Ankur Desai

We have seen the deployment of the military, the militarization of law enforcement in major cities that will actually be hosting the World Cup.

They used to raise funds for their own benefit.

Power having leached away from President Macron in that disastrous election of his 18 months ago, it's now here in the Assemblée Nationale, the Parliament, that politics in France is being played out.

Basically, MPs, parliamentarians have discovered that they now have the power to set the rules, to make the laws, to pass the budget, to govern the country, in effect.

The trouble is they're making a total hash of it.

The pinnacle of the absurd came with a vote on the budget for next year, rather an important vote, you might think, in which not just the opposition benches, but the government benches too, voted against.

Yes, every single MP, including the Macronites, voting against their own budget.

Well, actually, there was one vote for Harold Ewart, an independent and, incidentally, very anglophile MP.

Essentially, what's happening is that the beleaguered Prime Minister, Sébastien Le Corneau, has made a deal with the socialists.

They've then inserted amendments into the budget, like the suspension of Macron's famous pension reform, which the centre and right then find that they can't stomach.

Another item on the left's wish list is a wealth tax.

I'm an economist and I'm the director.

The tax the left would like is named after this man, the Zuckman tax.

Very popular in the country, it would impose a minimum of 2% on people with wealth of more than 100 million euros.

To stop the very rich simply moving abroad, France would continue to claim tax on them extraterritorially, a bit like the way the United States taxes its citizens wherever they live in the world.

You have to pay a minimum.

The reason all this matters is that the state of French public finances is even worse than the UK's.

Alain Manc has advised French presidents since François Mitterrand.

He says being in the euro has been a mixed blessing because the shield it provides has exempted France from making the necessary economic reforms.

And what he fears now is the arrival of the populists, the hard right, Marine Le Pen.