48 The New York Reviewafter his election, when he posed for an
official portrait, he chose to stand in
front of his desk, displaying his youth
and vigor. One of the books chosen for
the desk was Stendhal’s The Red and
the Black, which seemed to suggest a
certain inspiration, coming as he does,
like Stendhal’s Julien Sorel, from the
provinces (Amiens for Macron, a vil-
lage near Besançon for Sorel). There
are further similarities between the
two. Macron likely sought to channel
Sorel’s ambition and passion, but the
truth is that he is less a character out of
Stendhal than out of Balzac, the great
chronicler of the petty bourgeoisie, its
hypocrisy, and its aspirational ascent.
He is far more like Eugène de Ras ti-
gnac than Sorel: Rastignac’s designs ul-
timately succeed, and he even becomes
a government minister. But every detail
of his persona is heavily manicured, and
a certain amount of envy fuels his rage
and his drive for social advancement.Macron is an upstart, a former invest-
ment banker who has struggled to con-
nect with rural France in the way of his
predecessors, as with Jacques Chirac’s
lifelong bond with Corrèze or Mitter-
rand’s annual pilgrimage to climb the
Rock of Solutré near Mâcon. He con-
siders himself an intellectual and can
never seem to give a press conference
that is less than a multi- hour ramble,
so nuanced, it seems, are his thoughts.
In foreign affairs, he considers himself
a major player and believes that his
personal charm can sway strongmen
and autocrats. But it never quite works
out that way: Putin invaded Ukraine
despite Macron’s attempts to dissuade
him, and Trump tore up the Iran nu-
clear agreement despite Macron’s 2018
state visit to Washington, where he was
convinced that eleventh- hour negoti-
ations would change Trump’s mind.
Once again, his suit became political,
although this time as a source of em-
barrassment. Trump led Macron along
only to humiliate him, flicking a piece
of dandruff off his lapel in front of the
press pool.
Domestically, Macron has embraced
his balzacien instincts and courted
the business establishment, which had
been horrified by the 75 percent “su-
pertax” on earnings over 1 million
that Hollande had promised after his
election and then abandoned two years
later under pressure. Macron’s finance
ministers have mostly been former
members of the traditional conserva-
tive party, the Républicains, and in
economic matters he has been a center-
right president more than a centrist
one. One of his major achievements
has been a series of labor reforms that,
among other things, have made it easier
to hire and fire employees. As a result,
despite the disruption of the corona-
virus, France’s perennially high unem-
ployment rate has actually fallen from
about 10 percent when he took office to
7.4 percent, its lowest level since before
the economic crash of 2008.
France has had right- wing presidents
before—in fact, despite its image as a
model welfare state, it has mostly had
conservative presidents since 1958. But
none, not even the brash Sarkozy, has
elicited the staggering amount of vitriol
that Macron elicits on a personal level,
although several of his predecessors’
policies caused their share of protests.
“Obviously, five years ago, he came
out of nowhere and transformed thepolitical arena, and he surprised every
single reporter in town,” said Roland
Lescure, a parliamentary deputy from
Macron’s party. “And I think people
have kept a bit of resentment.”
The source of that resentment seems
to be more a matter of tone than of
policy, which Macron appears to re-
alize. In the short amount of time he
has devoted to this year’s election cam-
paign, he has apologized for remarks
that have offended many French peo-
ple. But some of them have been diffi-
cult for voters to forget. In 2017, at the
opening of Station F, a start- up incu-
bator that was a fitting project for the
“Start- Up Nation” he wanted France to
become, he spoke about how in a train
station one often encounters des gens
qui ne sont rien—people who are noth-
ing. (“He’s someone who cuts through
the bullshit regularly, and has been
perceived in France as being arrogant,”
Lescure said.)
This perception was one major rea-
son for the gilets jaunes uprising against
his government in 2018 and 2019, a
protest against a proposed carbon tax
increase that turned into a vengeful,
violent, and seemingly endless demon-
stration of the provinces against Paris,
but perhaps against the hubris of Ma-
cron most of all. “People who are noth-
ing” have had enough of Macron, and
they are flirting with alternatives that
the political establishment considers
beyond the realm of respectability and
decency but that nevertheless resonate
with many ordinary voters, more than
half of whom backed candidates from
the far right or the far left in the first
round of the vote.
None of these concerns has seemed
to matter to Macron until now. He is
the darling of the French financial elite
and is close, for instance, to Bernard
Arnault, the richest man in France
and the chairman of the fashion con-
glomerate LV M H. In a strange move
for a sitting president, Macron spoke
at the reopening of La Samaritaine,
LV M H’s new department store project,
in June 2021. This year, on the last day
of campaigning before the first round
of voting, he stopped by a market in
Neuilly- sur- Seine, on the northwest
edge of Paris—one of the richest en-
claves in the country—to greet voters.
Macron promised to disrupt the way
things were done, but he has come to
be seen as the epitome of the establish-
ment, and perhaps even its last bulwark.
But even in one of Europe’s most ro-
bust and generous welfare states, there
are legitimate concerns about rising
inequality. A study by the Institut des
politiques publiques found that almost
all French households have seen a
small increase in their income, but the
bottom 5 percent saw theirs decrease
and the largest gains were among the
rich. These inequalities are not only
economic but social; education levels
are some of the most unequal among
OECD countries. This is partly why
Macron has gained a reputation as le
président des riches—a reputation that
has not been helped by the recent rev-
elations that his government has paid
more than 2 billion to consulting firms
such as McKinsey over the past five
years for advice about everything from
the Covid vaccines to pensions.^3 Whenasked about Macron as the president of
the rich, Lescure said that “facts don’t
really matter” to Macron’s critics. He
pointed to the general increase in in-
comes and falling unemployment rates.
