is about the same old ideological conflicts that have been tearing the Conservatives apart since the 1970s. Margaret Thatcher was the last Tory leader with an actual agenda.

We have no idea whether Boris Johnson will stay or go. We suspect that next week’s report may be decisive. If he has lied to parliament, he will go. If not, then perhaps not. He will need a simple majority of MPs on his side. There will probably be more embarrassing revelations. But when we hear newspapers hyperventilating about party whips being nasty, we think the media are hitting the end of the road. The biggest threat to Johnson is that of MPs making disastrous miscalculations, as many did during the Brexit wars. Remember Change UK? It is certainly true that Johnson is deeply unpopular right now, but MPs will have to fight for re-election at a time when the country will have move on beyond Downing Street parties. What we are seeing is that there are an awful lot of inexperienced MPs in the House of Commons, a group large enough to cause real problems for Johnson, and themselves.

If Johnson stays, we think he will change superficially, but not in substance: he may lose weight, sport a new hair cut, and engage in more diversionary tactics, like the recent assault on the BBC. If he goes, he will be replaced by someone who will look more respectable, but who will not have a strategic agenda either. We struggle to get excited about either scenario.

One of the important substantive points Sir Tony has made is that the system of taxation needs to shift away from labour and capital to other sources. Fuel duties will have to be replaced by road pricing if drivers switch to electric cars. 20th century social systems, state pensions and health care systems, are unlikely to be sustainable and optimal in this environment.

None of this plays a role in the Tory party right now. Unfortunately, the Labour Party is not focused on these issues either. For example, the pledge to get a better deal from the EU is vacuous because the EU will not compromise on the substance of the bilateral agreement with the UK just because the government changes. A customs union is still possible, but Labour is not campaigning for that now. Sir Keir Starmer is focused on Johnson, the man. We think that is a mistake too.

The plot to oust Boris Johnson is fading away: for now. We cannot rule out the possibility of further embarrassing revelations, but it is important to remember that it is extremely hard to get rid of a British prime minister with a large majority in the House of Commons. A majority of Tory MPs, around 180 of them if all attend, would have to cast a vote of no confidence in him. This is not a constructive vote as is common in some European countries. There will be no leadership challenge in the sense that the plotters can vote for another candidate at the same time. There are many MPs who for sure want to get rid of Johnson, but who distrust either Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak even more. Johnson straddles the political spectrum of the Tory party. He was with the Brexiteers, but he was never really in any camp. 

Yesterday, a Tory MP from one of a red wall constituencies deserted to Labour. His move actually reduced the chance of a successful leadership challenge. For one, the rebels are now one vote down. Secondly, Labour is visibly gaining at their expense. The longer they keep up the rebellion, the worse it will get. A rebellion constitutes an irrational act unless you have a clear alternative path.

On balance, we think it is unlikely that the Tories will get rid of Johnson, in the absence of further developments. Johnson already said he would fight off any challenge. He won’t resign just because the rebels garnered the minimum number of signatures to trigger a vote. They won’t get rid of him quietly. What we think is most likely is that the rebels will cut a political deal with Johnson, which should not be about alcohol in Downing Street, but about a political agenda. The lack of one is the real failure of the Johnson administration.

Also consider that events will intrude between now and the election date. Our lead story points to one such foreseeable event: a war in Europe. Pandemics, energy shortages, inflation, Brexit-related threats and opportunities all lurk in the background. As does the next virus. The parties will soon be forgotten.

Today Emmanuel Macron will be in Strasbourg to outline the priorities of France’s EU presidency, a grand tour de force of his vision on sovereignty, immigration, growth, ecological transition, digital policy, rule of law and defence. After the official ceremony, Macron is expected to declare himself candidate for the French presidential elections, writes Le Figaro.

Choosing his speech in Strasbourg as the launchpad for his national candidacy follows a simple calculation: Macron wants to use Europe to divide the right, and divide the electorate into pro- and anti-Europeans. The message is: On Europe, you either support it with Macron or denounce it with Marine Le Pen or Eric Zemmour. His strategy is to isolate Valérie Pécresse, with her, in his words, “neither for, nor against, quite on the contrary” attitude.

In 2017, Macron’s discourse on Europe already exploded the left, but the right still resisted. This time, Macron wants to finish the job, and is counting on the EU presidency to help him achieving this goal. Putting up the European flag at the Arc de Triomphe at the beginning of the EU presidency already triggered a polemic response from Le Pen, Zemmour and Pécresse. Macron’s party, LREM, used this controversy as a defining element of their presidential campaign, by choosing the picture of the EU flag over the Arc for the campaign material.

