Macron cannot accept how impotent he has become

Two photographs encapsulate the rise and fall of Emmanuel Macron. May 2017: in a carefully choreographed ceremony to mark his assumption of power, the newly elected president walks purposefully in the Cour Napoléon of the Louvre, a young man striding to meet his destiny. He is alone because this is his victory and no one else’s. October 2025: following the resignation of another one of his prime ministers, Sébastien Lecornu, whose government lasted less than a month, Macron walks contemplatively along the banks of the Seine, followed at discreet distance by two security officers. He is alone because he is without friends or allies. Following his resignation, Lecornu has been tasked with forming another government (Lecornu II), France’s sixth since 2021. Meanwhile the end-of-year deadline to vote on the 2026 budget fast approaches. This budget is a first step at addressing France’s massive deficit and rating agencies are circling like vultures to see what will happen. Every day some new incident adds to the sense of malaise. On 21 October the former president Nicolas Sarkozy started his prison sentence for a scheme to fund an election campaign with money from Muammar Gaddafi. As he left his residence, supporters gathered outside singing “La Marseillaise” and hurling insults against the magistrates. The right-wing news channel CNews – France’s Fox News – presented the scene as that of the martyr-hero being acclaimed by the people. Depicting this sprinkling of Barbour and Hermès-clad Sarkozy fans as “the people” was stretching credulity, but the sight of a former president of the republic heading for jail was a terrible blow to the prestige of the office. Then the extraordinary theft from the Louvre added a comedic touch to the pervasive sense of a dysfunctional government. It was a “humiliation for our country”, said the far-right leader of the Rassemblement National (RN), Jordan Bardella. Former RN leader Marine Le Pen said it was a “wound to the soul of France”. In this atmosphere everyone is talking about a “regime crisis” and the end of the Fifth Republic. For the British press there is a touch of Schadenfreude that the ungovernable French are at it again. In France, speculation about regime change is a national pastime in a country that has had 15 constitutions since 1789. When in the 1920s there was a dissatisfaction with the instability of the Third Republic (1870-1940) one commentator quipped: “How beautiful the republic looked under the empire.” The constitutional grass always seems greener on the other side. In truth, however, there is no regime crisis. There is a grave political crisis that the bizarre behaviour of the president might yet transform into a regime crisis. One of Macron’s former prime ministers, Gabriel Attal, remarked bitterly that he “no longer understands” the president; and another, Edouard Philippe, took the remarkable step of calling on Macron to resign, something that was previously only demanded by the far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who leads the La France Insoumise (LFI) party. The constitution of the Fifth Republic has proved amazingly resilient and adaptable over the years. Contrary to popular belief, France does not have a presidential system like the United States. The constitution created by Charles de Gaulle and his advisers between 1958 and 1962 is a curious hybrid between a parliamentary and presidential system. The president, elected by universal suffrage and therefore enjoying their own democratic legitimacy, has considerable power: they can dissolve parliament and call referenda. But unlike in the US, the government they appoint is responsible to parliament. If parliamentary elections produce a different political majority from the party of the president, there is a potential political stand-off. Such a situation occurred for the first time in 1986 when the Socialist Party of president François Mitterrand was defeated in parliamentary elections. Everyone wondered what would happen next. With their long constitutional memory, French commentators invoked the precedent of president Patrice de MacMahon, who in 1877 had, in similar circumstances but under a different constitution, been confronted by the dilemma “submit or resign”. He did both. Mitterrand, however, submitted – agreeing to name and “cohabit” with a conservative prime minister. Two more episodes of cohabitation have occurred since then (1992-95, again under Mitterrand, and then 1997-2002, under Jacques Chirac). On each occasion no one has contested the president’s authority over the so-called reserved domain of foreign policy. What is different now? When Macron was elected in 2017, everything proceeded normally. The parliamentary elections following his election produced an absolute majority of deputés who supported his liberal centrist project. Although Macron had written eloquently about the need for a more consultative style of governance – more “horizontality” as he put it – he chose to govern in a very vertical, top-down manner. Since his predecessor, François Hollande, had governed so ineffectually, there was initially some readiness to accept this. But Macron took what people came to call his “Jupiterian” approach too far. This was one reason for the explosion of protests by the gilet jaunes movement in November 2018. When Macron was re-elected president in 2022 the subsequent parliamentary elections produced only a relative majority for his centrist supporters. Suddenly, getting legislation through parliament required negotiation. When this did not work the government had to use a clause in the constitution (49.3) allowing it to force through legislation unless enough parliamentarians could be found to vote no confidence. Frustrated by this situation, Macron in June 2024 took the extraordinary decision to dissolve parliament. Given that recent European elections had shown a surge for the far right, it was hard to believe that new elections would produce a parliament more favourable to Macron than the previous one. Indeed, one theory was that Macron expected a far-right victory in order to demonstrate, ahead of the 2027 presidential election, that the far right was unfit to govern. Whatever the explanation for his decision, it produced the worst possible outcome. No clear political majority emerged. There are three basic blocs – ranging from the LFI on the extreme left to the RN on the extreme right – and there are no less than 11 groups in the current parliament. In other words, the president cannot be forced to cohabit because there is no clear partner to cohabit with. Faced with this situation, Macron made another catastrophic error. Since the largest group in the new parliament was the so-called New Popular Front (NFP), Macron should logically have called upon one of its representatives to form a government. In fact, the NFP, an unstable grouping of four left-wing parties, did not have an overall majority. It would only have been able to form a government by making concessions to the centre (or the left of the centre), which its own more left-wing members (from Mélenchon’s LFI) would never have countenanced. So the experiment would have failed but at least Macron would not have been accused of undemocratically ignoring the result of the election. And there was always the possibility that other members of the NFP might have considered breaking with the LFI to ally with the centre. Instead, Macron appointed a centre-right prime minister, Michel Barnier, who was unable to create a stable majority of parties to support him. That government lasted 11 months before collapsing. As one French commentator recently put it, Macron still acts as if he is Jupiter, but does not realise he has no thunderbolts to hurl. The politicians in parliament must share some blame for this crisis. It is often said that they have lost the art of compromise necessary in fragmented parliamentary systems. This displays a strange nostalgia for the previously unloved Fourth Republic, which had 21 governments in 12 years; not much compromise there. The current reluctance of the party leaders in parliament to compromise and permit the formation of a stable majority has added to the malaise. But again, the problem is partly of Macron’s making. As he clearly wants to hold on to power at all costs, party leaders have less incentive to compromise as they would only seem to be helping the beleaguered president out of a crisis that he created. Macron even bears some responsibility for the political fragmentation in parliament. He won power originally because of disillusionment with the traditional right and left. But once elected he made no attempt to give a proper institutional structure to the Macronist centre. It never became more than a ragbag of politicians who had rallied to him, some from the right and some from the left. His party – to the extent that there was one – called itself En Marche (“on the move”), although some have pointed out that the initials EM were also those of Emmanuel Macron. The party then called itself Renaissance and now it is split into three groups under the banner name Ensemble. Not knowing what to call oneself is a sign that one does not know what one is. Where are we now? Lecornu, one of the few remaining loyal Macronists, has seemingly succeeded in forming another government, which now needs to get the budget voted in. Despite affecting Olympian calm, Macron seems to be making up policy as he goes. After the fall of the first Lecornu government in early October, the president flirted with the idea of dissolving parliament again. Then suddenly he changed his mind; party leaders received a text message in the early hours of 10 October calling on them to come to the Elysée the next day, where Macron told them that he was not planning a dissolution after all. A clear indication of how difficult Marcon finds giving up power arose when Lecornu announced on 