Although Emmanuel Macron did a little better than expected in the first round of the French presidential election last Sunday, the results were not a huge surprise. The second round next Sunday will be between Macron and the far-right leader Marine Le Pen, exactly as it was five years ago. But the results confirmed two worrying trends in French politics that were already apparent – and which are also evident to some extent across much of the rest of continental Europe.
The first is the realignment of politics away from a fault line between left and right, to one between “radical” centrism and populism. The centre-left Socialist and centre-right Les Républicains candidates both received less than 5% of the vote, a lower share of the vote than either of these parties had ever received before. Both Macron and Le Pen see themselves as being “beyond left and right” – that is, though they both want us to think of them as being opposites, they actually mirror each other. From a democratic point of view, this realignment is disastrous.
The second trend is the apparently inexorable rise of the far right in France. It is not just that between them Le Pen and her far-right rival Éric Zemmour got 30% of the vote – more than Macron. It is also the way that the far right has set the agenda in French politics more generally during the past five years, as illustrated by the way that, during the campaign, even centre-right candidates such as Valérie Pécresse adopted far-right tropes such as the idea of a “great replacement”.
Perhaps the only surprise in the first round was that Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far-left Eurosceptic leader of La France Insoumise, got 22% of the vote, up from 20% in 2017 and only 1% less than Le Pen. His success shows that, despite the rise of the far right, the left is also still quite strong in France, though it has drifted away from the Socialist party, whose candidate, Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo, got less than 2%. In other words, the left in France is now basically Eurosceptic.
In fact, Macron’s bid for a second term can be seen as the last gasp of French centre-left pro-Europeanism. It may be a surprise to hear Macron, who has been derided as the “president of the rich”, described as centre-left. But he was once a minister in the government of François Hollande, the last Socialist president. By looking at the longer trajectory of the French centre left and its relationship with the European Union, we can see how Macron represents the end of an era.
When François Mitterrand was elected as French president in 1981 amid rising inflation and unemployment, he promised state-led growth as a way out of France’s economic problems. But two years later he was forced to do a U-turn as financial markets put pressure on the French franc. The centre left in France drew the conclusion that social democratic economic policies were no longer possible at the national level. As his finance minister, Jacques Delors, put it, France had a choice between Europe and decline.
The problem with this pro-European strategy was always Germany or, rather, the inability of France to persuade Germany to pursue a centre-left economic policy, especially after the creation of the European single currency, which constitutionalised German preferences by limiting the ability of governments to borrow and spend. After the euro crisis began in 2010, first Nicolas Sarkozy and then Hollande tried – and failed – to persuade Germany to loosen the eurozone’s fiscal rules.
When Macron became president in 2017, he made one last attempt to cajole Germany into making concessions. He proposed “a Europe that protects”, in which the eurozone would be reformed to protect citizens from the market. He undertook difficult labour market reforms in order to gain credibility in Berlin. But though many there had been spooked by how well Le Pen had done in the 2017 election and realised that Germany needed Macron to succeed, chancellor Angela Merkel ignored his proposals for a more redistributive EU.
“Pro-Europeans” argue that the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 has been a game-changer. In particular, they see a breakthrough in the creation of a €750bn recovery fund, which some, like the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, then the finance minister in the Merkel government, even called the EU’s “Hamiltonian moment”. But although the recovery fund limited the economic impact of the pandemic itself, it did nothing to reduce the macroeconomic imbalances that already existed within the eurozone.
In any case, these developments do not appear to have stopped the rise of Euroscepticism in France. According to new Eurobarometer data published last week, only 32% of French people trust the EU, a lower figure than in any other member state. Meanwhile, under pressure from the far right, Macron has reinvented the idea of “a Europe that protects” in terms of cultural rather than economic protection, completing his journey from the centre left to the centre right.
Unlike in 2017, many in France worry that Le Pen could actually win this time, especially if a substantial number of Mélenchon’s voters abstain in the second round. (He has carefully told them that they should not give Le Pen a “single vote” without telling them to vote for Macron.) But even if Macron wins, he will face the same problems as before. In particular, unless the EU’s fiscal rules are reformed, it is difficult to see how he will be able to deliver much on the economic issues that matter to French voters.
Like Le Pen, Mélenchon has somewhat toned down his Euroscepticism – they both now talk about changing the EU from within rather than leaving it, though some worry that this could make the EU even more dysfunctional. But whether or not Macron hangs on for another five years, future French presidents from the left are likely to be less pro-European – and more confrontational towards Germany – than their predecessors.
• Hans Kundnani is a senior research fellow at Chatham House and the author of The Paradox of German Power
