Macron and ‘Macronism’ aren’t finished yet

The disappointment which greeted the far-Right with France’s parliamentary election results on July 7 has been hailed as a victory for the country’s progressive Left. Supporters of Marine Le Pen and her young National Rally president Jordan Bardella have proclaimed that the victory of their party will be only a matter of time. The equally vicious supporters of the France Unbowed leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon have placed their role in the victorious New Popular Front grouping at the centre of its success. For Bardella, fear of Mélenchon is his best asset; for the far-Left, the party of Le Pen is the glue which holds together their place in the mismatch of the French left. The confused left-wing coalition which has won spans groups from the populist France Unbowed to Macron’s own Ensemble party. The long political vacation means that the crisis of the President’s own making will lie unresolved until after the nation’s totemic Olympics. 

The true result for France is that neither extreme has won, and Emmanuel Macron is still liking the look of his enemies divided and his power intact. The frailty of prospective coalitions and the mismatched governments touted by commentators will not be able to dispel the power of the two extremes. The beleaguered president may in fact stay fairly confident that his government will be the only constant. 

This is not to say that the New Popular Front is badly named. Amid a quiet town centre in Rochefort near the west coast of France on Friday last week, the prolonged chanting of the NFP rally made its way round the streets with a crowd both young and old. Their message was not only one of opposition to the National Rally, but was also based on a reversion to the social support system which Macron has dismantled: lowering the pension age, wealth taxes, and tying wages to inflation. 

“Ignore them”, I was told by one townsman – a retired Anglophile French Army general, more inclined to Le Pen’s populist Right. The Left’s unholy coalition of radical firebrands and centrist social democrats certainly didn’t convince one resident of nearby La Rochelle either. Many centrist voters highly averse to the National Front will nevertheless cite the Left’s economic and social policies as unrealistic throwbacks for a country still beset by a large budget deficit and rising national debt. The parties of the NFP together gained a wide spectrum of voters in the election. But as a single political unit they could claim much less popular support. Even the pages of the centre-Left Le Monde, which still dominates the country’s newspaper stands, were very suspicious over the weekend of the election at the chances of resolving the internal conflicts of this emergency grouping. 

Yet they are just as suspicious of the National Rally itself. Bardella has gained spectacular ground among younger voters as the twenty-eight year old protégé of Le Pen, but his youth has maintained the suspicion that many older, more moderate French voters feel about the ability of any right-wing coalition to govern. Much of the support for the NF is based upon fears of the economic and social turmoil they predict will overrun France as a result of a victory for the NFP. Melanchon’s own glorification in the anti-Semitic rhetoric of his own party has only played into the hands of the Right.

But the message that “the centre cannot hold” is misleading. Macron’s own first victory in 2017 was seen as a pushback against the populist victories on Left and Right since the Brexit vote, but perhaps the truth is more complicated. For one thing, the French system means it is quite possible to contemplate a centrist presidency with an extreme parliament, something increasingly possible after the next presidential election. For now, however, neither the far-Left nor the far-Right stand much chance of gaining support across the parliament for a real mandate against Macron. Gabriel Attal, Macron’s choice as Prime Minister, has already been asked to rescind his resignation request and carry on. Moderates on the Left, such as Raphaël Glucksmann, have insisted on the importance of cross-party collaboration in forming a government, while still excluding France Unbowed and Mélenchon, its leader. Macron’s government will continue to be frail, and he has not achieved the “clarity” he sought in calling an unexpected poll. But he is still in power – and his opponents are only contemplating taking it from him by absolving themselves of their unsavoury election partners. The Left has found its own – reasonably credible – candidate for Prime Minister, Lucie Castets. But on Wednesday Macron rejected her. 

This is not to say that the future is necessarily bright for the French centrists. Record results and more years in opposition will only boost the confidence of the National Rally as they prepare for the next presidential election in 2027. Confused attempts at coalition government will only strengthen the tendency for voters to seek out the extremes. The Europe-wide picture for moderate social democrats and the centre-Right is in no way positive. Macron’s reputation as a beacon of moderate neoliberalism has been dented by his ever more complicated struggles with the economically conservative majority of his country. The chances of Keir Starmer taking up Macron’s mantle and playing an important role in European politics remain small. 

Yet we should not disavow Macronism quite yet. The pension age changes have in fact been implemented, Macron is still president, and if the Olympics go better than expectations then his popularity may stop falling. As Alain Catzeflis wrote here recently, “the one thing [Macron] doesn’t do is bury his head in the sand”. He’s walked towards a fair lot of danger in his seven years at the helm of the Fifth Republic, not the least of which was the call for this damaging election itself. Rather than defeating the centrist president, however, the chaos of France’s parliamentary fights in the coming weeks may only strengthen, little by little, the man at the top. 

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