by Nathan Sperbe
AMERICAN AFFAIRS
LONG READ
The 2010s were a dangerous decade in Western politics. In the span of a single year, between June 2016 and June 2017, the Brexit referendum began Britain’s departure from the EU, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, and France’s party system collapsed. But whereas Brexit and Trump were seen as breakthroughs of nationalist populism, what emerged from the French upheaval in that year was populism turned on its head. Emmanuel Macron, a centrist newcomer of impeccable technocratic, neoliberal, and pro-EU credentials, routed establishment center-left and center-right parties and took over the presidency in May 2017, putting a political party he had launched barely a year before at the center of French politics.
Against a backdrop of widespread discontent with the status quo in the dying days of François Hollande’s crumbling presidency, Macron looked in 2017 as though he had saved the day for the established order in France. In Perry Anderson’s biting words, Macron was a “simulacrum” of populism, an “antibody” generated by a threatened system to protect itself from being overturned, ultimately demonstrating—a reference to W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming”—that “the centre can hold.”1
Five years on, how is Macron’s center faring? In April this year, he was reelected as French president for another five-year term, beating, for the second time, right-wing candidate Marine Le Pen in the runoff. This in itself was a triumph of sorts, as France’s Fifth Republic tends to be unforgiving to incumbents, and the last time a sitting president was reelected was Jacques Chirac in 2002. Two months later, however, the president’s party and its allies lost their outright parliamentary majority in the legislative elections, obtaining only 42 percent of seats (245 out of 577), although remaining the largest political force in the National Assembly.
There is much more at stake in Macron’s shifting fortunes than adjustments in the composition of the French political class from one election cycle to the next. Over the past five years, France has faced, with the Yellow Vests movement followed by the Covid-19 epidemic, two episodes whose destabilizing potential exceeded anything the nation had experienced since the street protests of May 1968. Beyond these exceptional events, the country currently finds itself in a vortex of change that is reshaping economy, polity, and ideology both domestically and at the European level.
Emerging from the pandemic, France’s economic policy has become significantly more interventionist, while political rhetoric from all quarters today foregrounds issues of sovereignty, independence, protection, and planning—in sharp contrast to the neoliberal idiom on which Macron rode to power five years ago. The French president has navigated this shifting terrain deftly enough to ensure his reelection, striving to remake himself from neoliberal upstart to post-neoliberal statesman between 2017 and 2022. Yet antiestablishment political forces are steadily rising, now representing half or more of the electorate depending on the election. These forces are currently, on the right, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement national (National Rally, RN), and on the left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France insoumise (France Unbowed, FI). Both made major gains in parliament this June and are anticipating more decisive wins in the future, posing the question of how France’s current power structure will react if and when they gain a foothold in the executive.
At a fundamental level, past, present, and future developments in French politics are shaped by the nation’s political economy. On this premise, what follows takes a deeper look at the French and European contexts, setting out how socioeconomic circumstances and major policy choices interacted to produce Hollande’s fall, Macron’s victories, and persistent discontent expressed by the Yellow Vests and the inexorable rise of antiestablishment forces.
Given the present-day French trajectory, there are two major unknowns that carry vast implications for the future of France and Europe. First, how real is the French government and the EU’s post-pandemic embrace of neo-statism in economic policy? Is neoliberalism truly fading away as a guiding paradigm? And second, how will ruling institutions and incumbent elites accommodate the ascendancy of antiestablishment movements like RN and FI? Put differently, are these rising counter-elites on the radical right and the radical left preparing themselves to tear the system down, or to be co-opted by it?
France’s Long-Simmering Crisis
The acute political turbulence of recent years in France was a long time coming. After the first oil shock of 1973 put an end to a prolonged postwar economic boom known as the Trente Glorieuses (thirty glorious years), the country recorded lackluster growth almost continuously in the 1980s, ’90s, and 2000s. Most damaging from the standpoint of the French public, the tight labor market of the 1950s and ’60s gave way to mass unemployment—increasing from eight hundred thousand registered unemployed in 1975 to three million in the 1990s. Sweeping marketization reforms imposed by Left and Right politicians alike from the mid-1980s onward under the two-term presidencies of François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac did little to revive the economy, or to dissipate a widespread feeling of dissatisfaction vis-à-vis the political class.
For French citizens accustomed to thinking that their country was mired in crisis ever since the 1970s, the 2008–9 financial crash and recession only appeared to add a new crisis atop an existing one. As the unemployment rate rose from 7.2 percent in 2008 to 10.5 percent in 2013, GDP growth faltered once again in the context of international financial market speculation on eurozone states’ sovereign debt, amounting to 0–1 percent per year from 2012 to 2016. Under pressure from the European Commission and anxious to reassure investors, speculators, and domestic and foreign business interests, the French government carried out pro-cyclical fiscal tightening during the final years of Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidency (2007–12) and the early years of François Hollande’s (2012–17), further suppressing demand and deepening the crisis.
Looking back at these years, Hollande’s failed presidency was an object lesson in how to discredit and delegitimize a governing party—in this instance the French Socialist Party (PS)—to the point of bringing an entire party system down with it. Elected in 2012 on a left-leaning platform promising to renegotiate European budget requirements, to end austerity, and to wage battle against the financial sector, Hollande rapidly caved in to the EU—doubling down on spending cuts at the European Commission’s behest—and to the banking industry—passing a bank regulation law drafted under bankers’ own guidance that fell short of the provisions contained in the U.S. Dodd-Frank Act.2 Having announced during his campaign a tax rate of 75 percent on annual income above €1 million, this promise soon morphed into an “exceptional solidarity contribution” of 50 percent that was discontinued in 2015. Somehow convinced that corporate interests were still in need of more reassurance and support, Hollande further tilted to the right during his presidency, announcing in 2014 a supply-side package consisting of €40 billion of cuts in taxes and social security contributions for businesses. This was clumsily labeled a “pact of responsibility,” implying that companies were expected to do their part by expanding investment and employment. Unsurprisingly, this did not come to pass.
As it happened, the one locus of power in Europe that went against the grain of neoliberal orthodoxy in the 2010s was not France’s “socialist” government under Hollande but the European Central Bank (ECB). Under Mario Draghi’s leadership, it pledged in 2012 to do “whatever it takes” to ensure the euro’s survival, thereby alleviating market speculation on member-states’ sovereign debt. From 2015 onward, this was followed by large-scale buying of government bonds under the ECB’s Public Sector Purchase Programme (PSPP), reaching over €2 trillion by 2019. As shown by Jens van’t Klooster, this “technocratic Keynesianism” on the part of Draghi and the ECB amounted to de facto monetary financing of government deficits in the euro area, in total reversal of the Friedmanite monetarist precepts of a prior generation, even though the ECB itself would not admit to this much.3
Back in France, as Hollande’s presidency hurtled on, it became increasingly obvious that his dogged efforts to please corporate interests with so little to show for it amounted to political suicide. By the last year of his term, in 2016, not only had the French public suffered through eight years of economic stagnation, it was also rightfully contemptuous of a president who had so glaringly turned his back on the left rhetoric that had brought him to power. When Hollande’s labor minister, Myriam El-Khomri, proceeded to pass a bill weakening protective labor rules, mass protests and dramatic rioting ensued in the spring of 2016, while Hollande’s approval rating hovered between 10 and 20 percent—record lows for any French president. Aware of his dismal reelection odds, Hollande announced in December 2016 that he would not seek a second term—a first in the Fifth Republic.
2017: Neoliberal Populism to the Rescue
With Hollande out of the race and the Socialist Party as unpopular as it could be, the laws of political bipolarity would have predicted an easy victory for France’s center-right, meaning Les Républicains (the Republicans, LR), in the 2017 election. Despite its American-sounding name, adopted in 2015, LR is the historical, “Gaullist” governing party of the French Right, founded in support of General de Gaulle’s political ambitions. The party has been led, in more recent decades, by Presidents Chirac and Sarkozy (French political parties have a fondness for changing their names).
In the spring of 2017, however, the regular alternation of power between the PS and the Gaullist Right, which had anchored French politics since the early 1980s, failed to take place. LR’s candidate, François Fillon, a former prime minister under President Sarkozy, was hit a few months before the election by damaging evidence of embezzlement, putting a dent in his poll numbers. At a deeper level, the French electorate was understandably wary, as the 2017 election season opened, of the prospect of yet another iteration of the Left-Right pendulum that had done so little to serve its interests amid economic crisis. This deep-seated discontent among the citizenry, combined with Hollande’s dismal performance and Fillon’s corruption baggage, opened up the electoral space for Emmanuel Macron to take over the presidency.
Macron, a civil servant by training and a former investment banker, had been Hollande’s economy minister for two years before resigning to create En Marche! (On the Move!), a personal political movement whose initials, “EM,” were his own. Going into the election, he projected a youthful, modernizing image, extolling the virtues of entrepreneurialism and castigating the incumbent political class, Left and Right, for being more concerned about waging fruitless partisan battles than finding sound solutions for the nation’s future. In terms of policy, Macron was the quintessential establishment candidate, a child of technocracy, the epitome of elite consensus, a champion of the neoliberal axioms of marketization that had been foisted on French society since the 1980s. In terms of rhetoric, though, he was antiestablishment to the extent that he called for disposing of France’s political class as it had hitherto existed—and dispose of it he did. This paradox is echoed in Chris Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti’s idea of “technopopulism,” the blending of populist antiestablishment rhetoric with an appeal to technocratic reason, of which they see Macronism as a salient example.4
Macron came out on top in the first round of the 2017 presidential election at 24 percent, followed by the Far Right’s Marine Le Pen at 21 percent, and by Fillon and left-populist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, both at 20 percent. Far behind, Benoît Hamon, the PS’s candidate, came in fifth at 6 percent in a perfect “Pasokization” scenario—whereby a nominally socialist party with long governing experience is discredited and marginalized for having aligned too slavishly to EU budgetary orthodoxy, as had recently happened to Greece’s Panhellenic Socialist Movement, or pasok, under George Papandreou. Two weeks later Macron roundly defeated Le Pen in the runoff 66 to 34 percent, benefiting from a large number of voters seeing him as the lesser of two evils. Having barely entered the Élysée Palace, Macron oversaw the remaking of his personal movement from En Marche! to La République en Marche (the Republic on the Move, LREM), which went on to win an outright majority in the National Assembly in the legislative elections the following month. LR and the PS, which together had held 82 percent of seats in the previous legislature, saw their deputy numbers drop to 19 and 5 percent, respectively.
Beyond the dramatic fortunes of its winners and losers, the 2017 election season was also a watershed moment in the methods of doing politics in France. In short, institutionalized political parties in the twentieth-century mold were displaced by personalistic parties, or “movements,” revolving entirely around a single individual. Macron’s LREM fits the latter template perfectly in the sense that the party line is and can only be Macron’s, and so does Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s FI on the left and—only to a slightly lesser extent—Marine Le Pen’s RN on the right. By contrast, LR (ever since de Gaulle’s passing) and the PS function as arenas in which, however influential individual party leaders may become, they face competitive elections to gain and retain leadership of the organization and have to make internal compromises and alliances to keep the bulk of its membership on their side. Among other attributes, the personalistic party has the potential to be much more adaptable to fast-changing circumstances than the institutional party, since the leader’s word is enough to set the direction of travel, without having to go through high-stakes congresses and committee meetings in which rival political strategies are put to a vote. In a kind of Darwinian moment, the 2017 election cycle in France made it clear which of the two organizational models was fitter for survival in the present era of politics.
