France One month after his triumph at the French presidential election, Emmanuel Macron is about to complete the ‘revolution’ he promised to deliver. The resounding parliamentary majority En Marche is on course to secure on Sunday will be one of the largest of the Fifth Republic. Traditional parties are in tatters, and the Front National has been thrown into a mode of self-reflection. Hundreds of new faces, often coming from civil society, are about to enter French politics. An equal number of experienced politicians have to find another future for themselves.
Conventional wisdom so far is that Macron is either a new talented centrist, social-liberal leader à la Tony Blair and Barack Obama, who will produce the same kind of disappointment; or that he is the new face of the free and open world, who will save France and Europe from populism and decline. Away from these two simplistic interpretations, his first few weeks in office invite nuance. The ideological compass of the new French president is complex and flexible. The left has an opportunity to influence Macronism, and to keep the left-right divide alive as it is likely to resurface in a few years.
Candidate Macron
Emmanuel Macron emerged as a progressive, liberal-minded economy minister three years ago, when he joined Manuel Valls’ government. In the job, he built a reputation as an able and passionate reformist. He successfully defended a bill that opened up protected professions, such as bus transport, and relaxed rules on Sunday trading. He embedded a very technical reform into the appealing vision of a more mobile society offering a chance to everyone. Two years later, the ‘cars Macron’ (Macron buses) have transported millions of passengers.
Building on this success, Macron placed egalitarian liberalism at the core of his presidential bid. This political philosophy, developed by authors such as John Rawls and Amartya Sen, argues for special efforts towards those who do not have the ability to seize economic opportunities and to enjoy freedoms. Logically, Macron’s proposed reforms for France borrowed heavily from the Scandinavian textbook of flexicurity, social investment, universal welfare, and individual responsibility.
Crucially, Macron’s personal style and political positioning was until recently understood to be centrist and democratic, with a keen interest in quality deliberation. His launched En Marche as an horizontal, grassroot movement meant to attract those who were put off by the rigid structure and ideology of political parties. He spent the first three months knocking on doors to ask French people how they felt about life. Many observers pointed out that, as a student, he assisted one of the most reputable French philosophers of the twentieth century, Paul Ricœur, whose thinking leant towards consensus-seeking and reconciliation.
President Macron
After one month in office, the signals we get from the new president somewhat challenge these ideological and methodological assumptions. First, from his very first appearance as president elect on election night, Emmanuel Macron has adopted a very vertical style of power. The president does not spend time deliberating policy, mingling with political allies or talking to the press. His interventions are carefully selected. In a style borrowed from his glorious predecessors De Gaulle and Mitterrand, he strives to be a ‘Jupiterian president’, a president above the fray. There was a prescient hint of this in an interview Macron gave in 2015, in which he argued that French people were nostalgic of the monarchy. The president’s function was to fill the void left by the French Revolution.
Second, Macron has a ruthless approach to power and he does not hesitate to eliminate rivals. His most spectacular causality is of course Francois Hollande. In the weeks leading up to the legislative elections, his refusal to preserve Socialist MPs who declared themselves ready to work with him (despite not joining En Marche) has been felt as particularly cruel. Talented and promising individuals such as Matthias Fekl and Axelle Lemaire find themselves out of job as a result. The vast En Marche majority taking over the Assemblée Nationale imposes a one-party system. We are reminded that Machiavelli stands not very far away from Ricœur in Macron’s ideological horizon.
Third, the champion of freedom and civil liberty is fast accommodating the security-first climate in which western democracies find themselves, and which justifies exceptional measures. Since the Paris attacks in November 2015, France is under a ‘state of emergency’, a temporary deviation from the constitution that gives the police extended search and arrest powers. As a candidate, Macron proposed to lift the state of emergency. This is not the case any longer, quite the opposite, since the new government intends to enshrine most of its provisions into law.
Finally, Macron’s pro-EU, pro-globalisation instincts are tempered by a strong patriotic fibre. Defending Europe has been, for Macron, as much conviction as strategy. By sparing other EU leaders, especially Angela Merkel, from a France run by the Front National, the new president has put himself in a strong position to obtain something in return. Macron adopts a classically instrumental approach to Europe, which serves achieving French objectives by other means. Remembering that Macron was, in the early 2000s, part of Jean-Pierre Chévènement’s circles, a historic ‘souverainiste’ figure in France, sheds some light on this ambiguity.
Macron and the centre left
These observations stress the ambiguous nature of Macronism, which is, first and foremost, a one-man movement. Macron does not simply represent a new social-liberal offer. His progressivism is a very pragmatic and qualified one, which leaves the state an important role and does not shy away from playing the patriotic card. In such a fluid ideological environment, the centre left has an opportunity to influence the course of action both from within and from the outside by offering a reliable compass. Unless they build a robust set of principles and policies, and detach themselves from their narrow, personal basis, En Marche’s inconsistencies will soon come to the fore. Voters may give their left or right leanings precedence again.