Macron also uses Europe to defend his anti-Covid strategy. In December, he already insisted that vaccination would not have been possible in January 2021 without the EU. It was Europe that procured, organised and produced the vaccines. On Europe, there are no half-hearted positions with Macron. He says you have to defend Europe completely and fight for corrections inside the system. And he is depicting his adversaries as hypocrites when he is warning that one cannot say:

“I like Europe, but I don’t like its legal structure. I love Europe, but the treaties are not applicable here.”

Calling out the right and its voters to take a courageous stance on Europe is Macron’s big political bet. But it is quite abstract. Will his position on Europe convince the French when their concerns over purchasing power coincide with a still unresolved energy crisis in Europe? It will be in the concrete facts of life that this position will be tested. That story has not been written yet.

Three months ahead of France's presidential elections, there are several competing personalities that aim for the limelight. The fragmented left has seen many of them. The late entry of Christiane Taubira as a new candidate complicates matters even more. Competition is also thriving on the right. Today we take a closer look at two of those, on the far right and within Emmanuel Macron's group.

Eric Zemmour has one advantage for Marine Le Pen. He makes her look more centrist. In that sense, her attempt to normalise her image has succeeded. A Kantar poll for Le Monde suggests that only 40% consider Le Pen a representative of the far right. This is a fall of 11 points since 2018. 46% see her as a patriot who represents traditional values. Le Pen is not yet seen as a president, though. Only 21% would like her to win, and her party is still seen by half of those polled as a danger for democracy.

When it comes to Zemmour, he is clearly perceived as an extreme right-winger and xenophobe. And he offers ample reason for it. He just kicked off another controversy over his remarks about the obsession with handicapped children and was condemned by the courts to a €10,000 fine for calling young immigrants thugs, murders and rapists. These remarks have their fans on the far right, but they won’t help him enlarge his voters base. The polls suggest that Zemmour lost support since his fulminant start, and is now hovering around 12%. This number may underestimate his support and he could get more at the ballot. But even with those lower rates, Zemmour could deprive Le Pen the entry into the second round. At the moment, Le Pen is running neck-and-neck against Valérie Pécresse at 17%. Pécresse has a well established party behind her and thus can count on an effective promotion to push her over the finishing line, that is if nothing comes out of the closet last-minute like it did for Francois Fillon. Le Pen now sits somewhere between Zemmour and Pécresse, and has to fight for her place more than ever before.

Another one who has to fight for his place in his political group is Edouard Philippe, the popular former prime minister of Emmanuel Macron. Now Macron refused to grant Philippe his wish to merge his party Horizon with the Agir party of former minister Franck Riester. Both are part of the majority and back Macron as presidential candidate. A merger would have given them a group in the assembly and more finances for their campaign. It would have increased their power inside the majority, which matters to shape the agenda for the parliamentary elections in June.

Macron normally does not meddle in the affairs of his majority. But this time he did. Why? Le Figaro looks at why Philippe could become a threat to Macron. First, if Macron were to win the presidential elections, this would kick off almost immediately the competition over who is to succeed him. The more powerful someone becomes inside the majority, the less control Macron has. To exert power, it would be better for Macron if his underlings compete against one another.

If Macron were to lose in April, the challenge would be even more direct. Macron himself has indicated that he aims to remain in politics, one way or the other. This would lead to a rivalry between the two men. The issue is not so much what happens now, but what happens after the presidential elections. 

We wrote last week that there was a trajectory for Boris Johnson to replaced. We still think that the odds are against it because of a fundamental asymmetry: the 360 Conservative MPs have the right to cast a vote of no-confidence, which would require 181 supporters. But they don’t control what comes next. All they can do in the second round is nominate two candidates for a final selection by the Tory party membership. Johnson straddles the party’s rival camps: the pro-business moderates and the party’s right. The latter want to make the most of the freedoms offered by Brexit.

The political columnist Matthew Parris, formerly a Tory MP himself, writes that the real arbiters of Johnson’s fate are the ideological right wing among his Commons colleagues. He said that he is close to concluding that his usefulness to them has passed, but they are not quite there yet. We think this is a correct balance of assessment. This political conflict is not about Downing Street parties. But they may give a potential excuse for a wider political realignment that could see the Tory party move further to the right. So be careful what you wish for.

Looking back, Lord Frost's resignation may make strategic sense after all. He might have left a sinking ship. If Johnson were to be replaced by his current foreign minister, Liz Truss, Lord Frost could end up as her foreign secretary, back in charge of managing relations with the EU. Truss is a much more focused politician than Johnson. A Remainer once, she has shifted gradually to the right. She is a darling of Tory party conferences. Her priority will be to make Brexit work. We keep hearing the expression of a bonfire of regulations.