Winning the day in 2017 on the promise of political change, Macron had no qualms, once in the Élysée Palace, about taking full advantage of the traditional prerogatives and rituals of grandeur attached to the presidency in France’s Fifth Republic. A distinctive aspect of the French political system is that it is not only based (as in the United States, but unlike the rest of Western Europe) on the primacy of the presidential office over government activity, but also (unlike the United States) on the tight subordination of the legislative branch to the executive branch if—and this is a significant caveat—the president’s allies enjoy an outright majority in the National Assembly. Additionally, throughout Macron’s first term, the LREM majority in parliament was uniquely bereft of political autonomy since it was mostly composed of individuals—many of whom had no prior experience in politics—handpicked by Macron in the wake of his 2017 victory. This further diminished the already low standing of parliament in the Fifth Republic, making the National Assembly little more than a rubber stamp parliament or “registration chamber” (chambre d’enregistrement) controlled by the president between 2017 and 2022.
The sudden death of France’s two-party system in 2017 was an ambiguous event. The political landscape capsized as a result of the Macronian challenge, yet beyond the confines of political life, the rest of the power structure—the bureaucracy, the corporations—was left intact and if anything strengthened. The president himself had the ideal profile to further bind together the two traditional poles of France’s elite, namely the career civil service and “high-level functionaries” (hauts fonctionnaires) on the one hand, and the upper reaches of the business world on the other. Although LREM could not from the start match the vast networks of allies nurtured by the PS and LR over many years in finance, industry, the media, and the academy, Macron did succeed in rapidly building up his own power network of loyal politicians, bureaucrats, consultants, business people, and intellectuals.5 These people—Macron’s people—quickly earned the nickname of “Macronia” (la macronie).
Policy-wise, early Macronism was essentially neoliberalism. This meant, during Macron’s first year in office, dismantling a wealth tax in place since the 1980s, further deregulating the labor market by a series of executive orders, and passing a plan to convert the national rail service, SNCF, into a for-profit corporation. In the area of public finance, the government brought the budget deficit below the EU-dictated 3 percent mark, insisting on the need to appear “credible” in the eyes of European institutions. Rhetorically, Macron vowed to remake France into a “start-up nation”—a vacuous trope of aspirational neoliberalism if there ever was one. None of this was well-suited to address the French public’s deep-seated dissatisfaction with the economic status quo.
2018–19: Enter the Yellow Vests, Macron’s Rightward Turn
The first cataclysmic event in Macron’s presidency was the Yellow Vest (Gilets jaunes) movement—the most destabilizing episode of protest and rioting France had known since 1968. Although the Yellow Vests came in 2018 and went in 2019, and the impression they left has now faded given everything that has happened since, it would be difficult to understate the dramatic burst of subversion they embodied and the genuine threat they represented to the French state.
From the standpoint of France’s political history, the Yellow Vests were the “power of the street” (le pouvoir de la rue) incarnate—a kind of power that has carried over from the French Revolution to the present day. Indeed, throughout the Fifth Republic, “the street,” in the form of mass strikes and demonstrations, has usually been a far more effective countervailing power to executive authority than the National Assembly. This applies equally to the May 1968 protests of students and workers, to the public sector strikes of 1995 against pension and social security reform, and to the 2006 strikes and demonstrations against labor market reform—all of which were supported by a majority of public opinion and imposed policy turnarounds on the government.
While resonating with the French political protest tradition, the Yellow Vests were also truly innovative in their methods of action. The movement was sparked by a government decision to increase the taxation of fuel in the fall of 2018, in contrast to the labor and welfare issues that are the regular fare of French protest politics. Bearing high-visibility yellow jackets, car-owning protestors, mostly originating from small towns and medium-sized cities and from the lower-middle class, coordinated on social media to occupy roundabouts and block roads across the country. Additionally, dramatic street demonstrations occurred in city centers (most memorably on the Champs-Élysées in Paris) every Saturday. The movement peaked in intensity in its second and third weeks, in late November and early December 2018. By that point, the Yellow Vests’ message already went far beyond fuel taxation, foregrounding public services, purchasing power, and direct democracy, as well as loud calls for Macron to step down.
Although the right to protest is guaranteed by law in France, it is conditional on protest organizers notifying local authorities who reserve the right to ban public gatherings in the name of preserving “public order” on a case-by-case basis. As authorities responsible for policing city centers reacted to instances of sporadic violence by banning Yellow Vest marches in certain areas, the refusal of hundreds of thousands of protestors to abide by the law quickly turned the movement into the greatest threat to “public order” in half a century, unleashing violent police repression against “unauthorized gatherings.” In the course of the movement, over ten thousand protestors ended up in police custody and over four thousand individuals were wounded according to the Interior Ministry’s own statistics.
Shaken by the gravity of the situation, including the prospect of police forces being overwhelmed, Macron quickly moved to defuse the crisis, giving in to the Yellow Vests in early December by cancelling the fuel tax increase. While the Yellow Vest movement subsided thereafter, it nonetheless continued for months as Macron moved to conduct a “Great Debate” (le Grand Débat) with the nation in the early months of 2019. Eyeing the European Parliament election coming up in May as the next political opportunity, he concluded the “Great Debate” in April by announcing, among other lesser measures, a significant cut in income tax essentially benefiting the second-richest income quartile. This was mostly irrelevant to solving the cost-of-living challenges of the Yellow Vest base (often located in the third income quartile), but it proved a political masterstroke for siphoning off well-to-do conservative voters of LR who had been staunch supporters of the police’s ruthless suppression of the protests.
In the 2019 elections, LREM hardly carried the day, obtaining 22 percent of the vote to RN’s 23 percent, but what mattered to Macron was that both governing parties of the pre-2017 era performed pitifully, at 8 percent (LR) and 6 percent (PS), respectively. Having overseen the “Pasokization” of the PS in 2017, in 2019 Macron left LR and the whole Gaullist lineage of French politics in the dust, consolidating LREM as the central pole in the political field with Le Pen’s Far Right as its main challenger.
Shifting his image decisively to the right in 2019 and attracting a large contingent of older conservative “law-and-order” voters into his support base, Macron paradoxically emerged from the Yellow Vest crisis a stronger player in the French political space than before it. Still a somewhat inexperienced politician at the time he first campaigned for president in 2017, by 2019 he had become a consummate political operator, especially adept at navigating periods of crisis and instability to his own advantage.
2020–21: Pandemic Politics, All Hail Sovereignty!
Macron’s handling of the Covid-19 epidemic echoes what occurred during the Yellow Vest crisis: a president destabilized at first by the suddenness of the challenge, racing to extinguish the worst of the threat, and thereafter skillfully working to convert a collective crisis into political gains for himself. Yet in contrast to the Yellow Vests, the pandemic constituted a shock of gigantic proportions to economic life in France, precipitating a similarly drastic economic policy response on the part of the state. The French political economy is still in the process of being reshaped by the repercussions of the health crisis, transforming in turn some of the economic norms that prevailed in the pre-pandemic era.
The year 2020 did not start auspiciously for Macron. By that point determined to redesign France’s comparatively generous pay-as-you-go pension system from a year-based to a points-based system, he merely succeeded in producing a technocratic nightmare of contending economic projections, convincing the majority of the public that it had more to lose than to gain from the reform. Most trade unions were also hostile, bringing about, in December 2019 and January 2020, the most prolonged public transport strike in over two decades.
By February 2020, SARS-CoV-2 was already spreading undetected in the French population. As the seriousness of the epidemic became clear in early March, the French government, like so many others, stumbled over how to react. Minimizing the usefulness of face masks before abruptly requisitioning all mask stocks and production in the country, while relying for weeks on a staged influenza response plan ill-suited to the features of the coronavirus, Macron eventually imposed one of the strictest national lockdowns in Europe from mid-March to mid-May 2020, closing all schools and public venues and making it compulsory to fill out a form each and every time one ventured outside. By that point the contentious pension reform had been shelved.
On the epidemiological front, French Covid deaths peaked at about one thousand per day in the first days of April 2020, never reaching such heights thereafter. After the initial lockdown was lifted, viral circulation remained low for several months before rising again, as in much of Europe, during the fall of 2020, remaining at high levels until the summer of 2021. From October 2020 to June 2021, venues such as restaurants, cafés, bars, museums, cinemas, and theaters were shut, and a curfew was imposed, forbidding citizens from leaving their homes in the evening without justification. Schools remained open during that time. The vaccination of over 80 percent of adults by late summer 2021 significantly reduced the case fatality rate, leading the government to eliminate most restrictions. Overall, France experienced excess deaths in 2020–21 of 155,000, suggesting an average excess mortality for western Europe—lower than Italy, Spain, and the UK but higher than Germany.6 At the same time, among the public, fear of the virus and anger directed at the government’s lack of preparedness in the spring of 2020 gradually gave way to a more moderate attitude, perceiving restrictions as justified primarily in order to protect public hospitals from being overwhelmed. Macron himself espoused this emerging consensus, deploying rhetoric centered on balancing constraints and freedoms in the course of “learning to live with the virus.”
While the health measures enacted by France in the face of the virus were unremarkable in the European context, the government’s economic policy response was ultimately much more significant. From March 2020 onward, the Finance Ministry—referred to in France as Bercy, after the Paris neighborhood in which it is located—deployed an array of measures to neutralize the effects of lockdowns and restrictions on firms, wage-earners, and the standard of living. These included, first, a wage replacement scheme whereby the state paid out upward of 80 percent of the salaries of workers left idle by health restrictions and the slowdown in economic activity. Second, loans guaranteed by the state in the amount of €140 billion were channeled through the banking system and handed out to businesses of all sizes. Third, a “Solidarity Fund” was set up to directly compensate a portion of small firms’ income losses alongside tax deferrals and cancellations. Fourth, a series of sector-specific rescue plans were adopted in the course of 2020, targeting areas such as the car industry, aerospace, and tourism. To this was added, in September 2020, a recovery plan worth €100 billion featuring a mix of green investments, social housing, employee training, and tax cuts for manufacturers.
Introducing an initial raft of measures on national television in March 2020, Macron stressed “solidarity” when confronting the crisis and committed support “whatever the cost” (quoi qu’il en coûte)—a phrase that would come to denote the entire French economic response to the virus. In an interview with the Financial Times the following month, he asserted that “we have nationalized the salaries and P&L [profits and losses] of practically all enterprises.”7 As French GDP plunged by 8 percent in 2020, public debt rose from 98 to 116 percent of GDP in a single year. This rise in debt hardly mattered in the short run since the ECB, by now headed by former French finance minister Christine Lagarde, had itself introduced in March 2020 the Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme (PEPP), which opened the door to central bank purchases of government bonds in excess of what had already been undertaken under Draghi. Overall, the economic support measures implemented by Bercy lasted well into the second half of 2021, allowing for a much smaller and more short-lived rise in the French unemployment rate than after the 2008 crisis, while enterprise insolvencies were in fact fewer in 2020 and 2021 than in 2019.
Considering the epidemic and the socioeconomic picture together, it is easy to understand why Macron’s personal standing within the electorate improved somewhat during the course of the pandemic. By the time mass vaccination allowed France to escape the most debilitating phase in the summer of 2021, Macron’s approval rating was stabilizing around 40 percent—a figure much higher than Hollande’s and Sarkozy’s four years into their respective presidencies. Significantly, the “whatever the costs” and “solidarity” aspects of the French policy response allowed Macron to cultivate his left flank, retaining the potential support of former PS voters after having spared no effort in cultivating his right flank and attracting LR voters in response to the Yellow Vests in 2019.
