What a weekend.
On Saturday, France retained the Six Nations title with a last-kick penalty from Thomas Ramos, 48-46 against England. Back-to-back champions. Their 20th title. Galthié’s third. Pure theatre from start to finish.
For the uninitiated: the Six Nations is rugby union’s oldest international championship. It started in 1883 as the Home Nations Championship, with England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. France joined in 1910. Italy came in 2000, and the tournament became what it is today.
The following day, France held the first round of its municipal elections. I’m writing from Bangkok, late on Sunday evening, with no results in front of me yet. But I’ve followed the campaign closely. And it has been deeply dispiriting.
The tone isn’t disagreement. It isn’t debate. It’s hatred. Personal, relentless, corrosive. Parties tearing at each other not over ideas, but over their right to exist at all.
Rugby teaches something different. You can spend 80 minutes trying to dismantle your opponents, leave everything on the pitch, and then sit down with them after the final whistle. You respect the opposition. That’s not sentiment. It’s a code. It’s what holds the game together.
French politics seems to have lost that code entirely.
I know something about this world, briefly and at a very different scale. A few months ago I was appointed local representative for Les Républicains here in Thailand. It lasted weeks. I resigned. When a party leader cannot hold his own ranks together, the question that follows is unavoidable: what exactly are you representing? If you can’t lead a party, you can’t lead a country. Staying would have been dishonest.
In rugby, the captain earns authority through action. The team follows because trust has been built over time. You don’t follow a captain who’s lost the dressing room.
But what strikes me most about this campaign isn’t just the hostility. It’s the emptiness behind it.
The debate has been reduced to two subjects: immigration and the retirement age. That’s it. Two themes endlessly recycled, wielded as weapons by every side, without anyone ever following the argument through to its conclusion.
And meanwhile, nobody is talking about actually governing. No serious discussion about the structure of the state. No debate about where spending could be reduced or made more efficient. The conversation about tax goes in one direction only: more. Always more. But the question nobody wants to ask is a simple one: where does the money go, and are we spending it well?
France has one of the highest ratios of public spending to GDP in the developed world. That’s not a political opinion. It’s a fact. And yet not a single candidate seems willing to propose a genuine reform of how the state spends. It’s far easier to point at an enemy than to make difficult choices.
A captain who builds a game plan around hatred of the opposition, without ever developing actual plays, doesn’t win matches. He loses the dressing room.
France deserves better than that.