I enjoy writing about French politics about as much as you like reading about French politics. Take that however you want.

If you’re French and you’re picking up some sarcastic condescension, allow me to apologize. It’s not French politics in general that foreigners find infernally annoying, it’s French parliamentary politics in the back-half of Emmanuel Macron’s second presidential term.

To call the last two or so years “vexatious” on the French legislative front would be far too kind. Long story short, Macron can’t stand up a government. Or, more accurately, he can’t keep a government stood up, and that’s preventing France from addressing what, by now, are desperately urgent fiscal concerns.

Markets — and it’s not just markets — have taken to calling France “the new Italy.” There are a lot of contexts in which you might delight in being compared to the Italians. Fiscal management, budget rectitude and political turnover aren’t among them.

If we’re honest, Macron’s tenure is itself untenable and has been for quite a while. But he’s an adroit politician. Laugh as you might, but he really is. He’s not easily outmaneuvered.

Last summer, when elections for the EU parliament revealed a larger-than-expected surge in support for the French far-right, Macron rolled the dice on a parliamentary snap vote. The idea, in a nutshell, was to call the French electorate’s bluff. Like this: “Ok, so you’ll put more of Marine Le Pen’s disciples in Brussels, but will you give over the (our) domestic legislature to the far-right?”

Macron’s gamble both worked and didn’t. Le Pen’s National Rally gained a lot of seats, but that was a foregone conclusion. What RN didn’t get was a governing majority. Thanks to coordination among the French left, Le Pen was denied the legislative dominance she sought in the second round of the snap vote.

So, the “cordon sanitaire” held, but as a result, Macron ended up partially beholden to the French left. It was an “out of the frying pan, into the fire” scenario. Le Pen, meanwhile, emerged with the next best thing to an outright majority: Veto power, which she and protégé Jordan Bardella subsequently held over the legislative process like a Sword of Damocles.

That dynamic (and a contentious relationship with the left) doomed Michel Barnier, who has the dubious distinction of being the shortest-serving premier in the history of the Fifth Republic, having lost a no confidence vote in December a mere three months after being appointed by Macron.

Fast forward nine months and Barnier’s replacement, Francois Bayrou, likewise lost a no confidence vote, albeit in more dignified fashion.

Without getting into the tedium, Bayrou thought it important to address the budget concerns which continue to plague France. “All the challenges we face come down to one urgent question: Controlling our spending and our excessive debt,” he declared Monday.

The vote wasn’t dramatic. Bayrou knew he was done. Here’s a man arguing for austerity in a chamber dominated overwhelmingly by right-wing populists and leftists. Budget discipline hasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell in such a place.

There are no good options for Macron, who’ll now have to choose yet another premier, the fifth in less than two years. Whoever it is won’t have any better chance than Bayrou or Barnier of addressing France’s fiscal emergency and remember: This does matter in France, where a “Greek-style” debt crisis is possible, although not likely. France isn’t a monetary sovereign. They don’t issue their own currency. Fiscal discipline matters.

More worrying, in my opinion anyway, than the prospect of a financial crisis in France (the ECB would bail them out) is the intractability of the country’s crisis of government. The legislature’s frozen. Macron’s a fine statesman and, again, a gifted politician, but you can’t just carry on with the legislative body in a state of near total paralysis.

That’s the sort of willful negligence that fuels voter disaffection with the political center, thereby increasing the odds that someone unpalatably hostile to the liberal democratic Western political order ends up in The Élysée.

As Bayrou’s government fell, an appellate court in Paris said it’ll hear an expedited appeal of the embezzlement charges which, if not overturned, could keep Le Pen off the presidential ballot in 2027. A ruling’s expected next summer.

There were calls for Macron to resign on Monday. He won’t. He could, however, call another snap parliamentary vote. The problem with that’s straightforward: RN would probably gain even more seats. Le Pen says it’s the right thing to do — “an institutional lever to break the deadlock and enable democracy to function,” as she put it.

Notably, the March court ruling against Le Pen presumably means she couldn’t run to retain her seat in a snap election. That’s a sacrifice she’s willing to make. Particularly considering what I believe are uncomfortably high odds that she’ll ultimately (finally) become president in less than two years’ time.