Her main opponent would be Rishi Sunak, the finance minister, who we believe has the support of most MPs. We see him as a political moderate. He would most likely emerge as the winner in the first round of a leadership contest. But MPs only make a preselection. The two first-placed candidates would be put to the Tory party members. The members are unpredictable. Sunak would be a safe pair of hands, a John Major character. But Truss is popular among Tory grassroots. Parris' judgement is that the Tory centrists are less well organised than the right.

So it will be up to the Tory right to decide whether to seek the putsch now and risk a Sunak victory, or whether to keep an ineffective prime minister in his job, and wait until the right moment comes. Johnson, meanwhile, is responding with the usual deflections: an alcohol ban in Downing Street, and a debate to end the licence fee for the BBC. As though this would solve any problems.

We should remember that there is a reason why Johnson is in this job. He made a cold-blooded decision to support Brexit when he didn't believe in it, and then chose the right moment to grasp power. It will require a similar degree of ruthlessness to get rid of him. We are not seeing it yet. If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well It were done quickly, is what Shakespeare's Macbeth has to say about this. Each day that passes plays in the hands of Johnson.

Boris Johnson has not exactly had the best two months of his life. A crescendo of scandals has built up, and polling shows Labour reaching leads last seen during the austerity era of the early 2010s. But if he can make it through this series of crises, which we think he will, he’ll be jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Or rather, into the lack of fire. His problem will be a looming, energy-induced cost of living crisis. Emily Pinchbeck, the CEO of Energy UK, said last month that the firm expected consumer energy prices to rise by 45-50% in the spring. Should the government socialise the cost of that price hike, the estimate is that it would cost £20bn a year. To put that into perspective, the vaunted tax rise to provide surplus funding to the NHS and social care will aim to generate £12bn a year.

Some of this, of course, is not of the government’s own doing. Johnson and Rishi Sunak can point to global factors shaping the energy crisis. Pointing out that there was a crisis more or less everywhere was the government’s tactic during the petrol shortages that the UK experienced in September. It worked for them then.

But this is a more serious one. And the problem is that much of it has been caused by the policies of this government, and previous Conservative governments. First off, there’s the state of the energy market in the UK. Britain has been hit by a series of supplier failures because of two countervailing policies.

One of them is market liberalisation, a hallmark of the Cameron-Osborne years. This broke the dominance of the so-called big six energy suppliers in the UK, reducing their market share from 100% to 70%. But it also let to an ugly trend from a consumer perspective. Suppliers would lure customers in using cheap rates, and then jack up the price when they stayed longer. The only way anyone could get a reasonable deal was by constantly switching.

To stop firms from taking advantage of consumers like this, Theresa May’s government introduced a price cap, reviewable every six months, in January 2019. The last time the price cap was re-set, in August 2021, it rose by 12%, to £1277pa. This is, in normal times, a pretty significant rise, but it is not much compared to how much wholesale energy costs have risen since.

Both policies work in good times, when wholesale prices are relatively low. When they’re not, the lag causes problems for energy firms. They will buy energy on a shorter-term basis, taking the hit the longer time it takes for the cap to catch up. If they haven’t hedged properly, then you have a series of unviable smaller suppliers.

Then there is Brexit. When leaving the EU, the UK also left its internal energy market. Now, they no longer benefit from the EU’s market coupling mechanism, which allows buyers to simultaneously book day-ahead country-to-country interconnector capacity and prices. British buyers have to do both separately, reducing efficiency.

Key dates to watch out for are 7 February, when Ofgem, the British energy regulator, will announce the next price cap, and April, when the government has promised a response. But the problem will be how to pay for it. Amidst the spectre of rising interest rates, the UK also has to foot the bill for repairing services, like healthcare, social care, and education, that have been battered by the pandemic.

To manage the outlay, there will either need to be a tax hike, or more debt. Either, or both, will put Johnson into conflict with the right-wingers in his party. We think this is a more serious issue for him than bring-your-own-booze garden parties.

The stand-off between the EU and Poland is about to get worse, since Poland is not paying its fines, and the EU is getting ready to withhold budget payments. The European Court of Justice imposed fines on the Polish administration in two cases. One is a €1m-per-day fine for not suspending the disciplinary chamber of the Polish supreme court. The other is a €500,000-per-day fine for not closing down its Turow lignite mine, which the Czech Republic says is draining water reserves from the border region.

January 10 marked a deadline for Poland to inform the European Commission of when and how exactly it plans to dismantle the disciplinary chamber. In the absence of evidence that Poland has fully complied with the CJEU ruling from July, the Commission will proceed to send the first request for payment. Counting from 3 November last year, when Poland was officially notified, the claim has added up to around €70m by now. The Commission can decide over deadlines and procedures. The EU is already withholding Poland’s request for €36bn from the EU recovery fund over rule-of-law concerns. And they could withhold other EU budget payments if Poland refuses to pay the fine.

