The French president was once a bold reformer. What went wrong?
Constitutionalists in France are having the time of their lives. The uniqueness of France’s current political deadlock has forced its political leaders to pore over some of the more obscure articles of the Constitution of France’s Fifth Republic, designed for Charles de Gaulle. François Bayrou decided to dust off article 49-1, which allows him to trigger a confidence vote in a mad attempt to get parliament to support his minority government. It failed in spectacular fashion, forcing Emmanuel Macron to nominate long-time loyalist Sebastien Lecornu as his third Prime Minister in 14 months.
Bayrou, like his predecessor Michel Barnier, fell victim of an impossible political-fiscal conundrum. How do you pass the most toxic budget in recent French history with a small fragile minority coalition government. The mood in Paris is sombre. The French President is more unpopular than he has ever been. Rating agencies are circling around like sharks. The Minister of the Economy openly fears an IMF takeover.
It might come as a shock, but the current political deadlock and constitutional headaches were preceded not too long ago by a Bonapartist era of political conquest and limitless legislative ambition. Before becoming an isolated, rejected and hapless monarch, Emmanuel Macron had upended French politics, broken the tired established order and, when elected, pushed a flurry of legislation.
Emmanuel Macron started his high-profile career in 2014 as the former Minister of the Economy of the supremely unpopular François Hollande. A former investment banker and a top civil servant, Macron came with an impressive pedigree and a network connected with nearly all the elite circles in Paris. In 2016, he sensed an opportunity and created his own party, En Marche. French politics had been a left-right duopoly for decades, but Macron sensed that the elites on both the right and left had a lot more in common than they realised. He blindsided his mentor Hollande by deciding to run for his job, caught up with the scandal-embroiled centre-right candidate and imposed his globalist vs nationalist worldview by facing Marine Le Pen in the runoff. He absolutely bulldozed her in the debate and was crowned President of France after a triumphant victory speech in front of the Louvres.
France had not seen such a meteoric rise, possibly, since Napoleon Bonaparte
His presidential victory was stunning, but he still needed a parliamentary majority to govern and only a few weeks to campaign again ahead of the legislative election. To everyone’s stupefaction, not only did he get a majority by fielding largely political newbies, he got one of the largest majorities in the history of the Fifth Republic. In a mere three years, he went from being a fresh-faced minister, to having nearly full political control. France had not seen such a meteoric rise, possibly, since Napoleon Bonaparte.
And the ambition did not stop there. Once elected, Emmanuel Macron declared war on France’s ossified edifice. After all, the book he published during his campaign was called Révolution. It was, he wrote, time to turn the page on “three decades of inefficiency.” Within months, his government unleashed a salvo of ordinances to put the overweight Code du Travail on a diet by consolidating worker representation into a single committee, capping dismissal payouts, and elevating company bargaining above sector-wide norms. The wealth tax, once a political taboo, was immediately scrapped and replaced by property wealth tax. France’s corporate tax was slashed from 33 per cent to 25 per cent.The speed was breathtaking; no parliamentary debates slowed the charge. His MPs were even whispering that they would quickly go through Macron’s 2017 platform at this pace.
Unlike François Hollande, his gauche predecessor (pun intended), Macron looked comfortable among world leaders. On a European scale, Macron was pushing for a radical transformation of the EU. Happy to play bad cop in the Brexit negotiations, Macron saw within a post-UK European Union the potential for a real geopolitical player rather than just a geopolitical playing mat. The Economist could not get enough of him.
By 2018, France had emerged as “one of the fastest-reforming countries in Europe,” according to the IMF. By 2019, the early tremors of his reformist agenda were beginning to show statistical promise: unemployment had dipped from around 10 percent in 2016 to approximately 8 percent by 2019, and by the summer of that year France reported its lowest jobless rate in over a decade. Foreign direct investment was surging. Economists at the OECD went so far as to peg a possible 3.2 percent GDP boost over the next decade from these reforms.
But the pace of reform all came crashing down in 2019. At the height of his powers Macron would regularly mouth off the cuff remarks that came off as extremely arrogant and tone deaf. To an unemployed gardener, he shrugged, “I’ll cross the street, I’ll find you something.” The critics of his labour reforms were in his mouth “slackers,” “cynics,” or “extremes.” The constant churn of these provocations would end up hurting his image.
In 2018, out of nowhere, over a planned fuel tax hike, millions across France went to the streets with their high-vis jackets. The Gilets Jaunes were born. For months, every Saturday, they would protest. Rapidly the movement gained in intensity and violence. Allegedly Macron nearly had to be evacuated from the Elysee palace by helicopter. Tens of billions were given to various social groups to cool off the movement after months of protests.
This was the first major roadblock Macron faced. He was still firmly in political control. But it changed the tone of the presidency. A year after the Gilets Jaunes, Macron then had to deal with Covid. And then Ukraine. The presidency had become fundamentally reactive rather than keeping the initiative. A workaholic and a dreadful manager, he rapidly burnt out most of his inner circle.