The pandemic in France also foregrounded leitmotifs that eschew straightforward Left-versus-Right categorization, coalescing into a new dominant discourse of “sovereignty” and “protection.” This reflected, among other things, an attempt by Macron to reinvent his public image once more, away from the neoliberal modernizer of 2017 and toward embodying the resilience of French society in the midst of intensifying global disorder. Macron still being a staunch Europeanist, and highly invested in EU-level power politics, he is always careful to add the proviso that “sovereignty” and “protection” also apply at the EU level, producing awkward tropes along the lines of “a sovereign France in a sovereign Europe” and “a France that protects in a Europe that protects.”
To illustrate this swerve in rhetoric, on March 12, 2020, Macron declared: “What this pandemic reveals is that there are goods and services that must be placed outside market laws. To trust our food, our protection, our capacity to cure the sick, essentially our framework of living, to others than us is madness. We have to take back control over them.” As if the coronavirus had taught a globalist president to speak in the language of Brexit, Macron would go on to use the expression “take back control” on several occasions in 2021. By doing so, he sought to chime with ongoing ideological undercurrents triggered by the pandemic within French society at large, including a greater emphasis on “protecting one’s own” (protéger les siens) in hard times and a stronger preference for national and regional “short circuits” in the production and distribution of essential goods as opposed to globalized supply chains.
Although it is too early to tell the long-term impact of pandemic politics in France, it seems a fair conjecture that rhetorical elements of this kind are working to validate and to entrench some of the political economy transformations induced by the virus, primarily the dramatic interventionism of Bercy and the ECB to keep the French economy afloat during the worst of the crisis. Revealingly, while the income support measures of 2020–21 have been gradually wound down in step with post-lockdown recovery, the government’s propensity to mobilize fiscal resources and financial circuitry to political ends has remained markedly higher than before the pandemic. This is exemplified by the launch in October 2021 of a “France 2030” plan of industrial and technological investments worth €34 billion, as well as by the rising profile of Bpifrance, a government bank, as a vehicle for channeling credit and for investing in companies on behalf of the state.8 The idea that the pandemic is ushering in a period of economic statism in the West, as put forward by Paolo Gerbaudo,9 might well turn out to apply to France in the coming years.
2022: Macronia Lives On
As Macron geared up for the presidential and legislative elections scheduled in the spring of 2022, Macronism had become blurred as a result of state interventionism during the pandemic, but Macronia could feel confident in the future, having maintained political dominance through the dramatic episodes of the Yellow Vests and the coronavirus. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in late February gave Macron a further bump in the polls as he sought to project competence and gravitas in the face of geopolitical turbulence. Even then, however, his approval rating only stood in the low forties. It should also be mentioned that from early on Macron has elicited strong feelings of anger and outright hatred in sections of the electorate exasperated by his elitist demeanor and occasional expressions of contempt for the public. (In 2017, he mused during a speech, “A train station is a place where one encounters people who are successful and people who are nothing.”)
Declaring his candidacy and outlining his platform in late March 2022, Macron characteristically put out signals to both sides of the political spectrum, brazenly poaching policy ideas from other contenders. Eyeing the Left, he argued for the necessity of extensive state-coordinated green investments, in French parlance “ecological planning” (la planification écologique)—a concept that Jean-Luc Mélenchon had been championing since his 2012 presidential campaign. Eyeing the Right, Macron announced he would raise the legal retirement age from sixty-two to sixty-five, a less convoluted reform than the points-based redesign that had failed two years prior, and incidentally an LR policy plank. At the same time, Macron continued in the rhetorical vein he had explored during the pandemic by affirming the imperative to make France more “independent” in matters of energy, manufacturing, and technology.
Macron came out on top in the first round (28 percent), with strong showings on the part of the Far Right’s Le Pen (23 percent) and the Far Left’s Mélenchon (22 percent). The two parties which together had governed France during practically all of the Fifth Republic prior to 2017 were humiliated, with LR’s candidate Valérie Pécresse obtaining just under 5 percent and the PS’s candidate Anne Hidalgo just under 2 percent. As was expected, Macron went on to beat Le Pen in the run-off 59 to 41 percent in late April. Once more, he owed his election to a “lesser of two evils” logic whereby voters unsympathetic to both Macron and Le Pen viewed a Le Pen presidency as the worse prospect. Compared to 2017, however, his margin over Le Pen had halved, implying that distrust of the Far Right in the French electorate is steadily eroding. Besides Macron’s victory, the obvious takeaway of the presidential election was the ascendancy of antiestablishment forces. Combined, they reached about 60 percent of the vote in the first round (adding Le Pen’s and Mélenchon’s scores to that of lesser far left and far right candidates, including radical right firebrand Éric Zemmour, who obtained 7 percent).
Marine Le Pen’s RN party is the successor of her father Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front national, a party founded in the early 1970s by a motley crew of former Nazi collaborators, neofascist militants, and erstwhile defenders of French Algeria. Since taking the reins from Jean-Marie in 2011, Marine has worked hard to detoxify or “de-demonize” (dédiaboliser) its brand while still oftentimes putting out draconian anti-immigrant proposals—for instance, in this year’s election, banning the Muslim headscarf from all public space. In terms of social policy, RN favors keeping France’s welfare state in place while cutting social assistance to noncitizens. Momentarily threatened in late 2021 and early 2022 by the momentum behind the candidacy of Zemmour—a polemicist and television personality single-mindedly focused on countering Islam—Le Pen eventually saw off the challenge and reconsolidated her hold on the French far right.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, on the other hand, is originally a defector from the PS, having been schooled in politics during the Mitterrand years before becoming a junior minister in the early 2000s and eventually leaving the party in 2008 to set up the Parti de Gauche (Left Party), followed in 2016 by FI. An exceptional political orator, Mélenchon gives voice to radical egalitarian impulses tied to France’s revolutionary tradition since the times of Robespierre, while also drawing on the charismatic populism that made possible the electoral victories of Chávez, Lula, Morales, and Correa in Latin America. In terms of policy, FI calls for greening France’s political economy by way of “ecological planning” together with vigorous redistribution through higher taxes on the rich, a higher minimum wage, and bringing down the retirement age from sixty‑two to sixty.
Macron’s difficulty in containing the rise of RN and FI was exposed during the legislative elections that took place in June. The coalition of LREM and its pro-Macron allies, by now named Ensemble (Together), obtained 245 seats out of 577 in the National Assembly—still the largest political force in parliament but over forty seats short of the outright majority needed to ensure the smooth passage of legislation. To its left, 142 seats now belong to nupes, an electoral coalition cobbled together at short notice before the election, with Mélenchon’s FI as the leading force (75 seats) and the humbled Socialists, Greens, and Communists as auxiliaries. Nupes stands for New Ecological Social Popular Union, and it is uncertain how long it can survive the contrast between FI’s left radicalism and the PS and Greens’ proclivity for moderation. To the right, the Macronist bloc in parliament confronts a dwindling contingent from LR (64 seats) and a remarkable showing from Le Pen’s RN (89 seats)—a party that had long been kept at a distance from the National Assembly due to the two-round constituency-based voting system.
Having lost the outright control over parliament that he formerly enjoyed, it is still not clear at the time of this writing how Macron will go about governing in his second term. Potential strategies might include enticing LR or the center‑left (the PS and the Greens) into a kind of centrist alliance, or enlisting individual deputies left and right in sufficient numbers with the promise of government posts, or building legislative majorities on a case‑by-base basis. While this will be a humbling experience for a president who had up to this year treated parliament chiefly as a rubber stamp, Macron still retains control of the government for as long as the Left, LR, and RN do not move together to bring it down in a no-confidence motion. Aside from that, the constitution gives him the right to dissolve parliament and call new legislative elections at a moment of his choosing. Having proved capable of riding out various crises to his own advantage during his first term, Macron could very well find ways to instrumentalize institutional blockage in a divided parliament in order to bolster his authority.
Whether Macron will keep the upper hand on the political battlefield during the upcoming five years is uncertain, but nor is this the most significant question facing France today. Macron is scheduled to leave the Élysée Palace in 2027, having reached the constitutional two-term limit, and after this happens, the uncertainty surrounding the country’s political future only thickens. The two-dimensional polarization inside the National Assembly today—between Left and Right and between establishment and antiestablishment—is itself a symptom of the simmering crisis of authority that has been engulfing France for decades. This crisis is inducing slow-moving changes in the economic structure and the political landscape that a single individual like Macron, however skillful or lucky, can do little to direct.
A Neo-Statist France in a Neo-Statist Europe?
From the perspective of political economy, a key question for the future of Europe will be whether the interventionist policy orientation coming out of the pandemic is likely to be sustained. Paolo Gerbaudo’s recent book The Great Recoil contends that neoliberalism is giving way to a neo-statism shared by Left and Right alike, centered on the master-signifiers of “sovereignty,” “protection,” and “control.” His argument, however persuasive on its own terms, is mostly focused on political discourse, less so on the interpretation of policy and the analysis of economic institutions. The fact remains that four decades of reforms and restructurings since the 1980s have left most European countries, including France, under entrenched neoliberal institutional arrangements in a number of areas that include product markets, financial activity, and international trade. Incumbent economic elites are deeply invested in these arrangements—in effect they generate their wealth and standing through them—and how they might hinder or neutralize attempts to transform existing structures is a major unknown.
This being said, it is also the case that neoliberalism as rhetoric appears to be mortally wounded in the aftermath of the pandemic, especially so in France. Listening to Macron speak on the economy in 2022 does not ring the same as in 2017. His is a post-neoliberal discourse, in which nods to sovereignty now outnumber nods to free enterprise. Many on the French left continue to entertain the bugbear image of Macron as Thatcher reincarnate, a man hiding his game and biding his time until the opportunity arises to finally reconstruct France by way of a neoliberal blueprint. This view might be debatable at the level of individual psychology, and Macron might well still be a true neoliberal believer in his heart of hearts, but this is a misreading of the political moment. What happened in the course of Macron’s first term is that he was confronted with a stark choice between moving past neoliberalism and surviving politically, or keeping to the neoliberal script and being wiped away in the manner of Hollande. Ever the political animal, Macron went with the former. Put differently, he chose to ride the swelling tide of statism that arose out of the pandemic rather than be drowned under it.
Statism, however, is not performative, and statist intent is not enough to bury policy paradigms or to overhaul economic structures. From the standpoint of policy content and implementation, the neo-statist turn in France and in Europe is incomplete. Whether progress will be made toward a more comprehensive neo-statist order will depend not on technocratic willingness and ability alone but on a series of upcoming political battles involving politicians, bureaucrats, capitalists, and electorates.