14 October that, in order to win at least the abstention of the left in a no confidence vote, he was willing to “suspend” Macron’s flagship reform of the pension system, which would raise the retirement age from 62 to 64. Macron then seemed to sabotage his own prime minister by denying that the pension reform had been suspended. That the president has been forced to pause his reform, yet cannot publicly admit to having done so, is a sign both of his impotence and of his refusal to accept it. This tragi-comic situation plays into the hands of the far-right party of Marine Le Pen. Founded in the 1972 by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the Front National, as it was then called, started out as a fringe far-right party led by a charismatic anti-Semitic demagogue who admired the Vichy regime of Marshal Pétain. When he reached the run-off round of the presidential election in 2002, the country was shocked. In that second round, left-wingers held their noses to vote for the conservative Jacques Chirac and Le Pen scored only 18 per cent of the vote. Since then, Marine Le Pen has sedulously worked to detoxify her party, abandoning its extreme anti-Europeanism, its anti-Semitism and its nostalgia for Vichy, while not abandoning its strident rhetoric against not only immigrants but French Muslim citizens. She changed the name to the more inclusive sounding Rassemblement National, and has successfully cultivated an image of a cuddly grandmother figure who loves cats. In the second round of the 2022 presidential election, she won 41 per cent of the vote. The rise of the RN is explained by tectonic social and cultural shifts that have affected France since the late 1970s: the crumbling of institutions, such as the Communist Party, the Catholic Church and the trade unions, which once structured citizens’ lives and identities; the ravages of deindustrialisation; the breakdown of the Keynesian economic model and the failure of neo-liberalism to offer a viable alternative; the financial crash of 2008; the fall out of the Covid pandemic. The geographer Christophe Guilluy has coined the term “France périphérique” to describe the country’s victims of globalisation who have been left stranded – often literally because of the inadequacies of public transport – in peri-urban areas with limited access to medical care and schools, and who feel ignored by political elites. This was the breeding ground of the gilets jaunes protesters who gathered on the no-man’s land of roundabouts. Marine Le Pen is facing a ban on standing for election, subject to an appeal next year, because she is accused of illegally using European funds for her party. Her 30-year-old deputy, Jordan Bardella, has proved himself a consummate Gen-Z politician who thrives on selfies and TikTok. He even seems to be a sex symbol for some young voters. In general, the growth of the RN is helped by the ever-expanding media empires of two ultra-conservative billionaires, Pierre-Édouard Stérin and Vincent Bolloré (the latter is the proprietor of CNews). By declaring that the old divide of left and right has no meaning, and that the new division is between progressist (Macron) and nationalist (RN), Macron unwittingly helped propel Le Pen into the position of privileged opponent. The situation is so febrile, and Macron so unpredictable, that it is hard to be sure what will happen next. It is possible that the Lecornu II government will stumble on until the presidential election in 2027, not least because the alternative of parliamentary elections frightens many political leaders. There might be a Lecornu III or yet another government. Either way, a Le Pen (or Bardella) victory at the next presidential election looks increasingly plausible. And even if the RN does not secure an overall parliamentary majority in the subsequent parliamentary elections, it is likely the diminished conservatives (once proud Gaullists) would for the first time be ready to work with it. When conservatives tried to undercut him by adopting his anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric, Jean-Marie Le Pen used to say cannily that voters would always prefer the original to the copy. (Keir Starmer take note: sounding like Nigel Farage only helps Farage.) He was right. Now that the ideas of the far right have become almost mainstream, the repulsion on the part of what remains of the Gaullist right towards working with a party once rooted in Pétainist nostalgia has pretty much evaporated. That leads to a final question: what would an RN government look like? Will Le Pen prove to be more like Giorgia Meloni, who has (so far) been less hard line than feared, or Viktor Orbán, who seems intent on destroying liberal democracy in his country? No one has the answer, but the constitution of the Fifth Republic potentially gives Marine Le Pen much more power than Meloni enjoys. That is a worrying prospect for France and for Europe. And much of the blame will fall on Emmanuel Macron, alone.