You could tell the European political establishment had taken a shine to 39-year-old French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron by the number of articles in which he was referred to as both a “centrist” and an “outsider.” Angelique Chrisafis, of Britain’s Guardian, even called him a “maverick centrist outsider.” Macron was a centrist to the extent he claimed to follow a politics that is “neither right nor left.” He was an “outsider” to the extent that he had never been elected to political office.
But of course you can’t be both. Macron, a former investment banker, was the economics minister of the outgoing socialist government and was for a time the most powerful cabinet member in it. As such he is not just an insider. He is the establishment’s last hope for its own rescue. For years the French public has grown less inclined to believe its political leaders. The two main parties have not delivered on their promises. The conservative Gaullists long ago surrendered their selling point (national pride) to bring France into the multinational European Union. The Socialists surrendered theirs (jobs and benefits) to bring France into the global economy. And when the votes were counted in the first round of France’s presidential election on April 23, neither of the parties that have dominated French political life since the 1950s was there. Macron and his En Marche! (“onward,” or “on the march”) movement topped the polling at 24 percent. Marine Le Pen, heir to a party of nationalism and demagoguery founded by her father, was just behind him at 21.
From Paris, the runoff, which is to be held on May 7, looks unloseable for Macron. He took 35 percent of the vote there to her 5. The main newspapers and television networks are unanimously in his corner. On the other hand, that’s the way the U.S. election looked for Hillary Clinton early last November, if you were in Washington or New York. The moment you get outside of the cities, the country appears to be behind Le Pen. She won 48 of France’s 101 départements (county-level units) and the majority of its communes (municipalities)—19,038 out of 35,416. (Macron won 7,135.) But the bigger the municipality, the more likely Macron was to win it. It would take some catastrophic event linked to the EU, immigration, or terrorism (all of which Le Pen obsesses over and Macron takes in stride) to shift the election. Either that, or Macron would need to commit an uninterrupted string of blunders.
In the first few days of the two-week campaign, Macron did just that. He gave a victory speech at the grand café La Rotonde, Picasso’s former haunt, in which he seemed to treat victory as if it were in the bag. He quickly called German chancellor Angela Merkel and opposition leader Martin Schulz. In the last days of April, he went to Amiens, where a strike was in progress at a factory where Whirlpool builds dryers. The American multinational plans to move the jobs of the 286 people who work there to Poland. Macron stopped at the town’s chamber of commerce for a closed-door discussion with a handful of labor representatives. While he was there, Le Pen went to the picket line, spoke to the striking workers in the parking lot, ate a sandwich with them, and promised unconditionally to save their plant. “I’m on the side of the workers who are in the parking lot,” she said, “not in some restaurant in downtown Amiens.” Then she left.
It was made doubly embarrassing by the fact that Amiens is Macron’s hometown. He didn’t behave like someone who had any roots there, or anywhere. When Macron emerged to find out what had happened, he rushed to the factory itself. The workers whistled (that is, booed) him. He offered a few platitudes about “retraining” and opined that “protectionism is war.” Jacques Attali, the Socialist guru and European Union advocate, called the layoffs an “anecdote” that was beneath the notice of a president of the republic.
Macron’s campaign team quickly repudiated Attali. It did not escape notice, though, that many on that team were part of Macron’s old Socialist entourage from the ministry of economics. Many had been protégés of ex-finance minister and IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn during the Socialist elite’s last attempt to place an unelected finance expert in the presidency. The attempt was scuttled only by Strauss-Kahn’s involvement in an embarrassing sexual encounter in New York in 2011.
Now, Macron asserted that Le Pen “didn’t understand how the country works.” He was likely right, but the problem for politicians since 2008 has been that everyone, even investment bankers, is under suspicion of not understanding how the country works. One is reminded of Hillary Clinton’s complaint during the 2016 Democratic primaries about Bernie Sanders: “[His] numbers don’t add up.” This at a time when the administration in which Clinton served had added trillions of dollars to the national debt. Nobody’s numbers add up!
That, ultimately, is why Macron, before launching his campaign, had had to create a new political brand. The “left” that the Socialist party used to embody is no more. It is just a name. The Socialists moved from being a party of factory workers to a party of intellectuals. And as industry moved from smokestacks to silicon chips, intellectuals became capitalist bosses. Who wants that? The official Socialist candidate, Benoît Hamon, finished fifth, with 6 percent of the vote.
The French “right” meanwhile, has revealed itself as a more demotic formation than its campaign rhetoric found it convenient to admit. It is the party of the toothless unemployed, not the party of the readers of Corneille and Chateaubriand. The Gaullist Republicans now have nothing to sell the public, except the possibility of driving the agenda once legislative elections take place in June, a month after the presidential contest is over. But Macron may have a means of putting himself in charge of that process too. He has told people who wish to campaign in the legislative elections under the banner of En Marche! that they will have to quit their old parties. Should he win the presidency handily on May 7, that demand will be easy to enforce. He would likely suck a majority of Socialists into his orbit and an as-yet-to-be determined number of Gaullists.
That, however, would leave the growing ranks of those disappointed in globalization unrepresented. Didier Eribon, who writes about homosexuality, the philosopher Michel Foucault, and growing up working-class in Reims, warned before the first round in the Sunday Frankfurter Allgemeine that over the long term “to vote for Macron is to vote for Le Pen.” By this Eribon meant that it will establish her as the real alternative to a globalist elite and bring her to power eventually. That is not necessarily true. France has successfully waited out several populist revolts, just as the United States did William Jennings Bryan at the turn of the 20th century. It is never inevitable that a radical wave will reach shore.
Nor is it true, as press accounts often claim, that the political landscape left in this election’s wake is “bizarre” or “surreal.” No! It is classic. It is normal. It pits a party of capital-owners and wealth managers against a party of laborers. The only thing bizarre about it is that the former insist on calling themselves “the left” and the latter “the right.”
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