At the present time, there are two areas in which neo-statism has come to frame the economic agenda both in France and in EU institutions. The first is monetary policy, including not only monetary creation and interest rates, but also credit guidance and the politics of sovereign debt. As discussed above, the ECB has been de facto engaged in monetary financing—meaning the monetary funding of government deficits—since the mid-2010s and has doubled down on it since the beginning of the pandemic. Simultaneously, monetary technocrats in Europe are seeking to adopt new mechanisms to guide the allocation of private credit on the basis of environmental criteria, while other public institutions such as the European Investment Bank and France’s Caisse des Dépôts and Bpifrance are scaling up to distribute funding in accordance with EU and domestic-level greening agendas.10
The second area of rising state assertiveness is industrial and technological policy, encompassing public funding of R&D, targeted lending facilities, venture capital, government equity in companies, reshoring initiatives, and the screening of inbound foreign investment in strategic sectors. In the French context, this is illustrated by the targeting of quantum research, semiconductors, hydrogen, and nuclear reactors, among other domains, in the 2020 post-pandemic recovery plan and the “France 2030” plan mentioned above. Domestic programs of this sort are increasingly being conceived and implemented in tandem with the objectives and plans put out by the European Commission, as in the EUNextGen recovery plan, the “European Green Deal,” and sectoral initiatives for semiconductors (the European Chips Act) and batteries (the European Battery Alliance). Although the experience of the pandemic accelerated the pace of these efforts, it is notable that industrial policy was high on the agenda from the moment Ursula von der Leyen became Commission president in late 2019.11 The most publicized justification for this interventionist drive has been the need to address climate change, but another significant impetus—spelled out less often—has been EU politicians’ and technocrats’ heightened awareness of China as both a case study in state-directed growth and a geo-economic competitor.
Beyond these two policy domains, it is unclear that a coherent neo-statist paradigm encompassing the whole political economy will prevail in Europe and in France. The functioning of the labor market, redistributive taxation, as well as the welfare state writ large (including pensions, healthcare, unemployment, disability, and poverty relief) continue to be partisan issues, chiefly set on a left-right spectrum, about which the rhetoric of “sovereignty” and “independence” has little to say. It is conceivable that neo-statism in some areas will coexist with neoliberal stagnation in others. To be sure, strengthening the state’s hand in fostering technological innovation, in catching up with China in battery manufacturing, or in channeling funds to renewable energy investments does not preclude welfare retrenchment and labor market deregulation happening at the very same time. Whether Europe will move not only in a more statist direction, but also in a more egalitarian one, will very much depend on which political forces emerge the strongest from the current political conjuncture.
Breakdown or Co-optation?
As Macron is scheduled to exit the French presidency in 2027, what will come next? Time seems to be on the side of antiestablishment forces, specifically Le Pen’s RN on the right and Mélenchon’s FI on the left. To date, Le Pen and Mélenchon have each taken part in three election cycles for the presidency and parliament—in 2012, 2017, and 2022—and they have seen their vote shares and deputy numbers rise steadily over time. Sociologically, their support bases are consolidating, echoing to some degree the geography of support for Trump and Sanders in 2016 and 2020: rural areas, small towns, and middle-class suburbia for Le Pen; city centers and the banlieues (working-class suburbs of major cities) for Mélenchon. As for Macron, he is stronger among middle-class and well-to-do voters in medium and large cities, leading economists Bruno Amable and Stefano Palombarini to see in him the political expression of a “bourgeois bloc.”12 A generational factor also appears to be at play: Le Pen and (even more so) Mélenchon supporters are younger than the average voter, whereas support for Macron increases with age. It follows that RN and FI might be justified in believing that generational change is working in their favor.
Both RN and FI can be seen as incubators of counter-elites rising out of the field of electoral politics and aiming to break into France’s established order. As of today, that order is still largely inaccessible and inimical to the both of them. The two main components of the French elite are high-level civil servants or hauts fonctionnaires embedded in organs of the state, on the one hand, and capitalist executives and managers located in the corporate world on the other. The upper segments of the academic, cultural, media, medical, legal, and military worlds are auxiliaries to these two core elite demographics. In contrast with the American pattern, the career civil service is so central in France that it is easier, and more common, for state officials to convert mid-career into business leaders than the other way around. Compared to other western European nations, the French elite also happens to be very tight-knit and geographically concentrated (in the city of Paris), with thick networks of acquaintances straddling the public and private sectors.
As rightly pointed out by Perry Anderson in reference to the rise of populist politics in the West, the “established order . . . is capable of absorbing and neutralising revolts from whatever direction with impressive speed.”13 While this could well be valid in most places, it is especially relevant to the French case, where the incumbent elite happens to be unusually compact and coordinated. Being aware of this, both RN and FI have engaged in sustained efforts, out of the public view, to bring onto their side high-ranking state personnel that might train them in the inner workings of government and ease their transition into power if and when it happens. But while state officials sympathetic to either RN or FI can no doubt be found, and a few have joined and supported them publicly, these remain a very small minority among the administrative elite.
Both RN and FI are nonetheless intent on governing France and either may well have a chance to do so in the future. Hence it is notable that both have watered down their platforms on the subject of the EU between the 2017 and 2022 election cycles. Le Pen campaigned in 2017 for leaving the euro but she no longer advocates for this today. As for Mélenchon, he spelled out in 2017 an argument in terms of a “plan A” (changing EU treaties) and a “plan B” (leaving the EU), meaning he would take France out of the bloc if his demands for treaty changes were not met. Today he intends to “disobey” EU treaties in order to impose institutional changes on the bloc, but he no longer contemplates leaving it. These shifts may reveal an awareness on the part of both RN and FI that France and the EU have become so intermingled—the ECB backstopping French government deficits being the latest illustration—that exiting has become too daunting a prospect. It may also represent a way of making their platforms more acceptable to the civil service and to corporate interests, as RN and FI leaders know full well that the overwhelming majority of the French elite view leaving the EU as beyond the pale.
Establishment and antiestablishment actors alike tend to portray RN or FI taking over the French government as a historic rupture in waiting. All sides seem to share a vested interest in this narrative of breakdown: Macron in order to drum up support against impending chaos and Le Pen and Mélenchon in order to assure their supporters that the major changes they call for will be real enough. In the event either antiestablishment party enters government, however, the experience may end up being much less revolutionary than anticipated. For one thing, neither RN nor FI is likely to make its way into power with both the presidency and an outright parliamentary majority to go with it. This would require them to find allies, build coalitions, and make compromises, as FI has already started doing by setting up nupes as a big tent for the French parliamentary Left. It should also be remembered that “governing France,” in concrete terms, means bringing inside the preexisting administrative structure a contingent of several hundred individuals—namely ministers, chiefs of staff, and advisers—who will rely on tens of thousands of career bureaucrats to carry out policy. Given the intrinsic strength and coherence of the French civil service, this does not bode well for the capacity of either RN or FI to steer the state in directions that most administrative officials feel strongly against.
While institutional breakdown probably will not happen if either RN or FI make it into government one day, smooth sailing is unlikely as well. Other Western countries’ experience with populist politics can be instructive in this regard. In the United States, the Trump White House did not bring with it a framework for governing the state, still less the nation’s economic institutions. In Italy—probably a more relevant basis for comparison—elections in 2018 ushered into power an unlikely coalition of two widely divergent populist organizations, the Five Star Movement and the Lega. This set off predictable trepidation in EU capitals. Some political turbulence ensued, yet not only has the euro survived and Italy’s commitment to the EU been maintained, both parties in 2021 threw their support behind a “technical government” led by former central banker Mario Draghi (though he recently resigned).14
The present-day French political scene is volatile and the future is open. A centrist successor to Macron—former prime minister Édouard Philippe is a potential contender—could ride to victory in 2027. RN and FI could also stumble at the doorstep of power as a result of infighting or successful challenges from other political movements. As for France’s ruling elite, it may have to start making preparations for the intrusion in its midst of antiestablishment actors sooner or later. Co-opting these actors successfully would mean not only making some room for them, but also making some of their policies its own. The proverbial center will not emerge unchanged from such a process, but neither is it likely to collapse. If anything, the established order in France will muddle through, as incumbent elites learn how to channel currents of economic, political, and ideological change in directions that leave the bulk of their power and privilege in place.
French Lessons
Looking back at Macronism’s emergence in 2016–17 as a liberal counter-offensive against nationalist populism, and contemplating a post‑Macron future in which antiestablishment actors could find themselves gradually co-opted into France’s existing power structure, it is clear that the referents that framed the political debates of the 2010s have become obsolete. The two sides of the “neoliberalism versus nationalism” narrative have both evolved and outgrown their respective caricatures. Macron no longer sounds like the neoliberal proselytizer of his first presidential campaign, while Le Pen’s nationalism now stops short of advocating monetary independence for France, let alone leaving the EU. Left, Right, and center still diverge markedly on issues such as taxation, welfare, and immigration. Yet they also seem to be converging in other areas, such as embracing the rhetoric of “sovereignty” and “protection” outlined above, favoring a greening of the economic structure by means of large-scale public investments, and deferring (if only by default) to the EU as France’s monetary and geopolitical overlord.
It also follows that France’s political experience, despite its idiosyncrasies, could be illustrative of a broader pattern evidenced in other Western societies as well. “Technocrats” on one side, and “radicals” on the other, may be moving closer to each other. Leaving behind the pitched battles of the 2010s between “globalists” and “nationalists,” the future may offer instead a measure of amalgamation between the two, in terms of methods, discourse, policies, and personnel. From this perspective, Macron may be cast as a transitional figure, whose trajectory between 2017 and today expresses an incipient process of emulation, and hybridization, between establishment and antiestablishment.
This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VI, Number 3 (Fall 2022): 155–76.
Notes
1 Perry Anderson, “Why the System Will Still Win,” Le Monde diplomatique (March 2017). Also Perry Anderson, “The Centre Can Hold: The French Spring,” New Left Review (May-June 2017).
2 L’Expansion, “Réforme bancaire : des lobbys très investis,” December 5, 2012.
3 Jens van’t Klooster, “Technocratic Keynesianism: A Paradigm Shift without Legislative Change,” New Political Economy, December 31, 2021.
4 Christopher J. Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti, Technopopulism: The New Logic of Democratic Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
5 An invaluable journalistic investigation of Macronian networks within the French elite is Marc Endeweld, Le grand manipulateur : Les réseaux secrets de Macron (Paris: Éditions Stock, 2019).
6 Covid-19 Excess Mortality Collaborators, “Estimating Excess Mortality due to the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Systematic Analysis of Covid-19-Related Mortality, 2020–21,” Lancet, March 2022.
7 Victor Mallet and Roula Khalaf, “Macron Warns of EU Unravelling Unless It Embraces Financial Solidarity,” Financial Times, April 16, 2020.
8 See Matthias Thiemann and Peter Volberding, “The Rise of Bpifrance: The Rebirth of the Dirigiste State?,” The Reinvention of Development Banking in the European Union, eds. Daniel Mertens, Matthias Thiemann, and Peter Volberding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
9 Paolo Gerbaudo, The Great Recoil: Politics after Populism and Pandemic (London: Verso, 2021).
10 Klooster, “Technocratic Keynesianism”; Rochelle Toplensky and Alex Barker, “The European Investment Bank: The EU’s Hidden Giant,” Financial Times, July 14, 2019; Véronique Chocron, “La Caisse des Dépôts va investir 26 milliards d’euros pour appuyer le plan de relance,” Le Monde, September 7, 2020.
11 Valentina Romei, “Europe First: The EU’s Digital Industrialisation Challenge,” Financial Times, December 16, 2019.
12 Bruno Amable and Stefano Palombarini, The Last Neoliberal: Macron and the Origins of France’s Political Crisis (London: Verso, 2021).
13 Anderson, “Why the System Will Still Win.”
14 Thomas Fazi, “The Eternal Return of ‘Technical Government’ in Italy,” American Affairs 5, no. 2 (Summer 2021): 116–38.
