Macron alone

In this sense, if not much else, the result of the second round truly reflected the mood of the electorate, more animated by anxiety and muscle memory than by political passion.

Macron’s victory cannot be attributed to charisma, for he has none. At their last photo-op on Election Day, Macron and his wife Brigitte went for a walk on the beach. She was sporting a Rod Stewart mullet, a gold-trimmed hussar’s jacket in the key of Michael Jackson, mirrored Ray-Bans, and an orange tan. He was wearing a tracksuit, a badgeless baseball cap of no fixed allegiance, a pair of round-lensed dark glasses, and a cocky smirk on his pale face. He looked like a teenage chess prodigy whose mother wants to smarten him up for a party. But there is no party. There is only Emmanuel Macron.

Le Pen is the daughter and erstwhile protegée of her fascist father Jean-Marie, and she cannot shake the racist associations of the family brand. But Macron is unpopular. He is cerebral and unsympathetic, an énarque, a graduate of the École nationale d’administration, France’s school for elite public administrators. He struggles to pretend that he understands the concerns of ordinary people, and he is sometimes openly contemptuous of them. In the days before he met Le Pen in their single televised debate, some of the more optimistic pollsters had her closing the gap to within the margin of error, raising the possibility of a Trump-style surprise.

And the extremes had done well in the first round. The left-populist Jean-Luc Mélenchon (slogan: “Another world is possible”) won 22%. Le Pen, the right-populist mainstreaming herself as a “femme d’êtat” (stateswoman), took just over 23%. Macron, appealing to “nous tous” (“all of us”), led with 28%. That meant a repeat of 2017’s second round between Macron and Le Pen. He remained the favorite, but the result was not quite a foregone conclusion.

Still, the real test was not whether Macron won, but how badly Le Pen lost. The constitution of the Fifth Republic is designed to block a Le Pen or a Mélenchon from entering the second round at all. Charles de Gaulle, the architect of France’s curious presidential system, intended to neuter what he called “the system of parties” — especially the Communist Party, but also France’s ample rump of postwar fascists — and create an imperial presidency. Yet this is the third time in five electoral cycles that a Le Pen has beaten the odds by making it to the runoff.

In 2002, when the left vote split and the fragrantly racist Jean-Marie Le Pen slipped into the runoff, the leaders of the other parties exhorted their followers to rally around le front républicain, a “republican front” to defend the constitution. It worked: Le Pen won only 18% of the second-round vote, giving Socialist candidate Jacques Chirac 82%, a margin redolent less of the Fifth Republic than a banana republic.

The taboo against extremist candidates survived, but it was weakened by the breach of 2002. Marine Le Pen has exploited that opening, first by moving her father’s National Front toward the center, and then by breaking with him and founding her own party, National Rally, in the image of Europe’s new Right. In 2017, Macron beat her by 66% to 34%: a resounding but respectable defeat. On April 24, Macron beat her again, but Le Pen, revising her slogan to “Pour tous les Francais,” narrowed the gap to 58.5% and 41.5%.

“We want to reunite France,” Macron said at his rather small victory rally in the Champ de Mars on the night of April 24. This was much the same as what he said in 2017 — “We want to reconcile the French.” But when Macron offers to reunite the French, he implies that they were united before. They never were. The price of stability under the Fifth Republic was permanent disunity, the casting of the heirs of the midcentury communists and fascists beyond the pale of power.

In such a system, “reconciliation” means that the anti-system parties must surrender. They never will. Mélenchon’s and Le Pen’s tactical moderation has made them more popular, not less; Le Pen’s move to the center left a vacancy on the hard Right that was exploited by the journalist Éric Zemmour. Meanwhile, Macron may not have defeated the extremists, but he has excelled in wrecking the Fifth Republic’s natural partners, the center-right Les Républicains and the center-left Socialists. Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist mayor of Paris, won only 1.8% in the first round, and Valérie Pécresse of Les Républicains won 4.8%. These were the worst results in their parties’ histories.

So, the “system of parties” has, indeed, been disempowered — but not quite as de Gaulle intended.

Macron is the first sitting president to win reelection since Jacques Chirac in 2002, but his victory rings hollow. As in 2017, moderate voters saw him as the least-worst candidate. Turnout in the second round, 72%, was the lowest since 1969. Take into account abstentions and spoiled ballots, and Macron won only 38.5% of the nation’s votes. He also faces a hurdle in June, when the voters turn out again for the législatif, the elections for the National Assembly. If he fails to win a majority, he will be forced to seek “cohabitation,” a coalition with a rival party.

It’s not that “the center cannot hold” in France. Macron is holding a hollowed-out center all too well. He now intends to drag it and France forward, regardless of popular legitimacy.

“I don’t make predictions,” political scientist Gil Delannoi told me a day after the election, then added: “Last week, I predicted 59% for Macron. But that was easier.” It was professionally risky for an academic to predict, as Delannoi did in his 2018 book The Nation Against Nationalism, that populism would not be a momentary aberration, and that the populists, regardless of their extremist antecedents and attitudes, might be reflecting genuine popular disquiet about immigration, Islamism, and the corrosion of national identity by the European Union and the global market. It was harder still to predict, as Delannoi did then, that all it would take to revive Europeans’ preference for borders and nation-states was a pandemic from Asia and its economic consequences.

We met at Delannoi’s office at Sciences Po, the Institute of Political Studies. Around the corner, the tourists jammed the terraces of the cafes on the Boulevard St. Germain. France managed the COVID-19 crisis a little better than the other European states, not least through strict limits on personal movement. The economy has made up the lost ground, unemployment is down, and the air of chaos that pervaded Paris during the migrant influxes of the 2010s has abated. There is a strange calm to the surface of life, but the disquieting rumble from below is not that of the metro trains beneath the boulevard.