This is what is about to happen in the second case, over the Turow mine. The Polish government has shown no inclination to pay those fines nor to close the mine. The Commission is now preparing to withhold payouts from the EU budget for non-payment of fines, a measure which could enter into force within days or weeks. The total amount owed in this case at the moment is at €50m.

A new candidate has entered the race for the French presidential election. Gaspard Koenig, philosopher, editorialist and founder of the think tank Generation Libre, decided to put his hat in the ring with a single aim: simplifying the laws and thus the lives of French citizens. As a staunch defender of individual freedom, Koenig believes that most problems in citizens' daily lives are related to rules and norms that defy common sense and restrain the people to do what they want. One of his ideas is to divide by 100 the number of norms and laws.

Koenig certainly knows how to expose the absurdities of modern life. In his latest column for Les Echos, he points out the inconsistencies of the new Omicron rules: the French are to wear masks outside all the time. They are allowed to take them off inside when drinking or eating in a restaurant or café, but are not allowed to drink even a sip when travelling on the train even for long 6h journeys. Joggers are exempted outdoors, but what about smokers? Dance clubs have been closed down, while taking the fully packed train to work is still okay.

The fate of bad laws is that they will see the addition of some small amendments and exceptions, ending in an avalanche of new rules and restrictions. It would be wrong to think that these micro-hassles are benign, says Koenig. By introducing almost permanent legal insecurity, they foster an anxiety-provoking relationship between the population and the police. By making the law a simple symbolic instrument, they actually help to undermine the rule of law, he argues. Over time, people get accustomed to renouncing their freedoms, and end up believing that anything that is not allowed is prohibited.

It also invites disobedience. Inapplicable laws remain unapplied. People will continue to get their drink at the bar, and will sip their water in the toilets on the train. Human dignity does not respect, or pretend to respect, instructions that are contrary to common sense.

No doubt, Koenig has no chance of getting close to the top in this election race, but his message of simplification might catch on. Since the pandemic, the French have been the most administered, controlled, regulated, and monitored of all. But will the political class follow suit? Nicolas Beytout has his doubts, even if he likes Koenig’s idea. The people took comfort in their normative protection by the state. No one really read the fine print of the obligations that come with accepting state aid. No one has even an idea of an alternative plan for how to survive this pandemic. The next president will not be the one to manage the pandemic, but to help people get on with their lives. What will happen to those laws and norms? More amendments and exceptions? Or up into the bin? There is clearly a case for simplification at the horizon.

The Guardian had a good discussion about what happened to the end-of-theory predictions from the first decade of this century. They largely held up, with some nuances. The basic idea is that statistical methods, based on large data volumes, would gradually supplant structural theoretical models in natural and social sciences. The article does not mention economic models, which is our main concern here. But we see this happening too.

One of most egregious cases of where theoretical models fail is inflation forecasting. As we keep writing, they have no hope in hell of capturing underlying trends because they exclude too many interlocking factors, and because they do not take account of structural societal shifts. The ECB’s inflation forecast has been so appalling that it would have been beaten not only by the proverbial dart-throwing monkey but probably even by astrologers. This is for the simple reason that the model is biased towards a return of inflation back towards the status quo. Any method without such a bias will outperform it. The rise of modern statistical tools has also started to impact economic policy making and economic research. We would expect central banks and governments of the future to hire more data analysts and statisticians and fewer paper-writing economists.

We have also witnessed the theory-versus-statistics debate in our own line of work. As observers of European media, we have been relying on translation services, without which we would not have been able to read Finnish or Greek newspapers. When we started 15 years ago, the world of translation software was dominated by services using structural linguistic models. The linguists scoffed at the statistical translation techniques developed by Google and others at the time. Statistical translation ended up winning the battle. Things in life that are too complex and too chaotic to be subjected to linear structural models. Language is one of them.

The issue is not only that computers are better at finding relationships between data than humans. Perhaps the bigger issue is their lack of cognitive biases. We have never met an economist who admits that his or her framework is wrong on the grounds that it is not supported by empirical. When a computer errs, its head does not turn red. The big advancements of the last decade is deep learning. It does not necessarily replace all theory, as it did in the case of translation. In some cases it might complement theory, for example in medicine. The more beliefs creep into your model, the more prone your profession is to meet the same fate as the first generation of translation modellers. If you believe that money and debt are the same thing, the central premise of modern monetary theory, no data will ever get you out of this belief system. Macroeconomics in particular is closer to language translation where error correction is important, as opposed to areas where scientists are constantly updating their understanding of reality.