Macronism in Retreat

Emmanuel Macron doesn’t take kindly to sharing power. But on June 30, as French voters went to the polls for the first round of parliamentary elections, his outgoing prime minister, Gabriel Attal, proved insubordinate. Attal was aware that their centrist coalition, Ensemble, was facing a major defeat. To control the damage, he suspended the government’s proposed reforms to the unemployment insurance system, which labor unions and parties on both the left and right had harshly criticized. (They would impose a fifteen-month cap on aid and require workers to log more hours to claim benefits.) He seems to have made the decision without even consulting Macron, who reportedly only learned what happened in the press. It was an early taste of marginality. Having lost much of his authority by hurling the country into a political crisis, Macron may well have to get used to the feeling.

It all began a few weeks earlier. On June 9 the far-right National Rally (RN)—led by Marine Le Pen and its twenty-eight-year-old president Jordan Bardella—sailed to a first-place finish in France’s elections to the European parliament. About an hour after the results came in, Macron took to television to announce that, exercising a power granted him under the top-heavy Fifth Republic, he was dissolving the National Assembly and calling snap elections to lay the foundations for a new government. It was a brash show of force that alarmed people across the political spectrum, who felt he was recklessly trying to regain the initiative at the high risk of rewarding the far right.

France holds national elections in two rounds: candidates need to clear a threshold of support to advance to the runoff. In the weeks leading up to the election, polls suggested that the RN would be able to form the first far-right government since the Vichy regime. The first-round results on June 30 seemed to confirm those fears. The RN came in first place, with over 33 percent of the vote; Ensemble got just twenty. Twenty-eight percent, meanwhile, went to the New Popular Front (NFP), an alliance formed after the dissolution by the center-left Socialists, the Communist Party, the Greens, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s further-left La France Insoumise (LFI). The country’s left-wing and centrist blocs tend to be mutually rancorous. But the RN’s strong showing forced them into a temporary nonaggression pact: over two hundred Macronist and NFP candidates withdrew from the runoff to combine the two voter pools.

The maneuver derailed what had been widely billed as the RN’s election. On the night of July 7 Paris and other urban areas found themselves celebrating a relative left-wing victory: the NFP emerged as the leading bloc in the National Assembly, winning, according to the latest estimations of caucus formations, 193 seats against 166 for Ensemble and 142 for the RN and its allies. Since all three groups are well beneath the 289-seat threshold needed for an absolute majority, NFP leaders are demanding a “cohabitation” government—the French term for the situation in which the president shares power with an opposition prime minister and cabinet. For now, however, Macron seems determined to avert this outcome; many observers fear a long stretch of political paralysis.

The center’s tacit pact with the NFP marked a revival of what in France is known as the “republican front”—a grandiose name for a strategy in which left-wing, centrist, and moderate conservative voters support whichever candidate is in the stronger position against the far right. But this was a republican front in name only. The weeks since the runoff vote have only confirmed what was already obvious then: Macronists and the NFP have almost no common ground besides a circumstantial interest in keeping the RN out. The far right’s growing strength, meanwhile, remains the defining story in French politics. Its preoccupations—from the fetishization of state authority over civil liberties to the restriction of immigration—are now mainstream. If the “republican front” wants to do more than delay Le Pen’s ascendance, it’s going to have to credibly break with Macronism’s marriage of pro-business economics and nationalist culture war. But for that, centrists would need to seriously reengage with the left. At present, that prospect seems nearly unthinkable.

The textbook “republican front” emerged in the 2002 presidential election, when Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father, shocked the political establishment by making it into the runoff against the center-right incumbent, Jacques Chirac. A notorious Holocaust denier, the elder Le Pen led what was then known as the National Front (FN)—renamed by his daughter in 2018—a party he cofounded in the 1970s to bring together reactionaries who never made peace with the defeat in the Algerian War or the taboo surrounding the Vichy years. In the 2002 second round, voters bitterly opposed to Chirac cast tactical ballots for him to block Le Pen, who was soundly defeated. In the 2017 and 2022 presidential elections, Macron likewise defeated Marine Le Pen in the runoffs by wide if shrinking margins, with support from voters who generally opposed his agenda.

