Macronism On the Ropes

France ended 2024 in a state of political turmoil, with its fourth Prime Minister in a year, an embattled minority government, and only an emergency budget rolled over from last year, frozen in real terms, to see it through the first few months of 2025. President Macron named François Bayrou, a longtime fixture of French centrist politics and one of Macron’s earliest supporters, to be his next Prime Minister on December 13th after lawmakers from the hard left and the populist right united to torpedo Prime Minister Michel Barnier’s government a week before as he tried to pass an austerity budget without a parliamentary vote. Even though ex-EU Brexit negotiator Barnier was supposed to be a master deal maker, he couldn’t talk his way out of the fundamental problem that he hadn’t the votes in the fractured National Assembly to pass hefty tax increases and spending cuts to reduce the national deficit, even after granting numerous concessions to Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. His minority government duly collapsed after just 12 weeks in office.

His successor is a 73-year-old three-time presidential candidate whose Democratic Movement (MoDem) party belongs to Mr Macron’s alliance, and in many respects the original centrist. Until recently a part-time farmer and still mayor of the town of Pau at the foot of the Pyrenees, the new prime minister has already held two high-ranking positions in government, serving as Education Minister under conservative Prime Minister Edouard Balladur in the 1990s and briefly as Justice Minister immediately after Macron’s election in 2017 — a job he was forced to resign after less than a month, when he was placed under investigation for allegedly embezzling European Parliament funds. But he has also swerved leftwards, backing François Hollande, a Socialist, over Nicolas Sarkozy for the presidency in 2012. Bayrou relinquished his own presidential ambitions in 2017 to allow his junior, Mr Macron, to carry the centrist banner alone, with great success in that year’s election. Yet their relationship has not been without its tensions. In particular, Mr Macron seems to have had other loyalists from his own party in mind for the Matignon (official residence of the French Prime Minister), only for Mr Bayrou to force the president’s hand by threatening to pull his party out of the centrist alliance if he wasn’t given the job.

A lame-duck President with a minority government represents a remarkable comedown for Mr Macron, whose youth, vigor, and background in high finance once made him the hero of the neoliberal center. When Americans first put Donald Trump in the White House, and British voters backed Brexit, Mr Macron gave them hope that “post-partisan” centrism – left leaning on immigration and the environment, neoliberal in economics, hawkish in foreign policy, and staunchly supportive of EU technocracy – could still be a winning platform in Europe. With the Socialists and the neo-Gaullists both in decline after a failed presidency for each (those of Hollande and his predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy), Macron won the 2017 election, handily defeating Marine Le Pen in the second round. The Economist swooned, heralding him as “Europe’s Saviour”; in 2018, Politico even titled a story “How Emmanuel Macron Became the New Leader of the Free World”. If anybody could hold back the populist tide, they agreed, it was him.

Bit by bit, this achievement has since crumbled. In 2022, Mr Macron lost his parliamentary majority. In July, at the snap poll he unwisely called to try to see off Marine Le Pen after her party triumphed in European parliamentary elections, it shrunk further. That failed gamble left him politically isolated, with even allies criticizing his rash decision, and personally depressed and disagreeable. It also strengthened the parliament, which is now divided between three roughly equal blocs. The Nouveau Fronte Populaire, a leftist alliance formed just weeks before the polls, won 188 seats, Le Pen’s National Rally 142 and Macron’s centrist alliance 161. In sum, no party had the 289 seats required to achieve a legislative majority in the 577–seat Assembly. The leftist front was the surprise winner thanks to heavy tactical voting, and the National Rally had the most votes of any single party. Both then demanded, unsurprisingly, that the president name a new premier from their ranks. He refused, selecting first Barnier from the Republicans, then Bayrou from MoDem instead, an appointment that has been widely denounced by the other parties. It is “incomprehensible in electoral terms”, said Marine Tondelier, leader of the Greens; Olivier Faure, leader of the Socialist Party, described the new government as “a provocation” with “the hard right in power under the watchful eye of the extreme right.” The president of the National Rally, Jordan Bardella, meanwhile slammed the new government as ridiculous, saying Bayrou “put together the coalition of failure”.

