Emmanuel Macron or the collapse of the center

The political crisis currently shaking France has symbolic value: Emmanuel Macron, who bet on the center by rejecting what he considered to be old “sterile oppositions” between the left and the right, is in the process of sinking.

The result in the most recent European elections marked a clear setback for his party and the political option it defends: with 31% of the votes against 14%, the National Rally led by Jordan Bardella and Marine Le Pen obtained more than double the support of Renaissance, the president’s party, which is thus less than 1% from third place occupied by Raphaël Glucksmann’s socialists.

By triggering early legislative elections, an untimely reaction which is as much a daring gamble as wounded pride, Macron hopes to restore the unity of France around himself and his party.

But the risk is great, as we can already see, that the oppositions will unite on the left as well as on the right and then stand up against each other, and against Macron himself, who is more and more hated.

Faced with the rise of the far right, left-wing parties concluded an agreement to form a new popular front, a historic nod to the government of Léon Blum who led France in the late 1930s. Right , meanwhile, the controversial decision of Éric Ciotti, president of the Les Républicains political party, to break with Gaullist tradition (and the leaders of his own camp) to reach an agreement with the National Rally foreshadows the formation of a far-right union – excluding that embodied by Éric Zemmour, whom the Lepénists can conveniently qualify as more “extreme” than them.

The first polls carried out since the surprise outbreak indicate that Macron’s party could not make it through the first round, and even be “wiped off the map”, which would lead to a duel in the second round from which the president and his party would be excluded, unprecedented in the history of modern France¹.

Macron’s current weakness has long been his strength. The one who had managed to place himself above the fray, to avoid quarrels to better embody the verticality of power, today passes for a sort of aristocrat lost in the Élysée palace, he whom his adversaries describe as regularly as a “president monarch”. While he initially presented himself as an inspired politician confident in the future, a sort of French Obama² daring to mobilize the “mystical”, even “Christ-like” part³politics (“I will serve you with love”, he said, arms crossed, the evening of his first election in 2017), Macron appears today as a man disconnected from so-called “ordinary” France.

But Macron’s difficulties also reveal the limits of his political project, that of a party wanting at all costs to escape the left-right alternative.

In trying to reach an imaginary and fantasized center, that of measurement and common sense, he did not develop a strong vision, was not based on any precise philosophy, other than that of the interest of the moment.

The president has camped himself in the role of a reasonable arbiter called upon to decide between the divergent demands of lobbies and representatives of civil society, authorizing himself to cheerfully draw on the program and rhetoric of other parties, at the risk of multiplying the contradictions.

This is how Macron presented himself as a “progressive” candidate (“I can make progress win,” he said in 2016), while distancing himself from the left (“Honesty obliges me to tell you that I am not a socialist, even if I am a minister in a left-wing government…”). While he mobilized the imagination and slogans of old rebels, launching an essay entitled Revolution and the En marche! movement, he worked to achieve the reforms demanded… by the right. He thus worked to liberalize the economy through the relaxation of labor standards, the reduction of taxes on large businesses and the tax on capital, the postponement of the retirement age, new restrictions on unemployment insurance, etc.

Since his re-election in 2022, Macron has adopted a confused discourse, relying on poorly mastered formulas and improvised policies. Thus, in the midst of a pension reform crisis last year, Macron announced 100 days of appeasement… while committing to “accelerate” the current reforms!

And after castigating the far right, he moved closer to it by passing in December 2023 a law on immigration described as “harsh” by the moderate elements of his own party, complicating the reunion of families and authorizing loss of nationality.

By betting on neither-nor, neither left nor right – “quite the opposite”, would add the comedian Coluche –, by wanting to embody the “catch-all center”⁴according to the formula of political scientist Thomas Frinault, Macron and his political party ended up being nothing to anyone (and this is the risk that awaits another centrist coalition that we know well: the Coalition Avenir Québec).

Incapable of defining themselves by themselves, except according to external benchmarks, Macron and his party have condemned themselves to insignificance, and soon perhaps to impotence. Why would right-wing or far-right voters, for whom Macron is too soft, choose the copy rather than the original? And why would left-wing voters, for whom Macron speaks on the left but acts on the right, want to support the policy of wishful thinking?

Faced with the threat of chaos that he himself will have encouraged, Macron will undoubtedly claim his experience and his moderation. He will present himself as a bulwark against the extremes, banking on the reassuring “averageness” of what he himself called the “extreme center”. But one wonders if the argument will be heard by voters who seem to have understood for quite some time now that the “king” is naked.

1. Consult the article Figaro “According to the European projection, the Macronists and LR threatened with disappearance”

2. Watch the France Info report “Le French Obama”

3. Consult the article Sunday Newspaper “Macron, sacred confidences”

4. Consult The Conversation article “Emmanuel Macron’s catch-all center”

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