The 2010s were a dangerous decade in Western politics. In the span of a single year, between June 2016 and June 2017, the Brexit referendum began Britain’s departure from the EU, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, and France’s party system collapsed. But whereas Brexit and Trump were seen as breakthroughs of nationalist populism, what emerged from the French upheaval in that year was populism turned on its head. Emmanuel Macron, a centrist newcomer of impeccable technocratic, neoliberal, and pro-EU credentials, routed establishment center-left and center-right parties and took over the presidency in May 2017, putting a political party he had launched barely a year before at the center of French politics.
Against a backdrop of widespread discontent with the status quo in the dying days of François Hollande’s crumbling presidency, Macron looked in 2017 as though he had saved the day for the established order in France. In Perry Anderson’s biting words, Macron was a “simulacrum” of populism, an “antibody” generated by a threatened system to protect itself from being overturned, ultimately demonstrating—a reference to W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming”—that “the centre can hold.”1
Five years on, how is Macron’s center faring? In April this year, he was reelected as French president for another five-year term, beating, for the second time, right-wing candidate Marine Le Pen in the runoff. This in itself was a triumph of sorts, as France’s Fifth Republic tends to be unforgiving to incumbents, and the last time a sitting president was reelected was Jacques Chirac in 2002. Two months later, however, the president’s party and its allies lost their outright parliamentary majority in the legislative elections, obtaining only 42 percent of seats (245 out of 577), although remaining the largest political force in the National Assembly.
There is much more at stake in Macron’s shifting fortunes than adjustments in the composition of the French political class from one election cycle to the next. Over the past five years, France has faced, with the Yellow Vests movement followed by the Covid-19 epidemic, two episodes whose destabilizing potential exceeded anything the nation had experienced since the street protests of May 1968. Beyond these exceptional events, the country currently finds itself in a vortex of change that is reshaping economy, polity, and ideology both domestically and at the European level.
Emerging from the pandemic, France’s economic policy has become significantly more interventionist, while political rhetoric from all quarters today foregrounds issues of sovereignty, independence, protection, and planning—in sharp contrast to the neoliberal idiom on which Macron rode to power five years ago. The French president has navigated this shifting terrain deftly enough to ensure his reelection, striving to remake himself from neoliberal upstart to post-neoliberal statesman between 2017 and 2022. Yet antiestablishment political forces are steadily rising, now representing half or more of the electorate depending on the election. These forces are currently, on the right, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement national (National Rally, RN), and on the left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France insoumise (France Unbowed, FI). Both made major gains in parliament this June and are anticipating more decisive wins in the future, posing the question of how France’s current power structure will react if and when they gain a foothold in the executive.
At a fundamental level, past, present, and future developments in French politics are shaped by the nation’s political economy. On this premise, what follows takes a deeper look at the French and European contexts, setting out how socioeconomic circumstances and major policy choices interacted to produce Hollande’s fall, Macron’s victories, and persistent discontent expressed by the Yellow Vests and the inexorable rise of antiestablishment forces.
Given the present-day French trajectory, there are two major unknowns that carry vast implications for the future of France and Europe. First, how real is the French government and the EU’s post-pandemic embrace of neo-statism in economic policy? Is neoliberalism truly fading away as a guiding paradigm? And second, how will ruling institutions and incumbent elites accommodate the ascendancy of antiestablishment movements like RN and FI? Put differently, are these rising counter-elites on the radical right and the radical left preparing themselves to tear the system down, or to be co-opted by it?
France’s Long-Simmering Crisis
The acute political turbulence of recent years in France was a long time coming. After the first oil shock of 1973 put an end to a prolonged postwar economic boom known as the Trente Glorieuses (thirty glorious years), the country recorded lackluster growth almost continuously in the 1980s, ’90s, and 2000s. Most damaging from the standpoint of the French public, the tight labor market of the 1950s and ’60s gave way to mass unemployment—increasing from eight hundred thousand registered unemployed in 1975 to three million in the 1990s. Sweeping marketization reforms imposed by Left and Right politicians alike from the mid-1980s onward under the two-term presidencies of François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac did little to revive the economy, or to dissipate a widespread feeling of dissatisfaction vis-à-vis the political class.
For French citizens accustomed to thinking that their country was mired in crisis ever since the 1970s, the 2008–9 financial crash and recession only appeared to add a new crisis atop an existing one. As the unemployment rate rose from 7.2 percent in 2008 to 10.5 percent in 2013, GDP growth faltered once again in the context of international financial market speculation on eurozone states’ sovereign debt, amounting to 0–1 percent per year from 2012 to 2016. Under pressure from the European Commission and anxious to reassure investors, speculators, and domestic and foreign business interests, the French government carried out pro-cyclical fiscal tightening during the final years of Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidency (2007–12) and the early years of François Hollande’s (2012–17), further suppressing demand and deepening the crisis.
Looking back at these years, Hollande’s failed presidency was an object lesson in how to discredit and delegitimize a governing party—in this instance the French Socialist Party (PS)—to the point of bringing an entire party system down with it. Elected in 2012 on a left-leaning platform promising to renegotiate European budget requirements, to end austerity, and to wage battle against the financial sector, Hollande rapidly caved in to the EU—doubling down on spending cuts at the European Commission’s behest—and to the banking industry—passing a bank regulation law drafted under bankers’ own guidance that fell short of the provisions contained in the U.S. Dodd-Frank Act.2 Having announced during his campaign a tax rate of 75 percent on annual income above €1 million, this promise soon morphed into an “exceptional solidarity contribution” of 50 percent that was discontinued in 2015. Somehow convinced that corporate interests were still in need of more reassurance and support, Hollande further tilted to the right during his presidency, announcing in 2014 a supply-side package consisting of €40 billion of cuts in taxes and social security contributions for businesses. This was clumsily labeled a “pact of responsibility,” implying that companies were expected to do their part by expanding investment and employment. Unsurprisingly, this did not come to pass.
As it happened, the one locus of power in Europe that went against the grain of neoliberal orthodoxy in the 2010s was not France’s “socialist” government under Hollande but the European Central Bank (ECB). Under Mario Draghi’s leadership, it pledged in 2012 to do “whatever it takes” to ensure the euro’s survival, thereby alleviating market speculation on member-states’ sovereign debt. From 2015 onward, this was followed by large-scale buying of government bonds under the ECB’s Public Sector Purchase Programme (PSPP), reaching over €2 trillion by 2019. As shown by Jens van’t Klooster, this “technocratic Keynesianism” on the part of Draghi and the ECB amounted to de facto monetary financing of government deficits in the euro area, in total reversal of the Friedmanite monetarist precepts of a prior generation, even though the ECB itself would not admit to this much.3
Back in France, as Hollande’s presidency hurtled on, it became increasingly obvious that his dogged efforts to please corporate interests with so little to show for it amounted to political suicide. By the last year of his term, in 2016, not only had the French public suffered through eight years of economic stagnation, it was also rightfully contemptuous of a president who had so glaringly turned his back on the left rhetoric that had brought him to power. When Hollande’s labor minister, Myriam El-Khomri, proceeded to pass a bill weakening protective labor rules, mass protests and dramatic rioting ensued in the spring of 2016, while Hollande’s approval rating hovered between 10 and 20 percent—record lows for any French president. Aware of his dismal reelection odds, Hollande announced in December 2016 that he would not seek a second term—a first in the Fifth Republic.
2017: Neoliberal Populism to the Rescue
With Hollande out of the race and the Socialist Party as unpopular as it could be, the laws of political bipolarity would have predicted an easy victory for France’s center-right, meaning Les Républicains (the Republicans, LR), in the 2017 election. Despite its American-sounding name, adopted in 2015, LR is the historical, “Gaullist” governing party of the French Right, founded in support of General de Gaulle’s political ambitions. The party has been led, in more recent decades, by Presidents Chirac and Sarkozy (French political parties have a fondness for changing their names).
In the spring of 2017, however, the regular alternation of power between the PS and the Gaullist Right, which had anchored French politics since the early 1980s, failed to take place. LR’s candidate, François Fillon, a former prime minister under President Sarkozy, was hit a few months before the election by damaging evidence of embezzlement, putting a dent in his poll numbers. At a deeper level, the French electorate was understandably wary, as the 2017 election season opened, of the prospect of yet another iteration of the Left-Right pendulum that had done so little to serve its interests amid economic crisis. This deep-seated discontent among the citizenry, combined with Hollande’s dismal performance and Fillon’s corruption baggage, opened up the electoral space for Emmanuel Macron to take over the presidency.
Macron, a civil servant by training and a former investment banker, had been Hollande’s economy minister for two years before resigning to create En Marche! (On the Move!), a personal political movement whose initials, “EM,” were his own. Going into the election, he projected a youthful, modernizing image, extolling the virtues of entrepreneurialism and castigating the incumbent political class, Left and Right, for being more concerned about waging fruitless partisan battles than finding sound solutions for the nation’s future. In terms of policy, Macron was the quintessential establishment candidate, a child of technocracy, the epitome of elite consensus, a champion of the neoliberal axioms of marketization that had been foisted on French society since the 1980s. In terms of rhetoric, though, he was antiestablishment to the extent that he called for disposing of France’s political class as it had hitherto existed—and dispose of it he did. This paradox is echoed in Chris Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti’s idea of “technopopulism,” the blending of populist antiestablishment rhetoric with an appeal to technocratic reason, of which they see Macronism as a salient example.4
Macron came out on top in the first round of the 2017 presidential election at 24 percent, followed by the Far Right’s Marine Le Pen at 21 percent, and by Fillon and left-populist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, both at 20 percent. Far behind, Benoît Hamon, the PS’s candidate, came in fifth at 6 percent in a perfect “Pasokization” scenario—whereby a nominally socialist party with long governing experience is discredited and marginalized for having aligned too slavishly to EU budgetary orthodoxy, as had recently happened to Greece’s Panhellenic Socialist Movement, or pasok, under George Papandreou. Two weeks later Macron roundly defeated Le Pen in the runoff 66 to 34 percent, benefiting from a large number of voters seeing him as the lesser of two evils. Having barely entered the Élysée Palace, Macron oversaw the remaking of his personal movement from En Marche! to La République en Marche (the Republic on the Move, LREM), which went on to win an outright majority in the National Assembly in the legislative elections the following month. LR and the PS, which together had held 82 percent of seats in the previous legislature, saw their deputy numbers drop to 19 and 5 percent, respectively.
Beyond the dramatic fortunes of its winners and losers, the 2017 election season was also a watershed moment in the methods of doing politics in France. In short, institutionalized political parties in the twentieth-century mold were displaced by personalistic parties, or “movements,” revolving entirely around a single individual. Macron’s LREM fits the latter template perfectly in the sense that the party line is and can only be Macron’s, and so does Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s FI on the left and—only to a slightly lesser extent—Marine Le Pen’s RN on the right. By contrast, LR (ever since de Gaulle’s passing) and the PS function as arenas in which, however influential individual party leaders may become, they face competitive elections to gain and retain leadership of the organization and have to make internal compromises and alliances to keep the bulk of its membership on their side. Among other attributes, the personalistic party has the potential to be much more adaptable to fast-changing circumstances than the institutional party, since the leader’s word is enough to set the direction of travel, without having to go through high-stakes congresses and committee meetings in which rival political strategies are put to a vote. In a kind of Darwinian moment, the 2017 election cycle in France made it clear which of the two organizational models was fitter for survival in the present era of politics.
