France’s crisis is not that Marine Le Pen might win; it is that no elected coalition has put a settlement on the table saying who pays, what changes, and what the state will enforce. Joseph C. Sternberg’s Wall Street Journal op-ed, Don’t Assume Marine Le Pen Can Save France, argues that the riots may improve Le Pen’s odds by exposing France’s social and fiscal rot, but that a win next spring would bring only procedural power: she might use state force and pass a budget, yet lack the state capacity and political consent for an immigration overhaul, while her law-and-order campaign sidesteps the fiscal crisis. His answer is a cultural reordering forced by markets, disorder, or both. That is the wrong sequence. It is also a séance in which the ECB, the French bond market, and the street are supposed to produce a miraculous consensus. Sternberg’s own admissions have already broken the séance.
He is right about one narrow thing. A president can win without a parliamentary coalition, administrative capacity, or public consent. State capacity is not a vibe. A statute without personnel, documents, enforcement, and courts is ink. Le Pen may fail to assemble those things. That is a serious risk. It is not proof that elections cannot begin the work of building them.
I had to read the central contradiction twice. Not because it was subtle. Because it had eaten its own tail. If a Le Pen mandate could clear a budget President Emmanuel Macron has been unable to pass, electoral power is not merely procedural. It is enough to make Parliament assign responsibility for a settlement. The same majority that taxes and spends can pass immigration rules. The same voters who reject the settlement can replace the government next time. Opposition does not need unanimity. It needs ballots.
Sternberg wants the political effect of an election without the exposure of electoral accountability. That is not realism. It is a wish.
Now take the retirement age. Sternberg’s strongest objection is that lowering it from 62 to as young as 60 cannot repair public finances unless something else changes. Correct. But it is not the opposite of fiscal reform. For a healthy worker in continuous employment, working from 60 to 62 adds two years of contributions and removes two years of pension payments, which can lower the system’s net cost. For people in arduous work, for caregivers, and for workers near 60 who cannot keep working, the policy needs pension credits, income support, and real jobs. The settlement is distributional. It is not magic, and it is not impossible.
If the retirement age falls but the offsets do not, government must borrow more, raise taxes, or cut spending elsewhere. The election does not erase that arithmetic. It forces the candidate to stop hiding it. Before the votes are cast, Le Pen must say which taxes rise, which benefits shrink, and which immigration rules change. The coalition then decides who bears the first cost. Voters decide whether they will accept it. If they reject it, they reject her program. If they accept it, she has the votes to govern.
If Le Pen wins, refuses to put the costs on the table, and watches her coalition collapse, that is evidence against her program—not against the possibility of electoral change. If she wins and carries both an enforceable immigration rulebook and a credible budget, she will have done what the op-ed says an election cannot do: assign responsibility before the emergency arrives. The election is where a leader must make the hard choice.
The first-mover problem is real. Whoever proposes the first cut gets punished. But Sternberg makes it sound permanent when it is political. Elections do not abolish punishment; they move it from the street to the next ballot. A candidate cannot hide the first bill and then demand trust. A coalition that publishes the terms can be rewarded in one election and removed in the next. That is not consensus. That is accountability with a clock.
France is waiting for someone to repair the boiler before anyone turns on the water. Everyone wants a working boiler and no cold morning. An election can end that stalemate.
On immigration, Sternberg asks whether millions of French who will not vote for Le Pen have the stomach to uproot migrant communities wholesale. The question smuggles unanimity into representative government. People who oppose the program have votes, opposition parties, and another election day. If the program is impossible to enact, it will fail. If a parliamentary majority carries it and an enforcement plan exists, the opposition’s refusal to consent does not veto it.
Immigration rules have to cover entry, work, language, legal status, and removal. They have to be clear enough to enforce. Democracy is not unanimous happiness. It is a way to decide who governs and make that government answerable. Sternberg grants a majority enough power over the budget and then asks that power to vanish when inconvenient rules need adoption. That is special pleading.
The riots do not prove Le Pen is right. They prove France is out of time. They do not create a new rule saying nobody may act until the streets explode. Parliament talks. The street starts talking louder. A riot prices delay. It does not write the budget.
Markets can do the same thing. In Sternberg’s own scenario, investors price French risk higher, French borrowing costs rise, French assets can be bought cheaply, and investors expect the European Central Bank to cushion the shock. All true. But waiting has a price. Every €100 billion of French debt at one additional percentage point costs €1 billion a year. Eurozone membership makes a French default harder; it makes delay more expensive, not less. The ECB can cushion borrowing conditions. It cannot write France’s budget or make investors indifferent to French politics.
Markets can force the first sacrifice. They do not make it democratic. They choose for the country, at a higher price.
France should build a governing coalition, not a personality cult or an emergency coalition. If Le Pen wins, she should use her mandate to assemble the institutional alternative before the first budget and the first immigration vote.
Start with the budget authority. France’s Ministry of Economy and Finance should table the finance bill and a medium-term debt plan. A parliamentary majority must carry the votes. The president must promulgate the result. That majority must include fiscal reformers and legislators capable of surviving the next election—not a presidential retinue.
Then build a social-insurance compact with the unions and employer associations before Parliament votes. The retirement age can move toward 60 where people can realistically keep working. Workers in arduous occupations and unpaid caregivers need credits. The minimum pension and unemployment support cannot become the balancing item in the budget. Broader contributions and progressive taxes must finance current outlays; automatic enrollment in supplementary pensions can build future capital. Sectoral bargaining should make employers share the adjustment instead of shifting it onto low-wage workers, while the government protects the floor and the Assembly authorizes the final law.
That is social democracy without the fireworks: collective bargaining, shared sacrifice, social insurance held in common, and democratic authorization. France’s fragmented parties, euro constraints, and habit of postponing bargains make this harder here. Harder is not impossible. It is what institution-building means.
Order is part of the same settlement, not a campaign slogan against it. The enforcement machinery must be specified. The Interior Ministry sets the immigration rules. Border services administer entry and removal procedures. Prefects coordinate. Mayors and local police handle daily enforcement. Prosecutors and courts provide due process. Each authority needs money, personnel, records, and a clear assignment. A law without those things is ink. A street forced to enforce because the state cannot is not order. It is coercion without law.
The next election can make a government possible. Le Pen is neither the cause of France’s crisis nor a guarantee that it will end. The cause is a fiscal and political deadlock: a state asks for sacrifice while its defenders call delay stability. If Sternberg believes electoral accountability cannot break the first-mover problem, he owes France a precise account of how any government ever can. Rule that out, or retract the categorical claim.
France does not need unanimous consent to change a budget. It needs a government that can make one pass and live with the result. It needs unions and employers bargaining over what workers can bear, a public authority protecting the social-insurance floor, and immigration rules backed by enforcement rather than mood. It needs the first sacrifice placed on the table before the market or the street forces it.
Le Pen can win the vote. France must build the settlement. Otherwise the bond market writes the budget and the street writes the law. A parliament can prevent that. It must start by acting like one.