The left and center were deeply at odds in those elections. Yet the “republican front” derived its limited substance from the belief, inherited from the postwar era, that French democracy had to be protected from fascism. That shared assessment can no longer be taken for granted. Today many on the left view Ensemble and the RN as varying shades on an essentially right-wing spectrum—and with ample reason. Macron’s outgoing interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, has decried France’s “ensauvagement” and criticized Le Pen as “soft” on Islam. (In fact she is a zealous civilizational warrior who in the past called for banning all public markers of Muslim identity.) In June Macron himself denounced the NFP’s program as “immigrationist.” Meanwhile the RN has tried to buff up its reputation in the eyes of the business elite. When the party rolled out its agenda on June 24, Bardella calmed fears that it would abandon Macronist economics, promising to “unwind all the breaks on growth” and aggressively reduce deficits.

The NFP wants a firm “rupture”—the watchword of its program—with both Ensemble and the RN. To that end, it marshaled a coalition of younger voters, people of color, and residents of major urban centers. It is pushing for reforms to the country’s police, including adopting a more localized model of law enforcement and creating an independent watchdog to investigate police violence. Other planks of its program include tax increases on corporations and the wealthy, a hike in the minimum wage, safeguards to democratic norms, and accelerated investments in public services and the energy transition.

For their part, the president’s allies have long defined themselves in opposition to what they call the “extremes.” Throughout much of Macron’s term, they’ve peddled a dangerous equivalence between the RN and the left, which they accuse of wokisme and antirepublicanism. These charges are most often directed at LFI, the largest party in the NFP. Its leader, Mélenchon, left the Socialist Party in 2008 and has since swum against the political mainstream on just about every subject, frankly acknowledging racism, making a progressive case for exiting the European Union (a position he’s since moderated to build bridges with the others on the left), and rejecting fiscal austerity.

Mélenchon is a divisive figure even among allies, some of whom have criticized him for his tight control over LFI, not to mention his incendiary rhetoric. These tensions were on full display in the left’s internal debate over Israel’s war in Gaza. In the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attacks, which it described as an “armed offensive of Palestinian forces,” LFI called for a cease-fire. The party’s staunch opposition to Israel’s invasion revived longstanding accusations of antisemitism against Mélenchon, who has made statements over the years that strike many as dogwhistles. (In 2013, to cite one example, he claimed that the Socialist Party’s finance minister, Pierre Moscovici, who is Jewish, “thinks in the language of international finance.”) On October 17 the Socialist Party dropped out of the New Ecological and Social Popular Union, a left alliance formed before the 2022 parliamentary elections.

But Mélenchon has drawn more ire from the center and right—above all on the subject of Islam. He has expressed strong solidarity with Muslim communities, perhaps the most marginalized demographic in France. For decades they have been subjected to a campaign of state harassment, including regulations banning the niqab and burqa in public spaces; last fall, Attal, as education minister, prohibited abayas in state schools. Darmanin has led an administrative clampdown on “separatism,” including, in 2020, ordering the dissolution of the Collective Against Islamophobia in France. That campaign was capped in 2021 by the passage of a law on “republican principles” designed to increase state controls over civil society. Both the RN and Macron allies have flippantly accused Mélenchon and his supporters of “Islamo-leftism,” a phrase that echoes the fascist canard of “Judeo-bolshevism.”

It was not surprising, then, that the center was the more begrudging participant in this election’s “republican front.” Even Macron and Attal appear to have butted heads over the subject: Le Monde reported that the prime minister took the lead in pressuring centrist candidates to withdraw. Their supporters, too, were less inclined to vote for the NFP than vice-versa. Studies show that, in runoffs pitting a Macronist candidate against an RN pretender, upwards of 72 percent of first-round left-wing voters swallowed their pride to cast a ballot for Ensemble; in contrast, only 54 percent of first-round Macron supporters submitted an NFP ballot. If the NFP’s candidate was aligned with LFI, less than half of Macronists fell behind them, with 19 percent opting for Le Pen.

