Paris
When Emmanuel Macron declared he would run for president of France in late 2016, the consensus was that he was a cat’s-paw of François Hollande. Macron had been deputy chief of staff at the Elysée Palace to the Socialist Hollande, the most unpopular president in the history of modern France, or indeed of political polling. Hollande then named him economy minister, a dazzling promotion for a 36-year-old civil servant who’d never run for elective office.
Tasked with modernizing the French economy, Macron took a few bites at the country’s rigid employment law (clocking in at well over 3,500 pages, it beats Obamacare in complexity). He let Uber into Paris against the violent protests of the taxi drivers, allowed Sunday openings for more categories of shops, broke the rail monopoly on regional transportation by allowing intercity bus lines (hitherto forbidden), and took to addressing colleagues and voters in management-speak, en anglais s’il vous plaît. He talked of “la task force,” “les losers” (ISIS terrorists), et “le win-win.” These were baby steps in the right direction, sorely needed even if somewhat cosmetic. Revolutionary it was not.
Observing Macron’s army of nominally socialist octogenarian supporters, all storied throwbacks to the presidency of François Mitterrand (former Elysée adviser and all-purpose pop thinker Jacques Attali, Yves Saint Laurent supremo Pierre Bergé, former Mitterrand culture minister and hip-hop champion Jack Lang), pundits recalled that Hollande himself had been a far more junior adviser to the same Mitterrand. The president, they felt, having no chance of winning, had groomed a transparent successor to keep his own people in place. The upstart was dubbed “Hollande 2.”
Now President Macron may be said to be following in Hollande’s footsteps—but with the aim of doing the precise opposite of what his hapless predecessor did. Triumphantly elected on May 7, at the head of a new party that did not exist two years ago—En Marche!—Macron is turning into Le Terminator, poised not only to win the legislative elections to the Assemblée Nationale (the final round will be on June 18), but to win in a landslide. With strategic brilliance and ruthlessness, he has systematically destroyed the right, the left, and Marine Le Pen’s National Front (FN), although in the last instance she helped him.
Macron has split the Républicains, the conservative party reshaped by Nicolas Sarkozy in recent years, by taking as his prime minister a young unknown from their ranks, Le Havre mayor Édouard Philippe. He consolidated with Bruno Le Maire, a onetime acolyte to the anti-George W. Bush former foreign minister Dominique de Villepin, as minister for the economy. Finally, in a move of balletic malevolence, Macron snatched the 34-year-old Gérald Darmanin, Sarkozy’s latest discovery and bright new hope, as the junior minister for public accounts.
This, in effect, left the Républicains with a rump of bitter older men who’ve been around too long and now only hope they won’t lose too badly.
The FN, having come close to complete victory, is now in complete disarray. Having believed, for a heady 12 hours, that she really had won her presidential debate with Macron last month, Marine Le Pen realized the following morning that she had not only lost, but botched it. While Macron cake-walked to victory, she wasn’t seen in public for over a week, hunched up at home with her cats and digesting her humiliation. Meanwhile, feedback from Le Pen’s base streamed in, confirming that her Palinesque performance in the debate had exposed her as undignified, flaky, and, in the words of many FN voters on Twitter, “non-presidential material.”
What followed in her party smacked of a mini-night of the long(ish) knives. Marine’s popular 27-year-old niece Marion, one of the Front’s only two members of parliament, who’d carefully expressed disagreements with her aunt’s too-statist choices, resigned to “take care of [her] daughter”—though really to distance herself from the general stench of Marine’s losing anti-euro campaign. Marine’s Karl Rove, the former left-wing Socialist Florian Philippot, the architect of her populist platform, threatened to resign, too. The man hitherto described, with some accuracy, as “Marine’s brain” was then dismayed to see her lukewarm reaction to this empty threat.
Only three weeks ago, the National Front giddily expected to end up with 50 to 60 members of parliament. They’re now wondering if they’ll manage 15, the minimum needed to create a parliamentary group. Like Trump, Marine appealed to disappointed blue-collar and lower-middle-class voters from both the right and the left.
But the Front is a clan more than a party. Its campaign has been farmed out to dubious experts, unprofessional and disorganized. Worse, local FN cadres have such a bad reputation for nepotism, corruption, and plain ineptitude that about 40 percent of Front regional officials (councilors, aldermen, etc.) elected in 2015 have already left the party.
In his shopping spree to strip the traditional parties of some of their more compatible personalities, Macron has taken on four Socialists, including two big beasts, Jean-Yves Le Drian (Hollande’s defense minister) at European and foreign affairs and Gérard Collomb, the Lyon mayor and regional satrap who supported him from the start, as minister of the interior. Collomb’s Socialist party machine is expected to deliver the Lyonnais regional vote to Macron’s party.
François Hollande’s Socialists, the venerable party of Jean Jaurès and Léon Blum, are dead in the water. At 125,000 registered members, they only number half Macron’s En Marche! official followers. They scored a little over 6 percent in the presidential election, and even though that will get them more seats than the FN in the legislative elections, they have been effectively ripped to pieces by the combination of Macron and the surprisingly strong Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a man of the far left whose support for Chavista Venezuela and Castroist Cuba didn’t hamper him from grabbing a fifth of the presidential vote.
Mélenchon himself, off the presidential campaign trail where he shone beatifically, all red flags strictly banned from his rallies, has since shown his true colors by high-handedly pre-empting a Socialist-held constituency in Marseille that he is sure to win. The Communists had supported Mélenchon for president; they now will field candidates against his. He will try to make up the votes by attracting a chunk of the working-class FN voters. It will not be enough to help him win the large bloc he dreams of in the Assemblée Nationale. And this infighting between far-left and farther-left will only benefit Macron.
It is all an unholy mess, watched with an Olympian eye by Macron, who self-describes his role as president as “Jupiterian” (he had the benefit of a classical education in his Jesuit lycée in Amiens). Following the lead of Barack Obama, the new president has sharply curtailed the access of the press who loved him so much these past two years. The Elysée will pick and choose exactly which journalists they’ll deign to allow in His Presence.
It doesn’t matter: Like Obama in the early days of his presidency, Macron can do no wrong in the eye of the voters. Some of his early appointees are fingered by the media for the same kinds of abuses that cost François Fillon, the Républicain candidate, the election. Bruno Le Maire, like Fillon, allegedly paid his wife with public funds in a fictitious parliamentary assistant job. Richard Ferrand, Macron’s consigliere and minister for parliamentary affairs, allegedly caused his former employers to buy a choice piece of real estate for the benefit of his girlfriend. Macron refuses to fire them. The voters do not seem to care. They elected the new boy, and they want him in charge.
Anne-Elisabeth Moutet is a Paris-based columnist for the London Telegraph and a commentator for the BBC.