“But it has to be admitted that the per-
ception is there.”Macron’s economic program would
not be so divisive if he had a positive vi-
sion to offer in other areas of French life.
But on matters of crucial importance—
climate, gender equality—France has
seen little change from the president
who vowed to “Make Our Planet Great
Again.” Much of what he has to say
about French society is taken from the
far right. At a rally in Paris in early
April, the only major event Macron’s
campaign hosted before the first- round
vote, he spoke of the dangers of extrem-
ism, especially on the far right. At that
point Le Pen had risen in the polls to a
degree that began to worry Macron’s
advisers. “The danger of extremism has
reached new heights because, in recent
months and years, hatred and alternative
truths have been normalized,” Macron
said. But his administration has contrib-
uted, even unwittingly, to normalizing
the same far right he condemns.
Since his election in 2017 Macron
seems to have judged that the way
to neutralize extremists like Le Pen,
Zemmour, and the many who agree
with them is to concede that there is a
kernel of truth in what they are saying,
especially about Islam and its compati-
bility with the French Republic, and yet
somehow to acknowledge those issues
in a positive way. But this has often
only resulted in bringing bad- faith and
toxic ideas more attention in the main-
stream. One of the more embarrassing
episodes of Macron’s presidency oc-
curred in October 2019, when he found
the time for a lengthy conversation
with the far- right magazine Valeurs Ac-
tuelles. He appeared on the cover in a
pensive pose with the following quote:
“The failure of our model is combined
with the current crisis of Islam.”
But these tactics—intended to reach
new audiences—have not neutralized
the far right at all; it has never been
more popular, as the results of the
April 10 vote make clear. If anything,
Macron’s strategy—suggesting that the
French social model, for instance, is
in some way a “failure” or that Islam,
an ancient religion, is in “crisis”—
has made the far right look like it has
valid arguments, which it defends more
strongly than he ever could.
Macron’s government spent years
preparing an “anti- separatism” law
meant to fight Islamist extremism
through increased security and police
capacity, but also through new rules
about “republicanism” in public life.
Some version of this might have been
an understandable response to a num-
ber of terror attacks: after all, Islamist
terrorists have killed more than 230
people in France since 2015—a genu-
ine national security concern. But the
bill led many to be confused about
what, exactly, the government’s target
was—Islamism or Islam itself (here
Macron’s interview with Valeurs Ac-
tuelles did him no favors). Macron’s
interior minister, Gérald Darmanin,
attacked Le Pen in a televised debate
last year for being too “soft,” and also
railed against the fact that “communi-
tarian cuisine” like halal and kosher
meats were separated from the restof the food in supermarkets. The ed-
ucation minister, Jean- Michel Blan-
quer, has actively discouraged Muslim
mothers who wear the headscarf from
chaperoning school trips. Perhaps most
embarrassing of all, Macron’s higher
education minister, Frédérique Vidal,
announced in 2021 a government cru-
sade against islamo- gauchisme, or
Islamo- leftism, in French universities,
while simultaneously admitting to the
press that she could not define the
term. “Of course, islamo- gauchisme
has no scientific definition,” she told
the Journal du Dimanche in February- “But it corresponds to the feel-
ings of our fellow citizens.”
All of this put Macron in a weak po-
sition as he went into the election: he
needed, and still needs, to show that
he can be a palatable president for
left- wing voters, but both his economic
policies and his forays into identity
politics have alienated them. After the
first round, Mélenchon, who came in
right behind Le Pen, urged his voters,
many of whom loathe Macron, not to
give “one single vote” to her in protest.
And Macron has said, in an apparent
concession to the left, that he would
consider withdrawing his proposal to
raise the retirement age from sixty- two
to sixty- five.
But this may be too little too late. A
distant campaign has failed to shake
the image of Macron as secretive and
more concerned with his own repu-
tation than the well- being of France,
which has allowed Le Pen to style her-
self—falsely—as not just a voice of
strength but a voice of empathy and
calm. “I will be the president of social
harmony,” she said recently. It’s telling
that Le Pen, who is now running for
the third time, has changed tactics and
done what Macron has refused to do:
go from town to town and talk about
the cost of living. This strategy may
well pay off.
3.
In this election, more than just Ma-
cron ism is at stake. Macron is favored
to prevail against Le Pen in the second
round on April 24. But around 60 per-
cent of voters cast a ballot for a Euro-
skeptic candidate on the right or the
left. Whoever wins will have a strong
say on the future of the European
Union.
At first glance, Macron’s pro-
European stance since well before the
war in Ukraine would seem to improve
his chances for reelection. Since the
beginning of his time in office, he has
called for a stronger European Union
and more investment in European
“strategic autonomy”: the idea that
the EU should be able to stand on its
own without the support of the United
States, especially in defense matters.
In the days after the Russian invasion,
headline after headline celebrated Eu-
rope’s unity. There was an almost un-
canny level of celebration about this
newfound spirit—built as it was on the
deaths of thousands and the displace-
ment of millions.
Officials close to Macron congratu-
lated their own foresight. At a discus-
sion panel hosted by a member of his
cabinet a few days after the invasion,
Jean- Louis Bourlanges, the head of
the Foreign Affairs Committee in the
French National Assembly, praised the
Germans, who had recently agreed to(^3) See Rym Momtaz and Elisa Braun,
“Sluggish Coronavirus Vaccination
Rollout Poses Risks for Macron,” Po-
litico Europe, January 4, 2021.
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