In the short term, the result of Macron’s anti-democratic defense of democracy is gridlock. With no party or alliance close to a majority in the National Assembly, the country now faces the prospect of a series of short-lived minority governments that will be hard pressed to achieve anything. Bayrou’s new cabinet, which he announced on Monday 23rd December 2024, looks a lot like that of his predecessor. It has mostly centrist and conservative lawmakers in key roles, even though the sum of its opposing forces — Marine Le Pen’s National Rally and the New Popular Front — make up a majority in parliament. Because the President called his snap election only six months ago, France cannot call a fresh election until July next year—and even then, it is far from guaranteed that any party or tendency will win a majority. Although a government shutdown should at least be avoided, because this year’s budget can be rolled over into next year, the situation precludes any serious reforms. Financial markets have already factored in this political mess. Credit-rating agency Moody’s downgraded France’s credit rating within hours of Bayrou’s appointment, citing “political fragmentation” and predicting that the national deficit will keep growing next year instead of going down as promised by Barnier.

In the long run, the spectacle of the French political establishment clinging to power but unable to form stable or effective governments is likely to feed yet more support for populist alternatives. One difficulty faced by the embattled Macronists will be the need to rally around a single candidate for the 2027 presidential election, when Macron himself is barred from standing for a third term. The field is now looking crowded. Besides Mr Bayrou, the 35-year-old Gabriel Attal (another short-lived recent Prime Minister) and Bruno Le Maire, a former finance minister, may fancy their chances, as do at least half a dozen other hopefuls among the Socialists and centre-right Republicans. If the establishment parties aren’t careful, such overcrowding could hand a first-round run-off place instead to the hard-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose support steadily increased over the course of his three previous runs. He finished fourth in the first round in 2012, with 11% of the vote. In 2017 he was third, with 20%. In 2022 he again placed third, with 22%. In a crowded field, that might be sufficient to make it to round two. In 2017, Le Pen made it to the second round with less. This could mean she would face Mélenchon in the decisive second round. The courts may yet ban Ms Le Pen – whose 96-year-old father and president of the National Front from 1972 to 2011, Jean Marie Le Pen, died on Tuesday – from standing for public office for five years, in a case over the misuse of EU funds to be judged in March. If not, though, she is the candidate French voters told one pollster they most want as their next president. Faced with a choice between her nationalist platform or Mélenchon’s revolutionary leftism – he wears a bespoke Mao jacket, is a fan of Venezuela’s economic model, and talks of a 90% tax rate – Le Pen would probably win.

A more fundamental challenge for the Macronists is the exhaustion of their stock of ideas. Back in 2017, Mr Macron’s central insight was that on major issues – immigration, climate change, EU integration, foreign policy, supply side reform — the soft left and business right have more in common with each other than with their rivals on the hard left and populist right. A post-partisan movement, he argued, would forge a new majority and unleash the French economy. Once in office, however, most planks of this platform have proven unpopular, unsuccessful, or both. High levels of non-Western migration from North and West Africa are now so widely agreed to be doing more harm than good that 70% of the French say that their country takes too many immigrants and 48% say it should accept no further immigration at all (rising to 55% among 18-24 year olds). Net zero, although less burdensome in heavily nuclear-powered France than in most other developed countries, has also proved politically costly. After Macron approved a large hike in gasoline taxes, in a country where gas already costs more than twice as much as in the US (and average household income is 40% lower), hundreds of thousands of Gilets Jaunes took to the streets with dramatic and sometimes violent protests. The movement only subsided with the arrival of the pandemic in early 2020, and at the time enjoyed the support of 72% of French voters.

