Patrick Costello sees Macron on the back foot with the far right threatening and the left alliance fracturing
Possibly the biggest irony of Emmanuel Macron’s political career is that he entered politics to counter the far right. Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father, had reached the second round of the 2002 Presidential elections and was only beaten by left-wing voters holding their nose and voting for Jacques Chirac, the corrupt mayor of Paris. Macron, then a young civil servant, referred to this as “the defining political moment of my generation” and saw his political role as transforming the mainstream parties to prevent the far right from ever coming to power.
Two decades later, and after eight years of Macron’s Presidency, the far right has never looked closer to power in France, with the 2027 Presidential elections looming on the horizon. Macron’s own approval ratings are languishing below 20% with his centrist coalition polling even lower. Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) has been leading presidential polls for over two years while their main opposition, the New Popular Front coalition of Socialists, Greens, Communists and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Unbowed (LFI), is looking irrevocably fractured as the Socialists seek to make separate deals with Macron to overcome a political crisis that has already claimed three Prime Ministers as its victims in less than 18 months. Political cartoonists are having a field day comparing France’s current instability with Italy’s post-war history of short-lived, unstable governments.
Much has happened since the fresh-faced 39-year-old became France’s youngest President in May 2017, and, in retrospect, the political responsibility for the mess can be laid squarely at the President’s door. Even at the time when most in Brussels were cheering on the arrival of an avowedly pro-European in the Elysée Palace, a French colleague expressed her concern to me: “Macron has won by destroying the mainstream left and right parties of the French political system: if he fails to solve the structural issues that have broken the back of every French Presidency for the last 30 years, the next contest will be between Le Pen and Mélenchon”.
Almost singlehandedly, Macron reframed French politics as a contest between the moderate, competent, economically orthodox centre and the far right. His gamble was that the fear of the far right would consistently push voters back into the “safe” arms of Macron’s centre.
The strategy failed for two reasons: first, because the structural reforms of the State, sold as necessary for France’s future economic growth, proved deeply unpopular, whether it was the abolition of the wealth tax in 2018, or more recently, the reforms to the pensions system. If this was what the moderate centre was offering as necessary medicine, too many of France’s voters were going to look elsewhere. Le Pen’s siren song that scapegoated national and European elites on the one hand and migrants on the other started to sound more appealing. This is where the second reason comes in: by framing Le Pen as his only serious opposition, Macron inadvertently broke the taboo and legitimised her politics. As more voters flocked to the far-right banner, he then compounded the error by tacking away from his socialist roots towards the right, triangulating Le Pen’s discourse and taking ever more right-wing stances on migration and law and order.
The apogee of this mistaken strategy came after strong results for Le Pen in last year’s European elections. Macron’s response was to call national elections, hoping that fear of a far-right government would be sufficient to push the electorate back into his arms. The tactic spectacularly backfired and voters instead punished his own coalition, flocking instead either to Le Pen or to the New Popular Front, the latter winning the largest number of seats. Since then, the President has refused to nominate a Prime Minister from the Popular Front, instead appointing right-wingers and centrists in the vain hope that they can find a political majority in the Parliament with support from Le Pen’s bloc. Three times this tactic has failed under Michel Barnier, François Bayrou and, most recently, Sébastien Cornu, and yet he still refuses to choose a Prime Minister to implement the progressive programme that a plurality of the French voted for last year.
The failure of Macron’s political strategy is significant for the UK because the Starmer-McSweeney strategy is so similar. Namely, remake the political centre, demonise the far left and make the far right your opponent, while triangulating far right policies to woo their supporters. The lesson from France is that further down the line, this can only end in tears.
However, there is also a second, more positive political lesson from France. In recent months, a large new social protest movement has emerged called Bloquons Tout (Block Everything). Unlike the earlier Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests), it is a younger and more left-wing movement and, crucially, more willing to coordinate with the trade unions. The resulting massive protests and strikes in September have already changed the national debate on the talk shows and the podcasts: discussions of immigration and security have been replaced by discussions of new wealth taxes. If triangulating the far right can only strengthen them, social protests and the presentation of left alternatives are, in the end, the only way to defeat them.