It has been a strange year so far in France. The country is beset by internal problems. Violent crime is soaring, drug traffcking is rife, the economy is stalling, the country’s debts mounting and the farmers revolting.
Yet these all seem secondary issues for President Emmanuel Macron. His focus is societal. First, his government inscribed the guaranteed access to abortion in its constitution, an event celebrated with much fanfare at which Macron was prominent. It was performative politics at its worst, a pointless gesture in a country where abortion rights are not in jeopardy.
He has also made it known that he wants to enshrine into French law the notion of “consent”. Currently in French law, the definition of rape includes the notions of “violence, coercion, threat or surprise”, but doesn’t mention “consent”.
The third issue is the most significant, and certainly the most controversial. In an interview with two newspapers on 10 March, Macron announced that a bill on assisted dying will soon be presented to parliament.
It’s a question he has been mulling since 2022, the year he discussed it with Pope Francis. “Does my death belong to me?” he asked reporters after his papal audience. “It is a daunting question. I am not sure I have the answer.”
A few days before Macron’s visit to the Vatican, Pope Francis informed a group of French officials that he hoped any debate in France could “be done, truthfully, to accompany life until its natural end”.
The president told the French newspapers this month what he had told the Pope in 2022: that he disapproves of the terms “assisted suicide” and “euthanasia”. For him, assisted dying is more palatable because the patient’s consent is fundamental and there must be “precise criteria”.
The newspapers to whom Macron gave the interview were Libération, the French equivalent of the Guardian, and La Croix, a Catholic publication.
In an editorial, the director of La Croix, Anne Ponce, expressed her reservations: “The end of life is not just an individual matter, it is also a societal one,” she wrote. “Legalising active assistance in dying is intended to introduce personal freedom, but it could in fact impose a heavy social injunction on the most vulnerable…So, yes, concern and alarm. Fraternity would be better placed in helping people to live than in helping them to die.”
The lack of palliative care in France has been a political issue for more than a decade, and yet despite the promises of politicians it remains a neglected medical sector. Today, only a quarter of France has adequate palliative care, with 26 out of 96 departments going without.
Some of Macron’s critics, therefore, regard the assisted dying bill as a cynical political manoeuvre to compensate for France’s poor palliative care.
Others see it as more shameless electioneering by Macron ahead of June’s crucial European elections. The polls are predicting a crushing victory for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, whose focus on the cost of living crisis, mass immigration and violent crime resonates with the electorate. Macron is incapable (and unwilling) to address these issues, so instead his strategy is to demonise his right-wing adversaries.
This explains his recent belligerence towards Vladimir Putin – even raising the possibility of deploying ground troops to Ukraine. Le Pen visited Putin in Moscow in 2017 and, prior to the war in Ukraine, had spoken warmly of the Russian president. Macron’s prime minister, Gabriel Attal, recently accused her party of being Putin’s fifth column in France.
It is also why after two years of avoiding the question of assisted dying, Macron has suddenly sprung it on the French. As La Croix remarked, the president is “pandering to the left wing of his majority and public opinion with the European elections looming”. The debate on the bill will start on 27 May and end a few days later, just before voting opens on 9 June. Le Pen has accused Macron of “scandalous” politicking.
Macron’s calculation is that assisted dying is an issue that will boost his standing with “progressives”. But many commentators in France predict that his strategy will backfire; the majority opinion is opposed to Macron’s war-mongering, viewing it as dangerous rhetoric from the first president of the Fifth Republic never to have served in the military.
As for assisted dying, it is much more of a personal choice than a political issue, as Le Pen said 18 months ago when the possibility of a bill was first raised. She said that it was an “intimate” issue that should be decided by the people in a referendum; she herself is opposed to any form of assisted dying.
Most French Catholics are of the same opinion, and their anger was eloquently expressed in a recent interview by Mgr Matthieu Rougé, the Bishop of Nanterre.
Referencing Macron’s 2017 vision of transforming France into a nation of “startup” entrepreneurs and techie whizz-kids, the bishop said: “One gets the impression that, in the start-up nation, non-productive people no longer have the right to exist.”
Gavin Mortimer is a freelance journalist.
This article originally appeared in the April 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click here.
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