Winning the day in 2017 on the promise of political change, Macron had no qualms, once in the Élysée Palace, about taking full advantage of the traditional prerogatives and rituals of grandeur attached to the presidency in France’s Fifth Republic. A distinctive aspect of the French political system is that it is not only based (as in the United States, but unlike the rest of Western Europe) on the primacy of the presidential office over government activity, but also (unlike the United States) on the tight subordination of the legislative branch to the executive branch if—and this is a significant caveat—the president’s allies enjoy an outright majority in the National Assembly. Additionally, throughout Macron’s first term, the LREM majority in parliament was uniquely bereft of political autonomy since it was mostly composed of individuals—many of whom had no prior experience in politics—handpicked by Macron in the wake of his 2017 victory. This further diminished the already low standing of parliament in the Fifth Republic, making the National Assembly little more than a rubber stamp parliament or “registration chamber” (chambre d’enregistrement) controlled by the president between 2017 and 2022.
The sudden death of France’s two-party system in 2017 was an ambiguous event. The political landscape capsized as a result of the Macronian challenge, yet beyond the confines of political life, the rest of the power structure—the bureaucracy, the corporations—was left intact and if anything strengthened. The president himself had the ideal profile to further bind together the two traditional poles of France’s elite, namely the career civil service and “high-level functionaries” (hauts fonctionnaires) on the one hand, and the upper reaches of the business world on the other. Although LREM could not from the start match the vast networks of allies nurtured by the PS and LR over many years in finance, industry, the media, and the academy, Macron did succeed in rapidly building up his own power network of loyal politicians, bureaucrats, consultants, business people, and intellectuals.5 These people—Macron’s people—quickly earned the nickname of “Macronia” (la macronie).
Policy-wise, early Macronism was essentially neoliberalism. This meant, during Macron’s first year in office, dismantling a wealth tax in place since the 1980s, further deregulating the labor market by a series of executive orders, and passing a plan to convert the national rail service, SNCF, into a for-profit corporation. In the area of public finance, the government brought the budget deficit below the EU-dictated 3 percent mark, insisting on the need to appear “credible” in the eyes of European institutions. Rhetorically, Macron vowed to remake France into a “start-up nation”—a vacuous trope of aspirational neoliberalism if there ever was one. None of this was well-suited to address the French public’s deep-seated dissatisfaction with the economic status quo.
2018–19: Enter the Yellow Vests, Macron’s Rightward Turn
The first cataclysmic event in Macron’s presidency was the Yellow Vest (Gilets jaunes) movement—the most destabilizing episode of protest and rioting France had known since 1968. Although the Yellow Vests came in 2018 and went in 2019, and the impression they left has now faded given everything that has happened since, it would be difficult to understate the dramatic burst of subversion they embodied and the genuine threat they represented to the French state.
From the standpoint of France’s political history, the Yellow Vests were the “power of the street” (le pouvoir de la rue) incarnate—a kind of power that has carried over from the French Revolution to the present day. Indeed, throughout the Fifth Republic, “the street,” in the form of mass strikes and demonstrations, has usually been a far more effective countervailing power to executive authority than the National Assembly. This applies equally to the May 1968 protests of students and workers, to the public sector strikes of 1995 against pension and social security reform, and to the 2006 strikes and demonstrations against labor market reform—all of which were supported by a majority of public opinion and imposed policy turnarounds on the government.
While resonating with the French political protest tradition, the Yellow Vests were also truly innovative in their methods of action. The movement was sparked by a government decision to increase the taxation of fuel in the fall of 2018, in contrast to the labor and welfare issues that are the regular fare of French protest politics. Bearing high-visibility yellow jackets, car-owning protestors, mostly originating from small towns and medium-sized cities and from the lower-middle class, coordinated on social media to occupy roundabouts and block roads across the country. Additionally, dramatic street demonstrations occurred in city centers (most memorably on the Champs-Élysées in Paris) every Saturday. The movement peaked in intensity in its second and third weeks, in late November and early December 2018. By that point, the Yellow Vests’ message already went far beyond fuel taxation, foregrounding public services, purchasing power, and direct democracy, as well as loud calls for Macron to step down.
Although the right to protest is guaranteed by law in France, it is conditional on protest organizers notifying local authorities who reserve the right to ban public gatherings in the name of preserving “public order” on a case-by-case basis. As authorities responsible for policing city centers reacted to instances of sporadic violence by banning Yellow Vest marches in certain areas, the refusal of hundreds of thousands of protestors to abide by the law quickly turned the movement into the greatest threat to “public order” in half a century, unleashing violent police repression against “unauthorized gatherings.” In the course of the movement, over ten thousand protestors ended up in police custody and over four thousand individuals were wounded according to the Interior Ministry’s own statistics.
Shaken by the gravity of the situation, including the prospect of police forces being overwhelmed, Macron quickly moved to defuse the crisis, giving in to the Yellow Vests in early December by cancelling the fuel tax increase. While the Yellow Vest movement subsided thereafter, it nonetheless continued for months as Macron moved to conduct a “Great Debate” (le Grand Débat) with the nation in the early months of 2019. Eyeing the European Parliament election coming up in May as the next political opportunity, he concluded the “Great Debate” in April by announcing, among other lesser measures, a significant cut in income tax essentially benefiting the second-richest income quartile. This was mostly irrelevant to solving the cost-of-living challenges of the Yellow Vest base (often located in the third income quartile), but it proved a political masterstroke for siphoning off well-to-do conservative voters of LR who had been staunch supporters of the police’s ruthless suppression of the protests.
In the 2019 elections, LREM hardly carried the day, obtaining 22 percent of the vote to RN’s 23 percent, but what mattered to Macron was that both governing parties of the pre-2017 era performed pitifully, at 8 percent (LR) and 6 percent (PS), respectively. Having overseen the “Pasokization” of the PS in 2017, in 2019 Macron left LR and the whole Gaullist lineage of French politics in the dust, consolidating LREM as the central pole in the political field with Le Pen’s Far Right as its main challenger.
Shifting his image decisively to the right in 2019 and attracting a large contingent of older conservative “law-and-order” voters into his support base, Macron paradoxically emerged from the Yellow Vest crisis a stronger player in the French political space than before it. Still a somewhat inexperienced politician at the time he first campaigned for president in 2017, by 2019 he had become a consummate political operator, especially adept at navigating periods of crisis and instability to his own advantage.
2020–21: Pandemic Politics, All Hail Sovereignty!
Macron’s handling of the Covid-19 epidemic echoes what occurred during the Yellow Vest crisis: a president destabilized at first by the suddenness of the challenge, racing to extinguish the worst of the threat, and thereafter skillfully working to convert a collective crisis into political gains for himself. Yet in contrast to the Yellow Vests, the pandemic constituted a shock of gigantic proportions to economic life in France, precipitating a similarly drastic economic policy response on the part of the state. The French political economy is still in the process of being reshaped by the repercussions of the health crisis, transforming in turn some of the economic norms that prevailed in the pre-pandemic era.
The year 2020 did not start auspiciously for Macron. By that point determined to redesign France’s comparatively generous pay-as-you-go pension system from a year-based to a points-based system, he merely succeeded in producing a technocratic nightmare of contending economic projections, convincing the majority of the public that it had more to lose than to gain from the reform. Most trade unions were also hostile, bringing about, in December 2019 and January 2020, the most prolonged public transport strike in over two decades.
By February 2020, SARS-CoV-2 was already spreading undetected in the French population. As the seriousness of the epidemic became clear in early March, the French government, like so many others, stumbled over how to react. Minimizing the usefulness of face masks before abruptly requisitioning all mask stocks and production in the country, while relying for weeks on a staged influenza response plan ill-suited to the features of the coronavirus, Macron eventually imposed one of the strictest national lockdowns in Europe from mid-March to mid-May 2020, closing all schools and public venues and making it compulsory to fill out a form each and every time one ventured outside. By that point the contentious pension reform had been shelved.
On the epidemiological front, French Covid deaths peaked at about one thousand per day in the first days of April 2020, never reaching such heights thereafter. After the initial lockdown was lifted, viral circulation remained low for several months before rising again, as in much of Europe, during the fall of 2020, remaining at high levels until the summer of 2021. From October 2020 to June 2021, venues such as restaurants, cafés, bars, museums, cinemas, and theaters were shut, and a curfew was imposed, forbidding citizens from leaving their homes in the evening without justification. Schools remained open during that time. The vaccination of over 80 percent of adults by late summer 2021 significantly reduced the case fatality rate, leading the government to eliminate most restrictions. Overall, France experienced excess deaths in 2020–21 of 155,000, suggesting an average excess mortality for western Europe—lower than Italy, Spain, and the UK but higher than Germany.6 At the same time, among the public, fear of the virus and anger directed at the government’s lack of preparedness in the spring of 2020 gradually gave way to a more moderate attitude, perceiving restrictions as justified primarily in order to protect public hospitals from being overwhelmed. Macron himself espoused this emerging consensus, deploying rhetoric centered on balancing constraints and freedoms in the course of “learning to live with the virus.”
While the health measures enacted by France in the face of the virus were unremarkable in the European context, the government’s economic policy response was ultimately much more significant. From March 2020 onward, the Finance Ministry—referred to in France as Bercy, after the Paris neighborhood in which it is located—deployed an array of measures to neutralize the effects of lockdowns and restrictions on firms, wage-earners, and the standard of living. These included, first, a wage replacement scheme whereby the state paid out upward of 80 percent of the salaries of workers left idle by health restrictions and the slowdown in economic activity. Second, loans guaranteed by the state in the amount of €140 billion were channeled through the banking system and handed out to businesses of all sizes. Third, a “Solidarity Fund” was set up to directly compensate a portion of small firms’ income losses alongside tax deferrals and cancellations. Fourth, a series of sector-specific rescue plans were adopted in the course of 2020, targeting areas such as the car industry, aerospace, and tourism. To this was added, in September 2020, a recovery plan worth €100 billion featuring a mix of green investments, social housing, employee training, and tax cuts for manufacturers.
Introducing an initial raft of measures on national television in March 2020, Macron stressed “solidarity” when confronting the crisis and committed support “whatever the cost” (quoi qu’il en coûte)—a phrase that would come to denote the entire French economic response to the virus. In an interview with the Financial Times the following month, he asserted that “we have nationalized the salaries and P&L [profits and losses] of practically all enterprises.”7 As French GDP plunged by 8 percent in 2020, public debt rose from 98 to 116 percent of GDP in a single year. This rise in debt hardly mattered in the short run since the ECB, by now headed by former French finance minister Christine Lagarde, had itself introduced in March 2020 the Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme (PEPP), which opened the door to central bank purchases of government bonds in excess of what had already been undertaken under Draghi. Overall, the economic support measures implemented by Bercy lasted well into the second half of 2021, allowing for a much smaller and more short-lived rise in the French unemployment rate than after the 2008 crisis, while enterprise insolvencies were in fact fewer in 2020 and 2021 than in 2019.
Considering the epidemic and the socioeconomic picture together, it is easy to understand why Macron’s personal standing within the electorate improved somewhat during the course of the pandemic. By the time mass vaccination allowed France to escape the most debilitating phase in the summer of 2021, Macron’s approval rating was stabilizing around 40 percent—a figure much higher than Hollande’s and Sarkozy’s four years into their respective presidencies. Significantly, the “whatever the costs” and “solidarity” aspects of the French policy response allowed Macron to cultivate his left flank, retaining the potential support of former PS voters after having spared no effort in cultivating his right flank and attracting LR voters in response to the Yellow Vests in 2019.
