After the relief, the confusion. France pulled back from the brink on July 7th when it rejected Marine Le Pen’s hard right at a final parliamentary vote. The electorate instead relegated her alliance to third place, and returned a hung parliament in which no bloc is close to holding a majority. But this has plunged France into new uncertainty. “Now what do we do?” asked the front page of Le Parisien, a daily paper, above a photo of a perplexed-looking President Emmanuel Macron.

In other European countries, the response is simple: rival parties sit down to hammer out a coalition agreement. But France has a weak culture of political compromise. The country has entered a period of bluff, posture, muddle and manoeuvring while it tries to work out who can govern.