Although Emmanuel Macron performed slightly better than expected in the first round of last week’s French presidential election, the results came as no surprise. The second round next Sunday will be between Macron and far-right leader Marine Le Pen, just as he was five years ago. But the results confirmed two alarming trends in French politics that were already apparent – and which are also apparent to some extent in much of the rest of continental Europe.
The first is the restructuring of politics from a dividing line between left and right, to one between “radical” centrism and populism. The candidates of the center-left Socialist and center-right Les Républicains received less than 5% of the vote, a lower share of the vote than any of these parties had ever received before. Both Macron and Le Pen see themselves as “beyond left and right” – that is, although they both want us to think of them as opposites, they actually reflect on each other. From a democratic point of view, this restructuring is disastrous.
The second trend is the apparently relentless rise of the far right in France. Not only that, between them Le Pen and her far-right rival Eric Zemour received 30% of the vote – more than Macron. This is also the way the far right has defined the agenda of French politics in general over the last five years, as illustrated by the way even center-right candidates like Valerie Pecres have adopted far-right tropes during the campaign as the idea of ”great substitute ‘.
Macron’s candidacy for a second term can be seen as the last breath of French center-left pro-Europeanism
Perhaps the only surprise in the first round was that Jean-Luc Melenchon, the far-left Eurosceptic leader of La France Insoumise, received 22% of the vote, up from 20% in 2017 and just 1% less than Le Pen. His success shows that despite the rise of the far right, the left is also quite strong in France, although it has distanced itself from the Socialist Party, whose candidate, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, received less than 2%. In other words, the left in France is already essentially Eurosceptic.
In fact, Macron’s candidacy for a second term can be seen as the last breath of French center-left pro-Europeanism. It may come as a surprise to hear Macron, who has been ridiculed as the “president of the rich,” described as a center-left. But he was once a minister in the government of Francois Hollande, the last president of the Socialists. Looking at the longer trajectory of the French center-left and its relationship with the European Union, we can see how Macron represents the end of an era.
When Francois Mitterrand was elected French president in 1981 amid rising inflation and unemployment, he promised state-led growth as a way out of France’s economic woes. But two years later, he was forced to make a U-turn as financial markets put pressure on the French franc. The center-left in France has come to the conclusion that social democratic economic policies are no longer possible at the national level. As his finance minister, Jacques Delors, said, France had a choice between Europe and decline.
The problem with this pro-European strategy has always been Germany, or rather France’s inability to persuade Germany to pursue a center-left economic policy, especially after the creation of the single European currency, which constitutionalizes German preferences by limiting governments’ ability to borrow and spend. After the euro crisis began in 2010, first Nicolas Sarkozy and then Hollande tried – and failed – to persuade Germany to loosen eurozone fiscal rules.
When Macron became president in 2017, he made one last attempt to trick Germany into making concessions. He proposed a “Europe that protects” in which the eurozone is reformed to protect citizens from the market. He undertook difficult labor market reforms to gain confidence in Berlin. But while many there feared how well Le Pen had done in the 2017 election and realized that Germany needed Macron to succeed, Chancellor Angela Merkel ignored his proposals for a more redistributive EU.
Only 32% of French people trust the EU – a lower figure than in any other Member State
Pro-Europeans say the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 has changed the game. In particular, they see a breakthrough in the creation of a € 750 billion recovery fund, which some, such as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, then finance minister in Merkel’s government, even called “the EU’s Hamilton moment”. But while the recovery fund has limited the economic impact of the pandemic itself, it has done nothing to reduce the macroeconomic imbalances that already existed in the eurozone.
In any case, this development does not seem to have stopped the rise of Euroscepticism in France. According to new Eurobarometer data released last week, only 32% of French people trust the EU, a lower figure than in any other Member State. Meanwhile, under pressure from the far right, Macron rediscovered the idea of a “Europe that defends” in terms of cultural rather than economic protection, ending its journey from the center-left to the center-right.
Unlike in 2017, many in France are worried that Le Pen could actually win this time, especially if a significant number of Melenchon voters abstain from the second round. (He carefully told them that they should not give Le Pen a “single vote” without telling them to vote for Macron.) But even if Macron wins, he will face the same problems as before. In particular, if the EU’s fiscal rules are not reformed, it is difficult to see how it will be able to give much on economic issues that matter to French voters.
Like Le Pen, Melenchon has somewhat softened his Euroscepticism – both now talking about changing the EU from within instead of leaving it, although some worry that this could make the EU even more dysfunctional. But whether Macron lasts another five years or not, future French presidents on the left are likely to be less pro-European – and more confrontational than Germany – than their predecessors.
Hans Kudnani is a Senior Research Fellow at Chatham House and author of The Paradox of German Government
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