The pandemic in France also foregrounded leitmotifs that eschew straightforward Left-versus-Right categorization, coalescing into a new dominant discourse of “sovereignty” and “protection.” This reflected, among other things, an attempt by Macron to reinvent his public image once more, away from the neoliberal modernizer of 2017 and toward embodying the resilience of French society in the midst of intensifying global disorder. Macron still being a staunch Europeanist, and highly invested in EU-level power politics, he is always careful to add the proviso that “sovereignty” and “protection” also apply at the EU level, producing awkward tropes along the lines of “a sovereign France in a sovereign Europe” and “a France that protects in a Europe that protects.”
To illustrate this swerve in rhetoric, on March 12, 2020, Macron declared: “What this pandemic reveals is that there are goods and services that must be placed outside market laws. To trust our food, our protection, our capacity to cure the sick, essentially our framework of living, to others than us is madness. We have to take back control over them.” As if the coronavirus had taught a globalist president to speak in the language of Brexit, Macron would go on to use the expression “take back control” on several occasions in 2021. By doing so, he sought to chime with ongoing ideological undercurrents triggered by the pandemic within French society at large, including a greater emphasis on “protecting one’s own” (protéger les siens) in hard times and a stronger preference for national and regional “short circuits” in the production and distribution of essential goods as opposed to globalized supply chains.
Although it is too early to tell the long-term impact of pandemic politics in France, it seems a fair conjecture that rhetorical elements of this kind are working to validate and to entrench some of the political economy transformations induced by the virus, primarily the dramatic interventionism of Bercy and the ECB to keep the French economy afloat during the worst of the crisis. Revealingly, while the income support measures of 2020–21 have been gradually wound down in step with post-lockdown recovery, the government’s propensity to mobilize fiscal resources and financial circuitry to political ends has remained markedly higher than before the pandemic. This is exemplified by the launch in October 2021 of a “France 2030” plan of industrial and technological investments worth €34 billion, as well as by the rising profile of Bpifrance, a government bank, as a vehicle for channeling credit and for investing in companies on behalf of the state.8 The idea that the pandemic is ushering in a period of economic statism in the West, as put forward by Paolo Gerbaudo,9 might well turn out to apply to France in the coming years.
2022: Macronia Lives On
As Macron geared up for the presidential and legislative elections scheduled in the spring of 2022, Macronism had become blurred as a result of state interventionism during the pandemic, but Macronia could feel confident in the future, having maintained political dominance through the dramatic episodes of the Yellow Vests and the coronavirus. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in late February gave Macron a further bump in the polls as he sought to project competence and gravitas in the face of geopolitical turbulence. Even then, however, his approval rating only stood in the low forties. It should also be mentioned that from early on Macron has elicited strong feelings of anger and outright hatred in sections of the electorate exasperated by his elitist demeanor and occasional expressions of contempt for the public. (In 2017, he mused during a speech, “A train station is a place where one encounters people who are successful and people who are nothing.”)
Declaring his candidacy and outlining his platform in late March 2022, Macron characteristically put out signals to both sides of the political spectrum, brazenly poaching policy ideas from other contenders. Eyeing the Left, he argued for the necessity of extensive state-coordinated green investments, in French parlance “ecological planning” (la planification écologique)—a concept that Jean-Luc Mélenchon had been championing since his 2012 presidential campaign. Eyeing the Right, Macron announced he would raise the legal retirement age from sixty-two to sixty-five, a less convoluted reform than the points-based redesign that had failed two years prior, and incidentally an LR policy plank. At the same time, Macron continued in the rhetorical vein he had explored during the pandemic by affirming the imperative to make France more “independent” in matters of energy, manufacturing, and technology.
Macron came out on top in the first round (28 percent), with strong showings on the part of the Far Right’s Le Pen (23 percent) and the Far Left’s Mélenchon (22 percent). The two parties which together had governed France during practically all of the Fifth Republic prior to 2017 were humiliated, with LR’s candidate Valérie Pécresse obtaining just under 5 percent and the PS’s candidate Anne Hidalgo just under 2 percent. As was expected, Macron went on to beat Le Pen in the run-off 59 to 41 percent in late April. Once more, he owed his election to a “lesser of two evils” logic whereby voters unsympathetic to both Macron and Le Pen viewed a Le Pen presidency as the worse prospect. Compared to 2017, however, his margin over Le Pen had halved, implying that distrust of the Far Right in the French electorate is steadily eroding. Besides Macron’s victory, the obvious takeaway of the presidential election was the ascendancy of antiestablishment forces. Combined, they reached about 60 percent of the vote in the first round (adding Le Pen’s and Mélenchon’s scores to that of lesser far left and far right candidates, including radical right firebrand Éric Zemmour, who obtained 7 percent).
Marine Le Pen’s RN party is the successor of her father Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front national, a party founded in the early 1970s by a motley crew of former Nazi collaborators, neofascist militants, and erstwhile defenders of French Algeria. Since taking the reins from Jean-Marie in 2011, Marine has worked hard to detoxify or “de-demonize” (dédiaboliser) its brand while still oftentimes putting out draconian anti-immigrant proposals—for instance, in this year’s election, banning the Muslim headscarf from all public space. In terms of social policy, RN favors keeping France’s welfare state in place while cutting social assistance to noncitizens. Momentarily threatened in late 2021 and early 2022 by the momentum behind the candidacy of Zemmour—a polemicist and television personality single-mindedly focused on countering Islam—Le Pen eventually saw off the challenge and reconsolidated her hold on the French far right.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon, on the other hand, is originally a defector from the PS, having been schooled in politics during the Mitterrand years before becoming a junior minister in the early 2000s and eventually leaving the party in 2008 to set up the Parti de Gauche (Left Party), followed in 2016 by FI. An exceptional political orator, Mélenchon gives voice to radical egalitarian impulses tied to France’s revolutionary tradition since the times of Robespierre, while also drawing on the charismatic populism that made possible the electoral victories of Chávez, Lula, Morales, and Correa in Latin America. In terms of policy, FI calls for greening France’s political economy by way of “ecological planning” together with vigorous redistribution through higher taxes on the rich, a higher minimum wage, and bringing down the retirement age from sixty‑two to sixty.
Macron’s difficulty in containing the rise of RN and FI was exposed during the legislative elections that took place in June. The coalition of LREM and its pro-Macron allies, by now named Ensemble (Together), obtained 245 seats out of 577 in the National Assembly—still the largest political force in parliament but over forty seats short of the outright majority needed to ensure the smooth passage of legislation. To its left, 142 seats now belong to nupes, an electoral coalition cobbled together at short notice before the election, with Mélenchon’s FI as the leading force (75 seats) and the humbled Socialists, Greens, and Communists as auxiliaries. Nupes stands for New Ecological Social Popular Union, and it is uncertain how long it can survive the contrast between FI’s left radicalism and the PS and Greens’ proclivity for moderation. To the right, the Macronist bloc in parliament confronts a dwindling contingent from LR (64 seats) and a remarkable showing from Le Pen’s RN (89 seats)—a party that had long been kept at a distance from the National Assembly due to the two-round constituency-based voting system.
Having lost the outright control over parliament that he formerly enjoyed, it is still not clear at the time of this writing how Macron will go about governing in his second term. Potential strategies might include enticing LR or the center‑left (the PS and the Greens) into a kind of centrist alliance, or enlisting individual deputies left and right in sufficient numbers with the promise of government posts, or building legislative majorities on a case‑by-base basis. While this will be a humbling experience for a president who had up to this year treated parliament chiefly as a rubber stamp, Macron still retains control of the government for as long as the Left, LR, and RN do not move together to bring it down in a no-confidence motion. Aside from that, the constitution gives him the right to dissolve parliament and call new legislative elections at a moment of his choosing. Having proved capable of riding out various crises to his own advantage during his first term, Macron could very well find ways to instrumentalize institutional blockage in a divided parliament in order to bolster his authority.
Whether Macron will keep the upper hand on the political battlefield during the upcoming five years is uncertain, but nor is this the most significant question facing France today. Macron is scheduled to leave the Élysée Palace in 2027, having reached the constitutional two-term limit, and after this happens, the uncertainty surrounding the country’s political future only thickens. The two-dimensional polarization inside the National Assembly today—between Left and Right and between establishment and antiestablishment—is itself a symptom of the simmering crisis of authority that has been engulfing France for decades. This crisis is inducing slow-moving changes in the economic structure and the political landscape that a single individual like Macron, however skillful or lucky, can do little to direct.
A Neo-Statist France in a Neo-Statist Europe?
From the perspective of political economy, a key question for the future of Europe will be whether the interventionist policy orientation coming out of the pandemic is likely to be sustained. Paolo Gerbaudo’s recent book The Great Recoil contends that neoliberalism is giving way to a neo-statism shared by Left and Right alike, centered on the master-signifiers of “sovereignty,” “protection,” and “control.” His argument, however persuasive on its own terms, is mostly focused on political discourse, less so on the interpretation of policy and the analysis of economic institutions. The fact remains that four decades of reforms and restructurings since the 1980s have left most European countries, including France, under entrenched neoliberal institutional arrangements in a number of areas that include product markets, financial activity, and international trade. Incumbent economic elites are deeply invested in these arrangements—in effect they generate their wealth and standing through them—and how they might hinder or neutralize attempts to transform existing structures is a major unknown.
This being said, it is also the case that neoliberalism as rhetoric appears to be mortally wounded in the aftermath of the pandemic, especially so in France. Listening to Macron speak on the economy in 2022 does not ring the same as in 2017. His is a post-neoliberal discourse, in which nods to sovereignty now outnumber nods to free enterprise. Many on the French left continue to entertain the bugbear image of Macron as Thatcher reincarnate, a man hiding his game and biding his time until the opportunity arises to finally reconstruct France by way of a neoliberal blueprint. This view might be debatable at the level of individual psychology, and Macron might well still be a true neoliberal believer in his heart of hearts, but this is a misreading of the political moment. What happened in the course of Macron’s first term is that he was confronted with a stark choice between moving past neoliberalism and surviving politically, or keeping to the neoliberal script and being wiped away in the manner of Hollande. Ever the political animal, Macron went with the former. Put differently, he chose to ride the swelling tide of statism that arose out of the pandemic rather than be drowned under it.
Statism, however, is not performative, and statist intent is not enough to bury policy paradigms or to overhaul economic structures. From the standpoint of policy content and implementation, the neo-statist turn in France and in Europe is incomplete. Whether progress will be made toward a more comprehensive neo-statist order will depend not on technocratic willingness and ability alone but on a series of upcoming political battles involving politicians, bureaucrats, capitalists, and electorates.
