Pity young Macron, discovering how complicated it is being President of France…

Spare a thought for poor President Macron of France. He really is up against it and it’s not fair.

Okay, okay. Joke. Macron – who was forced last week to abandon his skiing holiday as Paris burned – does not deserve a jot, still less a scintilla, of our sympathy. He has lost the confidence of French voters, not just the gilets-jaunes and their supporters, while trying to profit directly from Brexit to a degree that is unseemly and persisting with a 1970s view of European integration that makes him sound like a bizarro Jeremy Corbyn.

But, all that said – and I will be saying it again shortly – he is continuing to fight his corner and is still, in spite of everything, hoping to persuade French voters that they made the right choice in 2017 and should confirm him as President for a second term in 2022.

His poll numbers, which dipped perilously low three months ago, to the extent that only his wife and his prime minister replied Yes when asked if he was the right man to take France forward, ticked up significantly in February only to wobble again this month. In short, the President’s trial by jury is set to continue for months to come. His only hope of beating the charge that he is both arrogant and incompetent, and out of touch with the electorate, is for him to defeat the gilets-jaunes’ special forces, the Casseurs (Wreckers), who for the last 18 weeks have treated the Champs-Élysée as an ideological (and actual) battleground.

These Ultras, who seem able to operate at will, are filmed every Saturday smashing the windows of banks and luxury boutiques, pillaging shops and daubing walls with anarchist slogans. Last time out, the police seemed to have lost interest. They could hardly summon the energy to beat anyone up. One uniformed officer was even videoed stealing Paris St Germain football shirts from a looted store. The most famous avenue in the world, renowned for its elegance, faux exclusivity and rip-off prices, is being dismantled in weekly installments by Maoist-style hooligans bent on a revolution that while it won’t succeed could cause serious damage to the delicate balance between hard-Left and bourgeois Right that has marked Paris down the centuries.

Immense and lasting damage is being done to France’s image. Bankers and retailers are outraged. The police and CRS are exhausted – so much so that Macron this week sacked the prefect of police of Paris for failing in his most important task, the maintenance of public order and protection of life and property.

While the gilets-jaunes across the country have largely given up the fight (there were just 32,000 of them on the streets last weekend out of a population of 66 million), the hard core have redoubled their efforts, working to a weekly timetable that, one imagines, is supposed to end with Macron’s defenestration from the Élysée Palace and his replacement by a suitable character out of Les Misérables.

But – and this is where things get complicated – the people of France, while they might not be in sympathy with Macron, do at least acknowledge that the Ultras are as much a threat to their way of life as to the President’s political survival. The issue has become how to suppress those responsible for so much wanton destruction without transforming them into martyrs. Every police charge, every misfired rubber bullet, is evinced as evidence that France has become a police state. Yet every time another shop window is smashed or a car overturned and burnt, the cry goes up, What is Macron doing to restore peace? Where is the smack of firm government?

Meanwhile – and this is where things get even more complicated – the President is multi-tasking. He is not just responsible for national security, he must also address his country’s stubbornly long unemployment lines, boost economic growth (currently in the doldrums), confront customs officials on strike over the demands of Brexit; respond coherently to Brexit itself and ­–­ last but not least – somehow keep his European integrationist impulse consistent with the centrifugal forces threatening to tear the EU apart.

If he has had any good fortune in all of this, it is that his extremist rivals, to the Left and Right, are out of ideas and banging away at the same old drums. With the once-mighty Socialist Party in meltdown and the Conservatives wandering zombie-like around the purlieus of the National Assembly, Macron’s La République En Marche party, fabricated from discarded pieces of political Lego, remains for the moment in charge.

The big test will come in May with the elections – with or without the British – to the European Parliament. Macron will not be anticipating a strong showing, but if En Marche ends up swamped by a populist tide, his job will become that much harder. To switch metaphors, if he is currently piloting an airliner through heavy and persistent turbulence, he may shortly face the additional problem of a failed engine and jammed landing gear.

Would it all have been different if someone else had been in charge? Possibly. One could ask the same question about Theresa May and Brexit. Would Boris Johnson, in her place, have achieved a smooth and orderly departure from the European Union? I think not. Ditto, with knobs on, the leaders of the Labour Party. Sometimes, issues are so complex and pressing that only a united people, or parliament, can take the necessary steps. We have seen what competing obsessions, marked by splits, have led to in the UK. Now we are seeing them in France. With Italy spinning its wheels, the East bloc in revolt and Germany leaderless and stalled, Europe is in a bad place. Probably not the best time for Macron to have waxed his skis.