If this election revealed one thing, it is that Macronism is in retreat. First elected to office in 2017, Macron quickly earned the moniker “the president of the rich” for weakening collective bargaining rights and cutting taxes for the wealthy. After being reelected in spring 2022, he was hamstrung by the legislative elections that summer, with only a relative parliamentary majority. Since then he has relied heavily on constitutional measures to override parliament—including, in early 2023, to force through an increase to the retirement age without a vote. Macron’s defeat in the EU elections—his list won less than half of the RN’s share—threatened to further erode his bloc’s claim on power in the National Assembly.  

Macron must have got it into his mind that dissolving the National Assembly would be the best way to reverse these trends. Perhaps he thought the threat of a far-right majority could serve as an electroshock that, coupled with the divisions between LFI and the other left parties, might restore a mandate for his coalition. A still more cynical interpretation would be that he actively hoped to shepherd the RN into power, exposing Le Pen and her allies to the travails of governing, and in turn position himself as a guardian of state institutions. Come the 2027 presidential elections, the far right would have to defend an actual record.

This is not conspiratorial thinking. In early June Le Monde reported that the tight-knit circle of advisors who crafted Macron’s dissolution plan consulted studies showing that the RN was poised to win a majority of seats in the event of snap elections. Figures in the far-right orbit caught wind of the dissolution order before Macron allies, including Attal. Le Monde also revealed that on June 9 someone in the president’s inner circle shared the news with Pascal Praud, an anchor on CNews, a chain owned by the reactionary mogul Vincent Bolloré. (The rough equivalent would be the White House leaking Biden’s plan to drop out to Sean Hannity.) On July 9 Libération reported that two leading allies of the president—Macron’s first prime minister, Édouard Philippe, and Sebastien Lecornu, the incumbent defense minister—had held back-channel discussions with Le Pen and Bardella in the Parisian apartment of a right-leaning Macronist fixer.

Whatever Macron’s plan, it backfired: the running gag in the press is that all he dissolved was his own coalition, which lost nearly ninety deputies. Meanwhile, an already brewing succession battle is likely to grow more intense. Macron and his allies still hope that they can hold onto power as the center of a “republican arc,” excluding both the National Rally and LFI. In a public letter on July 10, the president suggested that nobody won the election and called on “republican forces” to rally behind a “plural” majority. Yet that’s a long shot. The Socialists are still allied with LFI; Macron’s best bet is a rapprochement with the old center-right Républicains, who only seem interested in an ad-hoc working relationship, gauging that their long-term survival depends on the president’s coalition breaking apart.

In the longer term, popular support for Macron’s brand of centrism is dissipating. Electoral participation surged in this election, to just shy of 67 percent. But in the first round Macronist tickets earned over half a million fewer votes than in 2017—when only 48 percent of the electorate turned out. Perhaps Macronism will have been an interlude, as a chaotic two-party system takes shape to the right and left. Though riven by divisions, the NFP is about as close to a big-tent progressive force as France has had since the heyday of the Socialist Party. The RN, with its xenophobic nationalism and hard talk about law and order, is primed to pull away most conservative voters, having already sealed a pre-election alliance with a breakaway faction of the Républicains. The contingent that didn’t make the full leap to Le Pen still holds roughly forty seats and could be a pivot caucus if Macron’s allies manage to claw parliament back under their control. But the mainline of the French right is increasingly dominated by Le Pen. An editorial in the conservative organ Le Figaro even called in unconcealed terms for its readers to vote RN in runoffs against the left.

On July 16 Macron formally accepted Attal’s resignation, keeping him on as the head of a “caretaker government” that will likely last a few weeks. It’s uncertain what will happen after that. As the largest group in the National Assembly, the NFP wants to form a minority government; in his boisterous July 7 victory speech, Mélenchon insisted that “the NFP will apply its program, nothing but the program and all of its program.” In the following two weeks LFI and the Socialists struggled over control of the alliance, most notably over its pick for a prime minister. But on July 23 the NFP finally agreed on a nominee: Lucie Castets.