Macron’s public repositioning as a war hawk hasn’t helped his domestic standing either. As in other European countries, anti-establishment parties of the French populist right and left have been strengthened by waning confidence that NATO’s aims for the Ukraine war can be realized. While most of the French continue in general to support Ukraine, a growing share of the public has come to accept the case for a negotiated settlement: 30% favor supporting Ukraine to regain its lost territory, while 36% would rather push Ukraine towards negotiating a peace deal with Russia. The share of the French who believe their country is at war with Russia has also increased from 24% to 32% since October 2023, indicating that Macron’s efforts to dial up French support for Kiev may have mobilized those who fear sleepwalking into war more than those who fear appeasement. Although he gave the green light to allow French Scalp missiles to strike long-range targets inside Russia in November, and the French Foreign Minister subsequently gave signals that French troops might be sent to Ukraine, this makes the idea of a Macron-led European push to independently take on the full responsibility for funding and arming Ukraine in the new year seem highly improbable.

It is also doubtful that France could afford it. When Macron took power on a platform of shaking France out of its statist ways to become competitive in the world economy, government debt was around 98.5% of GDP. In 2023, it hit 110.6%. In 2017, France was running a budget deficit of around 3.4% of GDP. In 2024 this had risen to over 6% of GDP. Two key factors explain this runaway deficit spending. The first was the COVID lockdowns. In 2020, when the pandemic broke out, France’s deficit peaked at 8.9% of GDP. The second was the Ukraine war, which led Macron to fork out enormous energy subsidies to compensate for the blowback from sanctions imposed on Russia. The French Finance Ministry estimates that the subsidies cost around €45 billion in 2023, which amounts to 1.9% of GDP and explains most of the increase in the deficit. Despite some early success in overhauling the labor code, raising the pension age, and abolishing a “solidarity tax” on the wealthy, this grim fiscal legacy coupled with mediocre growth (French GDP is growing by barely 1% a year) means the Macronists have fallen well short of their bold promises to “unblock” the French economy with supply side reform.

This means the center is now stuck, politically and intellectually. Weak, unstable, split-the-difference government will prevail until at least July, perhaps longer, which will only increase the likelihood that Le Pen’s party emerges strengthened as truth tellers. In this respect, what is unfolding now in France is similar to what is going on next door in Germany, where Olaf Scholz’s coalition has just collapsed and is likely to give way to another coalition after elections next February. In both countries, the center is not holding up in terms of public support or the results of its sclerotic policies, but it insists on holding onto power regardless.

This leaves France and Germany as the principal remaining Continental exemplars of the “firewall” strategy of quarantining populist challengers, an approach that has failed in countries like Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, Hungary, and Slovakia where anti-establishment parties of the populist right and, more rarely, the populist left are already in government. Aside from its dubious democratic legitimacy, this cordon sanitaire approach has not curbed the growth of support for these parties in either country so far. The emboldened populist right and left blocs in the fractured French parliament regard themselves as the winners of July’s election and both are unwilling to fall in line behind another government of the weakened center. And Germany’s elections on February 23 2025 are likely to produce a coalition of center-right and center-left, which risks building more popular support for the populist right AfD and paleo-leftist BSW, both of which oppose continued arming of Ukraine, non-Western mass immigration, and net zero. By jointly taking responsibility for governing on a failing platform, the mainstream parties are likely to further demonstrate their fundamental convergence on most areas of policy and risk further defections of voters frustrated with the unsatisfactory status quo.

As in France, slow economic growth, tight fiscal constraints, rapid demographic change, and a turbulent external environment make for a restive and disgruntled electorate. And whereas in the past, voters’ frustration would have led to a cathartic change of government, neither the French nor German elite are presently prepared to allow such a pressure release valve to operate by giving the populists a share in power. When voters have tired of centrist coalitions or weak minority governments, however, they are likely to discover that the only other choice before them to deal with the existential problems facing their nations will be the so-called extremes. As such, there is now a real possibility of a National Rally led government in France next year, or even a Le Pen presidency in 2027. If Mr Macron decides his lame duck presidency has become so futile that he resigns, it might come even sooner.