President Macron is struggling to rally France’s centre ground
There is much talk in the air in France about the “inexorable” decline and fall of Emmanuel Macron. The thesis is a simple one. Savaged by the gilet-jaunes, further weakened by the public sector protests, no longer seen as woke by climate change activists, the President is steadily losing definition. Soon, we are told, all that will be left of him, after the fashion of the Cheshire Cat, will be his eyes looking down his nose at the electorate.
That Macron is in trouble is undeniable. According to the polls, no one, other than his wife, appears to like him very much. The Left portrays him as the President of the Rich; the Right dismisses him as a supercilious arriviste; he barely registers among supporters of the green agenda. And now, it seems, the centre cannot hold.
La République en Marche, the party he founded in 2016, is leaching members, both in the country and in the corridors of power. Of the 314 En Marche deputies who won seats in the National Assembly in 2017, only 300 continue to pledge their loyalty, and more defections are said to be imminent. Should the number fall below 289, Macron will lose his absolute majority and be dependent on the conditional support of the minority Modem Party. More to the point, he will come across as a President in free-fall, which almost always ends in disaster.
The immediate test will come next month with municipal elections due to be held across the country, including Paris, where the green-leaning Socialist incumbent, Anne Hidalgo, is increasingly expected to hold on. This morning, the En Marche candidate Benjamin Griveaux, formerly the official government spokesman, was forced to abandon his campaign for the Paris role after it was revealed by a Russian artist that he had made an extra-marital sex video and posted some “inappropriate” messages online. This is the sort of bad luck that the President doesn’t need. He can survive a defeat, especially if his opponents are hopelessly divided; a scandal-hit wipeout would be something else.
It would be easy to expatiate on the reasons for the plight in which the former investment banker, “neither of the left nor of the right,” now finds himself. His long-running fight with the yellow vest movement looks to have run its course. The many thousands of disgruntled provincials who took to the streets last year, resentful of the fact that their President accords only scant regard to la France profonde, have tired of their protests. In two years’ time, however, when the presidentials come round, they will very likely vote for either Marine Le Pen’s Far Right Rassemblement National or the qausi-Marxist France Insoumise, led by Jeremy Corbyn … I mean Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
Equally fatigued, but sustained by the panopoly of the trade union movement, public sector workers across the country are sullenly continuing to oppose the President’s state pension reforms. They are slowly backing off, but only in the fashion of the Wehrmacht in 1945, providing resistance every step of the way.
Conventional wisdom in France has it that any change opposed by lawyers, medical professionals, railway workers, teachers, firefighters and the police – to say nothing of the peasantry – is bound to fail. Macron thinks not and is resolved to hang on in. He has shown himself prepared to make concessions if he can do so without undermining the requirement that demand should not bankrupt the system. But he has refused to compromise on the core principle that pensions have to be earned and that early retirement is for the most part a privilege, not a right.
His problem, in political terms, is that his constituency across the nation is narrowing. Only if he can reinject energy into what remains of the Centre can he hope to be re-elected to the Élysée in 2022. Otherwise, he looks doomed.
It has long been theorised that the Far Right and the Far Left, if sufficiently extended, must meet somewhere (if not in the middle), and it is certainly the case that in France, the blue-collar vote can swing both ways. While the striking public sector workers turn primarily to the unions for leadership, in political terms it is the anti-immigrant Right and the pro-Putin Left (as much as the Socialists) who stand to profit at the ballot box.
But all is not lost. Not if you have an ego like the President of France. If the opinion polls are to be believed, there remain millions of Frenchmen and women out there, in every city, town and hamlet, who, from behind their curtains, accept the necessity for reform and remain persuadable that Macron is the only leader with the chutzpah to get it done.
Elections tend to bring all such matters to a head. My guess, if Macron survives the municipals, is that Le Pen will once again come second in 2022, just beating out whoever the centre-right Républicains choose as their figurehead and both the Socialists and Mélenchon. In that event, Macron would go into the second round as the narrow favourite, either to come a cropper or, more likely, to secure victory through the clenched teeth of the silent majority.
Everything, as ever, depends on how he gets through the next 12 months. If he outlasts the public sector protesters and gets 70 per cent of his pension reforms through the National Assembly, he can then turn his attention to Brussels and the EU, which is crying out for leadership in the vacuum created by Angela Merkel’s long goodbye.
Macron has an agenda for Europe that is at least as far-reaching as his domestic programme. He wants closer cooperation in every sphere, from taxation, through compliance by the Visegrad states all the way to defence and security. But he can’t hope to achieve his goals unless Germany joins the fight, and thus far there is little sign of that. This week, Merkel’s heir-apparent, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, dropped out of the race to succeed her as Chancellor, and with the Far-Right, anti-immigrant AfD knocking at the door it is hard to identify anyone in either the CDU or the SPD willing to join Macron in the stressful work of rebuilding (or electrifying) the Franco-German motor.
So could it all go hideously wrong for the one-time Jupiter President? Of course. Throughout Europe, and much of the wider world, the centre is giving way to populism on the one side and climate activism on the other. Amid the chaos, Macron’s best hope is to present himself as the only one with a plan. Le Pen is old hat – a two-time loser; the Centre, as of now, lacks focus; Mélenchon is no more than a stick with which to beat the Establishment; and the Socialists – whose headquarters recently moved from the Left Bank to the Parisian equivalent of Croydon – have a lot of work to do before returning centre-stage.
But such is the stuff of politics. Le Pen could end up like an old iPhone, with outdated software and a run-down battery. Anne Hidalgo, for the Centre-Left, or A N Autre, from the Centre-Right, or even a Green Saviour backed by social media, could emerge from the thickets as surprise contenders in 2022. But a lot of water will flow under the bridges of Paris before anything – or anyone – becomes even remotely certain.