A relatively obscure upper-level civil servant, Castets smooths over some of the tensions within the alliance. Her past ties to the Socialists, to which she belonged for a few years, make her a plausible consensus figure who might expand the NFP’s appeal and help the Socialists’ leader, Olivier Faure, contain grumblings in his caucus about their pact with LFI. Having cofounded an organization dedicated to defending state services and public-sector workers, she can also be billed as a representative of progressive civil society, above partisan loyalties. Her opposition to Macron’s 2023 retirement reform will assuage fears within LFI about backtracking on the NFP program. The president, however, sidestepped the suggestion. Traditionally the largest bloc in the lower house gets the first pass at tapping a prime minister, but because the NFP lacks an absolute majority Macron was never bound to follow their lead. An hour after the announcement, he told a TV interviewer that “it would be false to say that the New Popular Front has a majority” and that he would wait until at least mid-August—after the Paris Olympics—to choose a nominee.

In any case, an NFP government would be very weak without support from the center. The alliance claims that elements of its program can be enacted by administrative decree, like freezing the price of daily necessities and increasing the minimum wage. Civil society and NFP-allied unions could also be expected to rally in support. But when the time comes to approve legislation, to say nothing of a comprehensive budget, the combined forces to the right of the NFP can always pass a motion of no confidence.

Ensemble are refusing to collaborate with LFI in the transparent hope that a faction of the NFP will defect and support a national unity government, with a prime minister ideally from Macron’s coalition. On July 18 the National Assembly’s incumbent president, Yaël Braun-Pivet, was reelected with 220 votes thanks to support from the Républicains and independent centrist formations. Seventeen caretaker ministers also voted, which the left has denounced as a breach of constitutional norms. The NFP’s candidate, Communist Party MP André Chassaigne, won 207 votes.

Containing the NFP is one thing. Creating a durable government is another. If Macron fails, as I argued in The Nation, the country may well be stuck with a hung parliament and a technocratic regime capable of little besides passing budgets and handling day-to-day administration. Since Macron cannot dissolve the National Assembly again until next June, that arrangement would have to last for at least a year. If voters are called back to the polls, they could well reject it.

It is abundantly clear who would benefit, especially if left-wing unity splinters. On July 7, in front of television cameras at the RN’s watch party, Le Pen called the results “yet another lost year.” She and her allies would be well positioned to pick up the pieces if this National Assembly accomplishes little.

The best defense against that prospect would be for the left to remain unified and have a chance at governing, which Macron and his allies are doing everything in their power to prevent. Much has been made in recent years of how the French political class has “detoxified,” or as the French say “dediabolized,” Le Pen. But it has also sought to delegitimize much of France’s progressive tradition—the radical republicanism that irrigates the demands of the NFP program.

In fact nothing in the left-wing program is extreme. Corporate and financial leaders are sounding the alarm about the state of the country’s public finances: an NFP government, they warn, would precipitate a run on the debt markets. But they are just as quick to reject the NFP’s plan to fund reforms using more progressive taxation, including by restoring the wealth and capital taxes that Macron has unwound since 2017. The NFP also wants to lower the retirement age back to sixty-two from sixty-four. Roughly two thirds of the electorate were opposed to the reform when it was strongarmed through parliament in 2023, seeing it as a burden for late-career workers that hardly improves the actual solvency of the pension system.

Other NFP proposals take the Macronists at their word. The left calls for recognizing Palestinian statehood and imposing an arms embargo on Israel, which would put actual force behind Macron’s much-touted “strategic autonomy” from Washington. A progressive wing of Macron’s caucus revolted last winter after the government passed a stringent immigration law with support from the RN, a bill that Le Pen herself called an “ideological victory.” On July 16 Darmanin signed the final decrees to apply the legislation, which includes measures to facilitate the expulsion of foreigners and condition a residency visa on “respect for republican values.” The NFP wants to repeal it.

But it’s hard to admit to defeat, let alone yield to a program that effectively reverses one’s own agenda. “You have to be deaf and blind to not take into account that millions of people voted NFP,” one Macronist minister anonymously vented to Le Monde in the days after July 7. Yet even that remark is strikingly naïve: foreclosing the ideas and aspirations shared by those “millions of voters” has been the Macronists’ central strategy. Maybe they’d rather just learn to live with Le Pen.