The 2022 presidential election could have been a massive risk for Macron but also an opportunity to reset his relationship with the electorate and present a vision for a second term. Ultimately, 2022 was neither. Macron relatively easily cruised to a comfortable second round victory. He hardly even needed to campaign to earn a second term. With Covid and the war in Ukraine, he justified starting his official campaign two weeks before the first round.
But that also meant Macron did not use the election to set up a vision for five more years. He ran a continuity campaign and correctly calculated that his presidential stature would be enough to win a second term and then, like nearly all his predecessors before him, nearly automatically win a majority in parliament. This time the electorate decided not to play ball, and Macron lost his parliamentary majority. If the President did not bother explaining what he wanted to do with another term, the electorate did not care about giving him free rein to do as he wished.
It’s at this point that the “magic money” phase of Covid and decades of French fiscal profligacy caught up with Macron. With a trillion of debt accumulated since the start of his presidency, France’s debt to GDP ratio breaking 100 per cent of GDP and deficit consistently above the EU’s 3 per cent of GDP target, the storm clouds of austerity were gathering.
Legislative activity is now at a standstill
Last summer, keen to take back control of his political destiny, Macron went all in and called a snap election in a bold attempt to gather a majority. It backfired massively, again it was not very clear why the electorate needed to give the President a majority. In fact Macron’s party nearly halved in parliament. The dissolution ended up being the final nail in the coffin of Macronism. Ever since, Macron’s governments have been trying to juggle these new impossible parliamentary arithmetic with a minority government in a coalition with the center-right.
Legislative activity is now at a standstill. France’s deficit is still well above the 3 per cent EU target, debt is now at 114 per cent of GDP and yet nothing can be done about it. The cost of pensions, at around 420 billion euros a year – a quarter of all public spending – is a political taboo despite having generated half of the debt accumulated under Macron
The issue of pensions is in fact the most telling sign of Macron’s decline. Macron attempted twice to reform France’s pensions model. In 2019-2020 his pension reform was creative and a proper break from the past. The dozens of pension schemes and their byzantine complexity would be mostly rolled into one point-based model which would have given a lot more clarity to workers. Ultimately with Covid, the reform was canned. In 2022, however, he came back with a new pension reform. Gone were the structural changes, instead the new bill had one main objective — increase the retirement age from 62 to 64. A necessary change given the exorbitant cost of France’s pensions but one without the creativity and ambition of its predecessor.
This evolution of Macronism from the swashbuckling “spirit of conquest” he lauded in 2017 to the fundamentally reactive presidency of post-2022 can easily be spotted from the profile of his electorate. In 2017, he was backed by 27 per cent of the 65+ age category in the first round of the presidential election. In 2022 he won over 35 per cent of that electorate. Macron’s electorate, like his hair, has greyed.
With the Presidential election of 2027 less than two years away, the future of Macronism is more fragile than ever. Polls have his party in the low teens territory. A large majority of French citizens want him to resign, an opinion shared by 32 per cent of his own political supporters.
His relationship with many of his own MPs remains fragile ever since he nearly cost them their job in a mad gamble last summer. In the process he also damaged his relationship with his heir apparent and then Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, who was similarly blindsided by the President’s decision.
But beyond the question of political personnel, the main unknown is whether the original appeal of Macronism can survive without its herald. The idea that the elites of the right and left would stop pretending to disagree and merge into one enlightened central bloc. The left-wingers could stop pretending they were still somewhat Marxist and the right-wingers would no longer have to appeal to the nationalist wings of their party. The recipe worked for years, and Macron nearly managed to eliminate both of the former governing parties in the process. But En Marche, now renamed Renaissance, has never managed to be a strong entity in generating policy ideas, preparing the next generation of cadres or building a solid base at the local level. Instead the Macronist movement was strongly tied together both by the cult of Macron as well as the electoral prospects of sticking with him. So when Macron dissolved parliament, the Macronist romantics were heart-broken and the Macronist opportunists were ready to regain their autonomy again.
The idea that the smartest of the right and the left should unite into one omniparty might be running on fumes
Without a strong leader at its helm or a unifying set of ideas, those who came from the political left and those who came from the political right are building their own fiefdoms and preparing for all out war for the 2027 election. Many are even forming alliances with the parties they left years ago to join Macron. There seems to be as many centrist parties as there are centrist presidential hopefuls these days. The idea that the smartest of the right and the left should unite into one omniparty might be running on fumes. In the not too unlikely scenario where a Macronist candidate fails to reach the second round of the presidential election, Macron’s party Renaissance could even face near total wipeout.
But is Macronism dead? Macron himself will be a remarkably young ex-President with plenty of time to reinvent himself. He could even theoretically run again in 2032. But more importantly still, in decades to come, with the inevitable effect of time, it seems quite possible that many people will look back positively on the Macron years — even the historically unpopular François Hollande enjoyed a bit of a rebound of late. Centrist politicians will share stories of this large dominant central force that once dominated French politics just like for centuries the Roman Empire haunted the dreams of leaders all around Europe. And perhaps one day someone will channel the “spirit of conquest” and upend French politics once more.
