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FUSION

Macron’s France and the Specter of Populism in Europe

July 16, 2024

By Dalibor Rohac


Emmanuel Macron’s decision to call an early parliamentary election following the unprecedented success of France’s nationalist right in the European election in early June was always a risky proposition, bound to further weaken the plurality that his government enjoyed in the National Assembly. Most, including Macron, were pre-occupied with the slow but steady growth of the National Rally (RN). Yet the results on Sunday dealt a different shock to the system: first place for the New Popular Front (NFP), a left-wing coalition composed of the (center-left) Socialists, Greens, and France Unbowed (LFI), a party led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a far-left figure with ideological baggage harking back to the 1960s or 1970s.

Mélenchon, who addressed his party members as “comrades” on Sunday night, ran for president in 2012, 2017, and 2022, each time garnering ever larger support. In the most recent race, his 22 percent result in the first round placed him just one point behind Marine Le Pen, who was then defeated by Macron in the run-off.

To be sure, NFP was a temporary electoral coalition, not a basis for dragging the entire French left to the extremes. Yet LFI is arguably the leading force of the coalition and brings more members to the chamber than either the Socialists or the Greens.

LFI is “populist” in the conventional sense: it is guided by a “thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic camps, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’.” Instead of immigrants or “globalists”, for LFI the enemies are the rich, the technocratic elite, and Western imperialists. At various junctures, Mélenchon has proposed a 100-percent inheritance tax on large estates, leaving NATO, and renegotiating or disregarding EU treaties so that European governance will no longer be a “neoliberal” project.

Mélenchon defended Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and blamed the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 on NATO’s expansion to Russia’s borders. LFI’s leader in parliament, Mathilde Panot, became the subject of a police investigation over a suspected instance of “justification of terrorism,” a form of hate crime under French law, after she called the October 7 attack “an armed offensive by Palestinian forces” that occurred “in a context of intensification of the Israeli occupation policy.”

What makes Mélenchon’s success stand out is that left-wing populism has scored few electoral successes in recent years. Bernie Sanders and the ‘Squad’ might have their loyal supporters in the United States, but they have failed in building a larger movement comparable to the MAGA coalition on the right. Jeremy Corbyn’s bid to take the Labour Party in a leftward direction ended in disaster. Even in countries on Europe’s Mediterranean periphery, where politics has been dominated by questions of austerity and “neoliberalism”, left-wing populism has made limited gains. Despite its promises to the contrary, Syriza of Greece, ended up pursuing a conventional (and largely successful) program of fiscal consolidation, effectively nullifying the reason for its own existence.

The National Assembly that has emerged from the election is divided into three similarly sized blocks: the left, including a sizeable cohort of LFI radicals, the hard right led by Jordan Bardella, and Macron’s centrist block squeezed in the middle with 159 deputies in a 577-strong chamber (down from 245 in the last election). While he has not had a majority since 2022, it is unclear how Macron can continue to govern. There is a theoretical centrist majority excluding both LFI and RN, to be sure, but it involves Republicans, Macron’s own bloc, Socialists, and Greens working together on the basis of the lowest-common denominator – an unlikely prospect.

In other words, under the new distribution of seats in the legislature, France risks being gridlocked and dysfunctional. If there is a non-populist government, its only alternatives will be RN and LFI. That is hardly a good starting point for whatever centrist presidential candidate seeks to succeed Macron in 2027, since they will almost inevitably own the resulting dysfunction and inability to govern.

Does that mean that Macron made a mistake calling the election? Or, perhaps, was his project of realignment doomed from the get-go? The answers depend on what one thinks the plausible counterfactuals are. The idea of neutralizing the far right by offering them a path to share power in a limited, structured fashion was risky but not absurd. The idea of Bardella – a 28-year-old TikTok influencer – becoming prime minister and overseeing a cadre of RN nominees with little governing experience for the next three years may have disabused the French of the notion that the nationalist right has anything appealing to offer.