“It’s quite striking,” Delannoi said. “France is no longer in a scheme of parliamentary or representative democracy in which the people divide and have their own elected representatives.” Instead, the people are divided, but without political representation at the higher levels of state. “We are well into a pattern that has developed in many other countries. What we can call ‘the people,’ in terms of income or professions or access to public speech, has coalesced around populist attitudes that are not necessarily expressed in voting. It can be Marine Le Pen, it can be the yellow vests. It can even be part of the Mélenchon vote. It can be a lot of things.”

That explains the post-runoff resignation among populists of all stripes. The presidential elections, Delannoi believes, might not mean the end for Le Pen as a politician, but they could mean “the end of the idea that she could win the presidential election.” This makes France an outlier when it comes to handling the populist challenge. Conservative parties in the United States and Britain have integrated the insurrections of 2016. The Brexit vote rallied to Boris Johnson in Britain’s 2019 elections, and if the 2024 Republican nominee is not Donald Trump, he or she will strain to sound like him. Why hasn’t this happened in France?

“The French populist Right,” Delannoi said, “is an outside-the-system party, even more so than the Communist Party was in de Gaulle’s time.” The outsiders have always had their redoubts at the lower levels of government, and Delannoi suspects that this “bottom-up path” through local and regional office will offer less resistance to the populists, even if it is longer and more arduous. “If you try to take the most prestigious function of government, it unites many people against you.”

Macron retains that function despite having united the people against him. There are two reasons for this. First, he is the default candidate of a double-negative — the beneficiary of what the pundits call “l’impossible ni-ni,” the impossible neither-nor. Second, he prevents the political union of his rivals. He is abetted in this by an anti-populist constitution, but he also uses neither-nor rhetoric to make democratic politics impossible.

Macron agrees with his opponents, but “at the same time” — a Macron tic — he disagrees. “Allow me to explain,” as he also likes to say. He was an énarque, the inspector of finances, but he left to work for Rothschild & Cie Banque. He then entered politics as an adviser to Socialist President Francois Hollande, only to spin off his own candidacy as a neoliberal scourge of red tape. He says “democracy and Europe” were at stake in April’s elections, but he is visibly irritated by the procedural restraints of democracy and the public’s lack of enthusiasm for further merging France into the European Union.

Allow Raphael Haddad, a communications analyst, to explain. “Macronism,” Haddad reckons, is the “fundamentally institutional” speech of the énarque. It is “a rhetoric that denies or reduces the social conflicts that are inherent in democratic life.”

Gil Delannoi agrees. “The post-democratic order,” he said, “is no longer based on conflict, but on a kind of consensus, of opposition to other forms of conflict and resistance.” Macron admits that he is not a traditional party politician; that might be the most attractive aspect of this charmless man. He is neither of the Left nor the Right. He is a top-down administrator, begrudgingly taking the democratic path. He has exploited the narrow range of ideological acceptability of the Fifth Republic, and the rot of the parties that it favored, to establish a classically French rule from the bureaucratic center.

In the land of the Sun King, Napoleon Bonaparte, Charles de Gaulle, and dirigiste economics, Macron wants to restore and modernize the administrative center. The organizing power of the internet is a Sun King’s dream. Macron’s appeal to the political center, and his destruction of party politics, is the premise that aligns the president, the bureaucracy, and the people. Then the transformation of France into what Macron calls a “startup nation” can begin.

“There are two ways of saying that democracy no longer works,” Delannoi said. “One is when you change leaders and parties, but they bring the same policies in. The second possibility is to say that there is no longer even a need to change leaders and parties. Macron represents this aspect. He has combined people and parties who have alternated power. There is a reconciliatory aspect here: There is no longer this artificial division between Francois Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy, who, apart from more or less symbolic measures on issues like taxation, had the same policies.”

What happens if the centrist bloc falters or fails? What happens if its leader retires or, as in Macron’s case, cannot run again for the presidency? Macron’s party, En Marche, is a startup party. It shares his initials, and the upstart winner of the 2017 presidentielle recruited its current parliamentary membership overnight; it cannot survive without him. This year’s first round, Delannoi told me, presented the centrist electorate with a “nightmare.”

“That’s what the first round revealed to us, and it is very dangerous: the possibility of a second round between Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The truth is, the center in France is at once happy with Macron’s reelection but also disturbed, because the nightmare now seems really possible. For the first time, an election raised the prospect of the grip of the central bloc being broken by populists, whether of the radical Left or popular Right.”

Macron has made a desert of the center and calls it peace. He retains the titular power of the presidency but has yet to secure a parliamentary majority. He has less popular legitimacy than any president since the 1960s, he has faced unprecedented opposition in the streets from the yellow vest movement, and his plans for his first term were derailed by COVID-19. Yet he remains committed to transforming France: cutting red tape, continuing to free up labor markets, pushing back the age of retirement, and breaking the American monopoly on tech.

His motives remain enigmatic: He aspires to gloire but describes it in his usual nebulous, ni-ni language. He will be known by his deeds, but if the petty inconveniences of parliamentary elections obstruct his grands projets, he will be remembered not as the president who came to praise the Fifth Republic by saving it from the extremists, but as the president who further undermined French democracy by burying it in a rubble of rhetoric.

The same goes if he succeeds. The United States has had several political dispensations, but only one constitution. In France, the constitution has changed with each political dispensation. Macron is fulfilling de Gaulle’s dream of a Fifth Republic beyond parties and ideology, but his method is the new politics of personalities, technocracy, and the digital economy. The “impossible neither-nor” for the voters may become an “impossible both-and” for the Fifth Republic.

Dominic Green is a historian and critic. His latest book is The Religious Revolution: The Birth of Modern Spirituality, 1848-1898.