Leaders 9W
hen he wasfirst electedpresidentofFrancein2017,Em
manuel Macron immediately became a standardbearer
for radical centrism. He was young, clever and eminently rea
sonable. Also, it was a time of panic for liberals.
Britain had voted the previous year to leave the European Un
ion. America had just elected Donald Trump. Across Europe pop
ulists were climbing in the polls, even in sober places like Swe
den, Denmark and Germany. The far left were in power in
Greece. Italy’s Northern League would soon enter government as
half of an allpopulist coalition that flirted with leaving the euro
and rebuffed migrants rescued in the Mediterranean. All around
the rich world politicians who promised to raise walls, ignore
experts and turn back the clock to an imaginary golden age were
in the ascendant. No wonder Mr Macron’s triumph in one of Eu
rope’s most pivotal countries brought sighs of relief.
On April 10th Mr Macron will face voters once again. This
time he is running not so much on his aspirations for the radical
centre, but on his record as a nutsandbolts reformer, on his vi
sion for world affairs, and as a leader who has reinvigorated
French politics. In one sense, Mr Macron looks as if he will soon
be able to say his record has been vindicated. Our election model
gives him a 98% chance of making the second round on April
24th and a 78% chance of winning reelection (albeit a number
that has recently been shrinking—see Briefing).
Victory would be a remarkable achievement.
Not since Charles de Gaulle in 1965 have the
French reelected a president who has a major
ity in the assembly. However, the closer you
look, the more liberals around the world should
see Mr Macron as a cautionary tale.
It is in economic policy that his centrism has
been most successful. Before taking office in
2017, he argued that France should be open to globalisation, but
try harder to equip its citizens with the skills they needed to
adapt to change. His promarket labour and regulatory reforms
embodied this philosophy and they have led to an impressive re
bound in employment and newbusiness creation. Rather than
trying to preserve redundant jobs, he has boosted training and
early education. At the European level, he was a driving force be
hind the establishment of the ngeu, a €750bn ($818bn) jointly
guaranteed fund to help Europe’s weaker economies dig them
selves out of the hole into which covid19 had cast them.
He has, however, left plenty to do in a second term. Mr Mac
ron has been too eager to reach for the levers of state control,
whether capping electricity prices or meddling in the manage
ment of hypermarkets. For all his enahoned competence, he
has failed to restore hope to France’s leftbehind. Though his
supporters would be quick to point out that covid got in the way,
he has failed to overhaul the labyrinthine pensions system.
As an international statesman, Mr Macron correctly identi
fied the threat to the Western order from a rising China and an
irascible Russia. His solution was to attempt to boost the Euro
pean Union—a forum where France’s voice counts—even if that
undercut the institutions that bind the West together. Rather
than confront Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, he argued for
buildingbridges.Hewantedtodownplay nato, which he ac
cused of suffering “brain death”, by building up a European
counterpart. Yet, as the war in Ukraine has shown, America’s
role in defending Europe is indispensable. Although his efforts
to defeat jihadists in the Sahel were courageous and laudable,
they have yielded few results and are now unravelling. His deal
ings with a puerile postBrexit Britain were petulant—and just
what Britain’s unserious prime minister wanted.
It is in reinvigorating French politics that Mr Macron has
most fallen short. In the election in 2017 he trounced Marine Le
Pen, a nostalgic nationalist, by 66% to 34%. If she makes it to the
second round, which is likely, the polls today say Mr Macron
would win only narrowly, by 53% to 47%. The proportion of
French who tell pollsters that they will vote for a candidate of the
nationalist right or the anticapitalist left in the first round is
51%, slightly more than voted that way in 2017.
In other words, five years of government by the world’s cen
trist standardbearer has eroded support for the centre. There
are many reasons for this. War and the pandemic have polarised
politics, and not only in France. Mr Macron also sometimes re
pels voters with his aloof Jupiterian manner. Critics dub him “le
président des riches”. The label sticks, partly because he cut
France’s unworkable wealth tax, but mostly because his manner
is that of the highflying banker he once was. Mr
Macron also faces a problem that responsible
politicians always face when running against
populists. He offers policies boringly grounded
in reality. They say whatever will stir up voters,
whether or not it is true (see Leader).
The last reason is that Mr Macron has shown
an illiberal neglect of institutions. Although the
old politics had too many timeserving depu
ties, the parties of the centreleft and centreright have become
sideshows in presidential politics. True, responsibility for re
newal lay with them, but he made their job harder by poaching
their best talent. What is left is a contest between Mr Macron and
a cacophony of extremists on the left and the right. As a result,
the nearest thing France has to an opposition leader is Ms Le
Pen—a historic admirer of Mr Putin who would flout eurules by
favouring French citizens for everything from housing to jobs.
Her 21% chance of becoming president is alarmingly high.
In 2016 Mr Macron wrote: “If we don’t pull ourselves together
in five years or ten years, [Ms Le Pen] will be in power.” What
should centrists make of the worrying fact that, despite all he
has done, his words are as true today as they were then?
One lesson is that complex tradeoffs struggle to defeat slo
gans. Politics is so much about tribes and identity that material
gains in terms of jobs and economic growth are necessary but
not sufficient for reelection. Another is that one person cannot
sustain the radical centre. That is not only because too much is
riding on each reelection and on a successor turning up, but al
so because, as centrists know, individuals are flawed. French
centrism and its AngloAmerican liberal cousins are systems.
They require constant renewal, through argument and competi
tion. Mr Macron still has our vote, but he needs company.nFrance’s president is a cautionary tale for centrists everywhereWhy Macron matters