Yet, the danger facing Macron and political centrists in France now, especially as they seek to enforce a cordon sanitaire against the right, is that they will become burdened with Mélenchon’s baggage, paving the way to an RN presidency and control of the legislature after 2027. It would take extraordinary political maneuvering to make both the left and the right co-responsible for governing in a way that would neutralize their anti-establishment appeal.

To put the French situation into a broader context, recall that there have been two main responses of European political systems to the rise of the right. First, a shrinking number of countries, including France, scramble to keep right-wing populists away from power even at the cost of unwieldy compromises and dysfunction. In other countries, populists have either joined governing coalitions as junior partners (Finland, Sweden), led multi-party coalitions (Slovenia, Italy), or have governed on their own, commanding large majorities (Hungary, Poland).

In many cases, the prominence of right-wing populists in politics has changed the outlooks of mainstream parties – making them more hawkish on immigration or more pre-occupied with cultural and social issues. Macron himself passed a tough package of legislation to crack down on illegal migration. In the United Kingdom, the rise of Nigel Farage pushed the Conservative Party in a more Euroskeptic, populist direction. In the aftermath of the 2016 referendum, furthermore, delivering on what would have been previously considered a radical policy of extricating the UK from the EU, became the ultimate imperative driving the party. The Conservatives reverted to a more sedate version of themselves under Rishi Sunak, but that did not seem to help them either with moderate voters or populists who gravitated toward Farage’s new Reform Party.

What makes the French example stand out is not simply the long-standing commitment of political elites to keep the populist right, with its antisemitic, Vichy-era roots, out of power. More importantly, perhaps, Emmanuel Macron had a transformational effect on French party politics. With his rise in 2016 and 2017, he shattered the existing center-right and center-left parties that had previously dominated French politics. His movement, which promised transcending the divide between the center left and center right, recruited cadres from both sides of the political spectrum and pursued a technocratic, centrist path.

The downside of Macron’s success has been the suffocation of mainstream political life outside of his movement, now called Renaissance. Greens and Socialists are lucky to have entered the National Assembly on the back of Mélenchon’s movement while the center-right Republicans have stabilized at a low percentage of the popular vote. Renaissance, meanwhile, is a deeply personalistic structure. It is questionable whether it can generate another presidential candidate of Macron’s caliber.

Instead of addressing the populist challenge, Macron’s grand experiment in disrupting French politics and superseding the center left and the center right with his version of optimistic, pro-European technocracy may have brought France to a dead end. The only way to stave off a Mélenchon or a Le Pen (or a Bardella) presidency in three years is through a revival of traditional political parties. There is talent in both camps – the mayor of Cannes, David Lisnard, for example, has been a very effective politician with strong free-market commitments – but their success requires returning to some form of pre-2017 party competition without a technocratic behemoth occupying so much of the middle ground.

The writing for Macron’s project has been on the wall for a while, which is why he decided to call an early election instead of remaining a lame duck until 2027. In a way, his calculus involved breaking with the ‘cordon sanitaire’ approach that had hitherto dominated French politics. Instead of keeping RN away at all costs, Macron accepted that it would be better to turn RN into a stakeholder within the existing political system, thereby defanging or discrediting it.

The right, meanwhile, has sought to broaden its appeal. In 2017, Marine Le Pen praised Brexit and mused about leaving the Euro, rightly spooking the French electorate. Running for president in 2022, she talked about “reforming” and “evolving” the EU from within. Le Pen also once described Vladimir Putin as someone with whom she was defending “shared values”, made numerous trips to Moscow, and even received millions in Russian funding for her campaigns. As late as 2022, Le Pen blamed the war equally on Russian imperialism and on the “dangerous war-mongering attitudes of the European Union.”

