At this point, Americans shouldn’t need reminding that the institutions of so-called liberal democracy are in profound crisis, and that the crisis is getting worse rather than better. But if anybody out there still thinks the problem is just the Bad Orange Man, or that it’s confined to Kamala Harris’ campaign failures or the Democratic Party’s excessive wokeness, the collapse of “centrist” governments in Germany and France, within a month of the U.S. presidential election, offers plenty of evidence to the contrary.
Circumstances in those countries are different, to be sure — both from each other and from the U.S. — and in both cases the political, social and cultural problems have been brewing for years and can’t simply be chalked down to “oh no, rising authoritarianism.” (Which in any case is a symptom of dysfunction, not a cause.) Nor are those isolated instances, although when you’re talking about three of the largest Western-style democracies in the world, it should be obvious that the contagion is general.
If the downfall of onetime liberal dreamboat Emmanuel Macron in France seems like a startling headline — he remains in office, but has effectively lost control of government — and the crumbling of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition nothing more than a footnote, there’s plenty more chaos to contemplate. On opposite sides of the globe, Austria and Japan both lack functioning governments, a month or two (respectively) after elections that saw ruling parties lose and the hard right make significant gains. Four months into his term, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is already weakened and massively unpopular, despite a huge parliamentary majority (built on barely one-third of the popular vote).
We could go on: Across our northern border, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has lower approval ratings than Joe Biden. In Italy, the fash-curious government of Giorgia Meloni is stripping same-sex couples of parental rights. If you’ve been reading news sites like this one, I don’t need to tell you about Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, vanguard leader of Europe’s illiberal right, except to observe that he’s starting to look more like the rule than the exception.
But of course the big news in Europe this week was Macron’s slow-motion Waterloo moment, a tale of hubris and karmic payback if ever there was one. After his increasingly amorphous political party — which has gone through three different names in seven years — lost its parliamentary majority in an election last June, Macron faced a quandary: Under France’s unusual parliamentary system, the elected president appoints the prime minister, but the latter must command enough votes to stay in power. (Since they typically belong to the same party, that last part tends to be a formality.)
Macron has always seemed personally insulted by political opposition and refused to negotiate with the left-wing alliance known as the New Popular Front (or NFP, its French initials), which won the most seats in June’s election. He gambled instead that his longtime adversaries in Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party (or, perhaps, more moderate members of both factions) would be willing to accept his choice of old-line conservative Michel Barnier. That arrangement held for about three months, until Barnier tried to force through cuts in social security spending by using a slippery parliamentary maneuver that avoided an up-or-down vote.
After an overwhelming left-right vote of no confidence, Barnier is out, leaving Macron enormously weakened and with no obvious way to forge a government he can tolerate. He delivered an aggrieved speech this week vowing to remain in office until the next presidential election in 2027 and blaming his opponents at both political poles for forging an “anti-republican front” (i.e., being unpatriotic) and choosing “not to do, but to undo.”
That’s a revealing remark from a leader who has undone his own power and credibility so dramatically over seven years in power. But in larger historical and political terms, it’s misleading to understand the crisis of Western-style democracy in terms of the failures of individual leaders. One could argue, in fact, that the public obsession with charismatic political figureheads — whether in France or America or anywhere else — is itself the problem, or at least a big part of it. In that sense, Macron is the ultimate paradigm.
Youthful, handsome and cosmopolitan, married to an elegant older woman (who was once his professor!), Macron burst onto the global stage a few months after Donald Trump’s first election, and was embraced by far too many people as the charismatic, reassuring normie antidote. He was like the romance-novel fulfillment of the Clinton-Obama neoliberal hero, an anti-ideological but vaguely virtuous blank slate on which the entire world projected its desires.
Even at the time of Macron’s first victory in 2017, it was possible to observe that this global man-crush was a bit overcooked. His newly-invented party had no discernible agenda beyond his glorification (a phenomenon that may sound familiar to Americans), and that year’s voter turnout — even in a final-round confrontation with Le Pen, darling of the anti-immigrant right — dropped below 75 percent for the first time in modern French history. (It fell still further in their 2022 rematch, when Macron defeated Le Pen by a much smaller margin.)
Once in power, Macron seemed less likely to confront Trump than to fluff and flatter him, and adopted much the same “strategic” approach with Vladimir Putin, with even worse results. Those were early signs, in retrospect, of the preening arrogance and moral cowardice that fueled an atmosphere of perennial social crisis in France and have left Macron almost universally despised and politically isolated.
He wanted to be a beloved and respected world leader who did world-leader stuff, and he most certainly looked the part — but never appeared to possess a clear idea what the point of all those photo-ops and summit meetings might be. In terms of style and sophistication, Macron could hardly be further away from Donald Trump, but on a deeper psychological and semiotic level, they were more similar than different.
If Macron’s narrative has undeniable operatic or novelistic qualities, the collapse of Olaf Scholz’s always-awkward coalition government in Germany, a few weeks earlier, barely rises to sitcom level. Scholz’s center-left Social Democrats are not a newly invented party but rather one that seems fatally adrift in 2020s Europe. They only barely wriggled back into power after the long reign of Angela Merkel, the dominant figure of 21st-century German politics — another Euro leader with an undeserved reputation among liberal Yanks — and never seemed in control of Germany’s domestic and foreign policy crises (immigration and Ukraine, respectively).
With an election coming in February, everyone expects Merkel’s former party, the Christian Democrats, to return to power under the leadership of Friedrich Merz, often described as her right-wing nemesis. He seems eager to combine all the least appetizing ingredients of contemporary German politics — fiscal austerity, hardcore free-market economics and overt hostility to immigrants — in an effort to fend off the actual neofascist party, Alternative for Germany or AfD.
If Scholz’s distinctly unsuccessful chancellorship is likely to doom the fragmented German left to an extended period in political exile (which feels like something of a global trend), Macron’s predicament presents opportunities for the NFP, a loose alliance of left-liberal, social democratic and socialist parties that holds the largest number of seats in the French parliament.
If the thoroughly-declawed French president really wants to hang around for another two years with a semblance of functional government, he either has to cut a deal with the NFP or with the not-quite-fascist Le Pen, who fully expects to replace him in 2027. That will be the last act for the former golden boy who dreamed of making France great again, and it could be a decision with world-historical consequences: Which version of humiliation is he willing to accept?