At the present time, there are two areas in which neo-statism has come to frame the economic agenda both in France and in EU institutions. The first is monetary policy, including not only monetary creation and interest rates, but also credit guidance and the politics of sovereign debt. As discussed above, the ECB has been de facto engaged in monetary financing—meaning the monetary funding of government deficits—since the mid-2010s and has doubled down on it since the beginning of the pandemic. Simultaneously, monetary technocrats in Europe are seeking to adopt new mechanisms to guide the allocation of private credit on the basis of environmental criteria, while other public institutions such as the European Investment Bank and France’s Caisse des Dépôts and Bpifrance are scaling up to distribute funding in accordance with EU and domestic-level greening agendas.10
The second area of rising state assertiveness is industrial and technological policy, encompassing public funding of R&D, targeted lending facilities, venture capital, government equity in companies, reshoring initiatives, and the screening of inbound foreign investment in strategic sectors. In the French context, this is illustrated by the targeting of quantum research, semiconductors, hydrogen, and nuclear reactors, among other domains, in the 2020 post-pandemic recovery plan and the “France 2030” plan mentioned above. Domestic programs of this sort are increasingly being conceived and implemented in tandem with the objectives and plans put out by the European Commission, as in the EUNextGen recovery plan, the “European Green Deal,” and sectoral initiatives for semiconductors (the European Chips Act) and batteries (the European Battery Alliance). Although the experience of the pandemic accelerated the pace of these efforts, it is notable that industrial policy was high on the agenda from the moment Ursula von der Leyen became Commission president in late 2019.11 The most publicized justification for this interventionist drive has been the need to address climate change, but another significant impetus—spelled out less often—has been EU politicians’ and technocrats’ heightened awareness of China as both a case study in state-directed growth and a geo-economic competitor.
Beyond these two policy domains, it is unclear that a coherent neo-statist paradigm encompassing the whole political economy will prevail in Europe and in France. The functioning of the labor market, redistributive taxation, as well as the welfare state writ large (including pensions, healthcare, unemployment, disability, and poverty relief) continue to be partisan issues, chiefly set on a left-right spectrum, about which the rhetoric of “sovereignty” and “independence” has little to say. It is conceivable that neo-statism in some areas will coexist with neoliberal stagnation in others. To be sure, strengthening the state’s hand in fostering technological innovation, in catching up with China in battery manufacturing, or in channeling funds to renewable energy investments does not preclude welfare retrenchment and labor market deregulation happening at the very same time. Whether Europe will move not only in a more statist direction, but also in a more egalitarian one, will very much depend on which political forces emerge the strongest from the current political conjuncture.
Breakdown or Co-optation?
As Macron is scheduled to exit the French presidency in 2027, what will come next? Time seems to be on the side of antiestablishment forces, specifically Le Pen’s RN on the right and Mélenchon’s FI on the left. To date, Le Pen and Mélenchon have each taken part in three election cycles for the presidency and parliament—in 2012, 2017, and 2022—and they have seen their vote shares and deputy numbers rise steadily over time. Sociologically, their support bases are consolidating, echoing to some degree the geography of support for Trump and Sanders in 2016 and 2020: rural areas, small towns, and middle-class suburbia for Le Pen; city centers and the banlieues (working-class suburbs of major cities) for Mélenchon. As for Macron, he is stronger among middle-class and well-to-do voters in medium and large cities, leading economists Bruno Amable and Stefano Palombarini to see in him the political expression of a “bourgeois bloc.”12 A generational factor also appears to be at play: Le Pen and (even more so) Mélenchon supporters are younger than the average voter, whereas support for Macron increases with age. It follows that RN and FI might be justified in believing that generational change is working in their favor.
Both RN and FI can be seen as incubators of counter-elites rising out of the field of electoral politics and aiming to break into France’s established order. As of today, that order is still largely inaccessible and inimical to the both of them. The two main components of the French elite are high-level civil servants or hauts fonctionnaires embedded in organs of the state, on the one hand, and capitalist executives and managers located in the corporate world on the other. The upper segments of the academic, cultural, media, medical, legal, and military worlds are auxiliaries to these two core elite demographics. In contrast with the American pattern, the career civil service is so central in France that it is easier, and more common, for state officials to convert mid-career into business leaders than the other way around. Compared to other western European nations, the French elite also happens to be very tight-knit and geographically concentrated (in the city of Paris), with thick networks of acquaintances straddling the public and private sectors.
As rightly pointed out by Perry Anderson in reference to the rise of populist politics in the West, the “established order . . . is capable of absorbing and neutralising revolts from whatever direction with impressive speed.”13 While this could well be valid in most places, it is especially relevant to the French case, where the incumbent elite happens to be unusually compact and coordinated. Being aware of this, both RN and FI have engaged in sustained efforts, out of the public view, to bring onto their side high-ranking state personnel that might train them in the inner workings of government and ease their transition into power if and when it happens. But while state officials sympathetic to either RN or FI can no doubt be found, and a few have joined and supported them publicly, these remain a very small minority among the administrative elite.
Both RN and FI are nonetheless intent on governing France and either may well have a chance to do so in the future. Hence it is notable that both have watered down their platforms on the subject of the EU between the 2017 and 2022 election cycles. Le Pen campaigned in 2017 for leaving the euro but she no longer advocates for this today. As for Mélenchon, he spelled out in 2017 an argument in terms of a “plan A” (changing EU treaties) and a “plan B” (leaving the EU), meaning he would take France out of the bloc if his demands for treaty changes were not met. Today he intends to “disobey” EU treaties in order to impose institutional changes on the bloc, but he no longer contemplates leaving it. These shifts may reveal an awareness on the part of both RN and FI that France and the EU have become so intermingled—the ECB backstopping French government deficits being the latest illustration—that exiting has become too daunting a prospect. It may also represent a way of making their platforms more acceptable to the civil service and to corporate interests, as RN and FI leaders know full well that the overwhelming majority of the French elite view leaving the EU as beyond the pale.
Establishment and antiestablishment actors alike tend to portray RN or FI taking over the French government as a historic rupture in waiting. All sides seem to share a vested interest in this narrative of breakdown: Macron in order to drum up support against impending chaos and Le Pen and Mélenchon in order to assure their supporters that the major changes they call for will be real enough. In the event either antiestablishment party enters government, however, the experience may end up being much less revolutionary than anticipated. For one thing, neither RN nor FI is likely to make its way into power with both the presidency and an outright parliamentary majority to go with it. This would require them to find allies, build coalitions, and make compromises, as FI has already started doing by setting up nupes as a big tent for the French parliamentary Left. It should also be remembered that “governing France,” in concrete terms, means bringing inside the preexisting administrative structure a contingent of several hundred individuals—namely ministers, chiefs of staff, and advisers—who will rely on tens of thousands of career bureaucrats to carry out policy. Given the intrinsic strength and coherence of the French civil service, this does not bode well for the capacity of either RN or FI to steer the state in directions that most administrative officials feel strongly against.
While institutional breakdown probably will not happen if either RN or FI make it into government one day, smooth sailing is unlikely as well. Other Western countries’ experience with populist politics can be instructive in this regard. In the United States, the Trump White House did not bring with it a framework for governing the state, still less the nation’s economic institutions. In Italy—probably a more relevant basis for comparison—elections in 2018 ushered into power an unlikely coalition of two widely divergent populist organizations, the Five Star Movement and the Lega. This set off predictable trepidation in EU capitals. Some political turbulence ensued, yet not only has the euro survived and Italy’s commitment to the EU been maintained, both parties in 2021 threw their support behind a “technical government” led by former central banker Mario Draghi (though he recently resigned).14
The present-day French political scene is volatile and the future is open. A centrist successor to Macron—former prime minister Édouard Philippe is a potential contender—could ride to victory in 2027. RN and FI could also stumble at the doorstep of power as a result of infighting or successful challenges from other political movements. As for France’s ruling elite, it may have to start making preparations for the intrusion in its midst of antiestablishment actors sooner or later. Co-opting these actors successfully would mean not only making some room for them, but also making some of their policies its own. The proverbial center will not emerge unchanged from such a process, but neither is it likely to collapse. If anything, the established order in France will muddle through, as incumbent elites learn how to channel currents of economic, political, and ideological change in directions that leave the bulk of their power and privilege in place.
French Lessons
Looking back at Macronism’s emergence in 2016–17 as a liberal counter-offensive against nationalist populism, and contemplating a post‑Macron future in which antiestablishment actors could find themselves gradually co-opted into France’s existing power structure, it is clear that the referents that framed the political debates of the 2010s have become obsolete. The two sides of the “neoliberalism versus nationalism” narrative have both evolved and outgrown their respective caricatures. Macron no longer sounds like the neoliberal proselytizer of his first presidential campaign, while Le Pen’s nationalism now stops short of advocating monetary independence for France, let alone leaving the EU. Left, Right, and center still diverge markedly on issues such as taxation, welfare, and immigration. Yet they also seem to be converging in other areas, such as embracing the rhetoric of “sovereignty” and “protection” outlined above, favoring a greening of the economic structure by means of large-scale public investments, and deferring (if only by default) to the EU as France’s monetary and geopolitical overlord.
It also follows that France’s political experience, despite its idiosyncrasies, could be illustrative of a broader pattern evidenced in other Western societies as well. “Technocrats” on one side, and “radicals” on the other, may be moving closer to each other. Leaving behind the pitched battles of the 2010s between “globalists” and “nationalists,” the future may offer instead a measure of amalgamation between the two, in terms of methods, discourse, policies, and personnel. From this perspective, Macron may be cast as a transitional figure, whose trajectory between 2017 and today expresses an incipient process of emulation, and hybridization, between establishment and antiestablishment.
This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume VI, Number 3 (Fall 2022): 155–76.
Notes
1 Perry Anderson, “Why the System Will Still Win,” Le Monde diplomatique (March 2017). Also Perry Anderson, “The Centre Can Hold: The French Spring,” New Left Review (May-June 2017).
2 L’Expansion, “Réforme bancaire : des lobbys très investis,” December 5, 2012.
3 Jens van’t Klooster, “Technocratic Keynesianism: A Paradigm Shift without Legislative Change,” New Political Economy, December 31, 2021.
4 Christopher J. Bickerton and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti, Technopopulism: The New Logic of Democratic Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
5 An invaluable journalistic investigation of Macronian networks within the French elite is Marc Endeweld, Le grand manipulateur : Les réseaux secrets de Macron (Paris: Éditions Stock, 2019).
6 Covid-19 Excess Mortality Collaborators, “Estimating Excess Mortality due to the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Systematic Analysis of Covid-19-Related Mortality, 2020–21,” Lancet, March 2022.
7 Victor Mallet and Roula Khalaf, “Macron Warns of EU Unravelling Unless It Embraces Financial Solidarity,” Financial Times, April 16, 2020.
8 See Matthias Thiemann and Peter Volberding, “The Rise of Bpifrance: The Rebirth of the Dirigiste State?,” The Reinvention of Development Banking in the European Union, eds. Daniel Mertens, Matthias Thiemann, and Peter Volberding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
9 Paolo Gerbaudo, The Great Recoil: Politics after Populism and Pandemic (London: Verso, 2021).
10 Klooster, “Technocratic Keynesianism”; Rochelle Toplensky and Alex Barker, “The European Investment Bank: The EU’s Hidden Giant,” Financial Times, July 14, 2019; Véronique Chocron, “La Caisse des Dépôts va investir 26 milliards d’euros pour appuyer le plan de relance,” Le Monde, September 7, 2020.
11 Valentina Romei, “Europe First: The EU’s Digital Industrialisation Challenge,” Financial Times, December 16, 2019.
12 Bruno Amable and Stefano Palombarini, The Last Neoliberal: Macron and the Origins of France’s Political Crisis (London: Verso, 2021).
13 Anderson, “Why the System Will Still Win.”
14 Thomas Fazi, “The Eternal Return of ‘Technical Government’ in Italy,” American Affairs 5, no. 2 (Summer 2021): 116–38.
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