In a striking contrast with the pro-Russian sentiments held by Le Pen and others in the party, Bardella expressed his support for sending “ammunition and equipment [Ukraine] needs to hold the front” at a recent arms fair. Last year, Bardella stated that “the war would not end without a withdrawal of Russian troops and a return of complete and full sovereignty of Ukraine on the territories that are currently occupied by Russia.” Of course, he is still against sending “equipment that could have consequences of escalation in eastern Europe” but such views do not fall outside of the mainstream of the European discussion. Likewise, Marion Maréchal, Le Pen’s niece, wishes for Ukraine’s victory but does not want to see Ukraine join NATO – not unlike the Biden administration.

The choices facing the president, who enjoys a significant degree of discretion in appointing the new cabinet, are daunting. Enforcing the cordon sanitaire while working with the far left, which is equally if not more extreme than RN, puts RN on track to victory. Doing the reverse, meanwhile, risks strengthening Mélenchon as the only alternative against the right. Appointing a caretaker government, like that of Mario Monti in Italy, just kicks the can down the road, leaving all options open for 2027, for good and for ill.

For now, Macron is asking the current prime minister, Gabriel Attal, to stay put. Yet, the Italian route seems to be the most plausible option. Italy illustrates, however, that handing the keys to technocrats without governing majorities might work as a delaying tactic but does not prevent the right from arriving in power later on. Monti’s government was succeeded by the leadership of Giorgia Meloni (although Meloni herself has proved more moderate than either her supporters or critics expected).

What is more, Macron can now forget about his ambition to be a key player shaping the future of Europe. French leadership on Ukraine is unlikely to take on a more muscular form, as are Macron’s calls for Europe’s “strategic autonomy.” With Germany similarly paralyzed by internal disputes, the risk for the EU as a collective body is that important problems will simply go unaddressed.

It is worth noting, moreover, that the roots of the French and the German problem are connected. Because of the country’s history, Germany’s commitment to keeping the Alternative for Germany (AfD) out of power has been even stronger, fostering a form of groupthink. Yet, over time, the AfD has only grown stronger. As Jeremy Stern writes in Tablet, “unless the CDU can find a way to both govern and win elections from the right, the firewall will eventually crumble, and the AfD will take power in Germany.”

Juxtaposed against the moderation of the populist right in places such as Italy, Sweden, or Finland, the theory of the cordon sanitaire seems to have a mixed record. Of course, there is the understandable concern about right-wing populists as budding authoritarians. Claiming to speak on behalf of a unitary ‘the people’, populists have little patience with check and balances, constraints on majoritarian rule, and with unelected power more broadly – from the judiciary, through EU institutions, to the ‘deep state’ at home. Indeed, there has been a substantial consolidation of power by Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party in Hungary, later emulated by the Law and Justice Party (PiS) in Poland between 2015 and 2023, and more recently by Robert Fico’s governing coalition in Slovakia.

Yet, the fears of authoritarianism need to be qualified. Fourteen years into Orbán’s rule, his hold on power is strong but far from absolute. In Poland, PiS eventually lost power. Fico may be a figurative and literal survivor, but he can be (and has been) defeated.

In most other European countries, populists have been in and out of power without mounting wholesale attacks on political institutions. From Meloni’s government in Italy, through the presence of the likes of Sweden Democrats or Freedom Party Austria in governing coalitions, to Andrej Babiš’ premiership in the Czech Republic, it seems farfetched to see all right-wing populists simply as Hitlers in waiting. Many have turned out to be relatively conventional politicians who pursue policies supported by pluralities or even majorities of the population.

Macron may have many flaws, but he is not an unimaginative politician. If he still wants to defang the populist right ahead of the 2027 race, whatever government he ends up appointing must take seriously the questions of illegal immigration, security, and perceptions of cultural decline. And if that means the means the seemingly humiliating experience of passing more legislation with RN votes and perhaps creating room for RN appointees in the cabinet, so be it. The downside of either attaching himself to Mélenchon’s brand is too great, as is that of trying to govern uniquely from the narrow center and not getting anything done.


Dalibor Rohac is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC. Twitter: @DaliborRohac.

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