When Emmanuel Macron first won the presidential election in France in the spring of 2017, we were told he was the future of liberal pluralism. The BBC said that his victory was “a repudiation of the populist and anti-establishment wave” of that time. According to the cover of Time Magazinewas “Europe’s next leader.” The Economist went even further: On its cover he asked if he was the “savior” of Europe and declared that he was mounting a revolution in democratic politics “without a pike or gallows.”
Seven years later, Macron’s “peaceful” and “democratic” “revolution” is in ruins and the French president is struggling to navigate a political and institutional crisis that he single-handedly created. In June he called unnecessary legislative elections, lost them and refused to acknowledge his defeat. Over the summer, France went through the second longest period without a government in its recent history.
The resulting government, led by Michel Barnier, was only able to survive as long as it did thanks to a pact with the extreme right, before collapsing following a vote of no confidence held on December 4. Although Macron has now appointed François Bayrou as prime minister, it is not clear how this solves the fundamental problem that both the president and his program are detested throughout the country, and are strongly opposed in Parliament.
The (negative) balance of macronism
The balance of Macronism explains its bad streak. When he took office, France’s deficit was 2.6% of GDP, by October 2024 it had risen to 6.2%. Who are the beneficiaries of such waste? It’s certainly not the public school students or their stressed-out teachers who have to deal with the largest classes in Europe. Nor are they the growing number of people living in “medical deserts,” where there is insufficient access to doctors or surgeons.
However, the ultra-rich have done very well: France’s four largest fortunes have increased by 87% since 2020, according to Oxfam. Macronomy looks like Trussonomy (referring to former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss) in slow motion. It was a program of unfunded tax cuts for the rich that Macronists wrongly assumed would increase economic activity and therefore tax revenues. According to Macron’s economic guru, Jean Pisani-Ferry, “it wasn’t a bad strategy, it just didn’t work.”
If his economic record undermines the narrative that Macron was the candidate of innovation and sound finance, his social and political record demonstrates that Macron’s revolution was neither peaceful nor particularly democratic, and calls into question the labels of “progressive” and “centrist”, so often applied to the French president.
Police violence has escalated markedly under Macron, with an increasing number of people shot and killed by police and the number of rubber bullets fired into crowds skyrocketing.
It has also contributed to normalizing the extreme right, talking about its favorite topics, using its language and approving an immigration law that Marine Le Pen hailed it as an “ideological victory”.
Furthermore, he has governed in an increasingly undemocratic manner, promoting very unpopular measures and using article 49.3 of the Constitution to approve laws without a parliamentary vote. He has also tried to keep the leftist New Popular Front (NPF) alliance out of government, despite having won the majority of seats in this summer’s legislative elections.
The activist Ugo Palheta has written about the fascisation process of French society talking about how part of the media, the public service and the business elite are radicalized to the right. Macron has contributed greatly to this process, and the far right has achieved its best electoral results in its history this summer.
Recently, Macron has been fighting to try to keep the hit Netflix series in France Emily in Paris, what threatens with changing location and betting on Rome, where some episodes of the fourth season have already been filmed. It is an absurd mission. Emily in Parislike the Summer Olympics, projects a fantasy image of the France that Macron wants to govern, and intended to create.
But the archetype of Macron’s France is not the American Emily Cooper, the inhabitant of a buoyant nation inhabited exclusively by the rich and attractive, but rather Vanessa Langard, a participant in the yellow vest demonstrations that I met recently. Langard had been a decorator and had to take a second job to help pay for her grandmother’s care.
Langard was shot in the face and blinded by a rubber bullet at a protest in December 2018. When we spoke, she was distraught, sobbing as she described her anger at the French state’s refusal to designate her as a victim of police violence. Her mother commented that she had become more submissive since the assault.
His life shows us the effects of macronism on a small scale. Langard has fallen prey to Macron’s repressive strategy against dissent and blinded by the increasingly militaristic weapons that the State deploys against its citizens. Now, at 40 years old, he cannot work and lives on the meager benefits paid to people with disabilities in France; one person out of hundreds of thousands of citizens pushed into precariousness under Macron. It needs care, so it depends on an increasingly overloaded health system that the Government wants to cut even further.
Langard is part of the 56% of French people who say that life has become more difficult due to their low income and rising living costs, the 85% of people who fear that the next budget will negatively affect their financial situation and of 77% who understand that this is the result of political decisions.
Macron has more than two years left until the next elections, but nothing seems to indicate that he will change course. During the summer, Liberation revealed that a series of secret meetings had taken place between Macronists and members of the far-right National Rally party mediated by Macron’s trusted advisor Thierry Solère, helping to normalize them further. Edouard Philippe, Macron’s ally and possible successor, reportedly told Marine Le Pen that he wants the next elections to be a “project against project” competition without “moral criticism.”
It does not bode well for liberalism that its pro-EU poster boy has become King Lear, blinded by narcissism and willingly handing over the kingdom to a destructive force that he himself helped create. Macron offers an object lesson in the exhaustion of liberalism. When the form and appearance of liberalism remain, but its content and values fade, what remains is something empty and brittle. He becomes incapable of improving the lives of anyone but the rich, incapable of responding to inconvenient events such as disappointing election results, incapable of even articulating a moral critique of the far right that seeks to usurp him, and politically incapable of stopping its rise. Macronism has failed.
Oliver Haynes is a journalist and co-host of the Flep24 podcast
Translation by Emma Reverter
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