The Olympics may – just – have saved Macron’s presidency

But more likely everyday political reality will once more catch up with him

As the Paris 2024 Olympics comes to a close tomorrow, Emmanuel Macron is entitled to a smug grin or three. The grandiose, never seen before city-wide Games he micromanaged from the start were expected to be a shambles. They weren’t. Two weeks later, the French are still giddy about it all: the medals, the sights, the balloon-lifted blaze of the Olympic flame in the sky. People shared memes of the best headline of them all, the Wall Street Journal’s “Even the French cannot find anything to complain about”.
Yes, there was moaning and grumbling over the off-the-wall Opening Ceremony. It had the good (the silver horse galloping down the Seine, The Assassin’s Creed flame carrier jumping from roof to roof to the Louvre’s galleries, Céline Dion belting out Piaf from the Eiffel Tower), the bad (Lady Gaga doing cabaret in impeccable French not in the warm intimacy of a dark, smoky room, but marooned somewhere in the empty stone recess of a lower rive droite quay) and the box-of-frogs-mad moments (yes, that Last Supper, or Bacchanalia, with the drag queens and Dionysus as a simpering, well-fed Smurf, positioned in the exact place of the roast boar in the village banquet at the end of every Astérix adventure!)
But people in France – an astonishing 90 percent – loved it. The cheesiness, the Cyrano-sized crazy hubris, and even the rain was not a nuisance but a feature. The bare-headed Keir Starmer in a sea of plastic macs gained instant hero recognition from a people who just an hour beforehand were unlikely to have recognised him. 
This was after two months of an absurdist political sequence, which was punctuated by bouts of meaningless voting. It was also in the wake of murmurings of excessive spending over the Games while France’s national debt has passed the three trillion euros mark, and of impossible security challenges endangering hundreds of thousands of spectators. It all appeared to be the last throw of the dice by an attention-seeking juvenile President. 
And then it all miraculously came together. Everything worked – the Métro, the ticket offices, the glorious fan zones, the friendly gendarmes and bus drivers, the sheer happiness of it all. It helped that the Games had hitherto earned such a bad rap that Paris emptied itself of its natives as well as any kind of tourist save the sports fans. Hotels and restaurants were supposed to be coining it; they are, in the best of cases, half empty. When the National Court of Accounts delivers its verdict in a year or two, we will know how much money was lost in the venture.
Yet in terms of soft power France has accrued world-sized goodwill, of the best kind: a nation that supported her athletes without jingoism but with performance-enhancing enthusiasm. (It is fascinating that the France Insoumise Mélenchonista MPs, still wailing that the president must name the total unknown énarque they picked as PM, have failed to produce any social media posts, tweets or reels congratulating anyone in the Olympics. Battening on fear, anger and pessimism, they hate the possibility of a cheerful nation.)
On Monday, France will wake up to pick up the political threads. With his three-week-campaign snap election Emmanuel Macron crafted a speeded-up reality with the aim of wrong-footing everyone. He did, but at a cost. The only organised force were LFI’s Leninists, who, over a single night, rammed a Maduro-worthy common platform that made roadkill of their Greens and Socialists allies despite the LFI having fewer MPs. 
By forcing his departing PM Gabriel Attal to stay on with an entire caretaker cabinet during the Games and perhaps even the Paralympics, scheduled to end on September 8 2024, Macron slowed down the political pace with the hopes of the political landscape altering again.
Elated by his Olympics “win”, he believes he can transform the situation. The odds are that like the Olympic flame balloon tomorrow, he will come down to earth deflated.