France’s President Emmanuel Macron is following in the footsteps of his predecessor in that he is scoring lower and lower on the popularity polls. A man from nowhere, whose only task was to stop Marine Le Pen from winning, is continuing the policy pursued by his puppet masters, and he cannot but comply. The measures that he took or which he had been advised to take encountered popular resistance. It remains a matter of time before we learn whether the Yellow Vests movement is a spontaneous one, or a manifestation of the power struggle that is splitting the French elites, or external interference – Russian or American.

The Old Continent’s problems have merely been allayed for a time, and as such they are like a ticking bomb only waiting for favourable circumstances to go off. The Quantitative Easing programme that was implemented a few years ago clearly shows that Europe is depriving itself of one of the most important economic instruments which is money because money printed at will cannot properly be called money. If we add to this the demographic collapse and the attendant emergence of warring factions among the member states who roughly fall into two groups of those which want and those which refuse to accept Third World immigrants, we get Europe’s most representative selfie and this portrait looks bleak.

We don’t know which of the many tectonic plates – political, economic, demographic – and where will clash with the fiercest impetus but we know that the resultant earthquake is likely to sweep governments and disrupt the whole current balance of powers. Neither Russia, China nor the United States are or will be standing idle by. They will take full advantage of any opportunity which a weakened Europe will offer them on a silver platter in order to broaden their influence (in the case of Washington and Moscow) or to strengthen their foothold (especially in the case of Beijing).