For anyone awaking now from a ten-year slumber, and for whom the Covid pandemic and the return of war to European soil would take some explaining, the shape of the current French political landscape would be yet another source of astonishment.
When François Hollande replaced Nicolas Sarkozy as president in 2012 the old political markers still worked. The reins of national power were restricted just to the traditional left-wing or right-wing parties of government, according to well-defined boundaries. Crossing these boundaries was a rare and risky thing to do, exposing the transgressor to claims of treachery.
Ten years later, and after Emmanuel Macron managed to undermine completely this classic power pendulum, those disparate voices that have now expressed support for him ahead of this Sunday's first round of voting are a destabilising presence for those used to political groupings that are rooted in the past, to a political culture that was reinforced by the old Right-Left mutual antagonism.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
To give an example, in the space of just a few weeks the current president has received the official support of Marisol Touraine, the health minister under President Hollande, Éric Woerth, a legally-embattled former minister under President Sarkozy, and the veteran politician Jean-Pierre Chevènement. In other words, representatives respectively of France's so-called 'Second Left' or non-Marxist Left, of the neo-liberalism that went along with Nicolas Sarkozy's U-turn towards identity politics, and of a sovereignism steeped in a particularly inflexible Jacobin tradition.
These three figures are part of the sitting president's re-election campaign committee, alongside former Sarkozy supporters Renaud Muselier and Christian Estrosi and the former socialist minister Élisabeth Guigou. Some were present on Saturday evening for Emmanuel Macron's only large-scale campaign rally at La Défense Arena in Paris.
Many of these figures have been supporting the president for several years. In that sense the media coverage given to their pronouncements of support does not convey anything very new. Equally, when the socialist mayor of Dijon in eastern France, François Rebsamen, declared last month “I'm a man of the Left who votes for Emmanuel Macron” it should not be forgotten that he was a controversial employment minister under François Hollande who wanted more checks on and penalties against the jobless.
However, the expected failures of the candidacies of Anne Hidalgo from the Socialist Party (PS) and Valérie Pécresse from the right-wing Les Républicains (LR) give us a glimpse of the new centrifugal forces at play inside both parties. They could further bolster Macron's position if he is re-elected. Above all, we still need to properly understand the ability of the current head of state to unite figures from different political backgrounds, people who are in many cases former adversaries. Otherwise one cannot understand the key place that he has occupied at the centre of what is a partisan French system, nor how he has managed to maintain a large support base on the eve of this presidential election.
It would be too simplistic simply to point to opportunism on the part of those just mentioned. The prospects of a job or the unspoken hope of protection when you are embroiled in various legal issues can certainly play a role. But this motive certainly does not apply to everyone. For example, Jean-Pierre Chevènement does not face any legal issues and at his age – he is 83 – has no career ahead of him to worry about.
Moreover, singling out the motives of individuals does not take into account the fact that, despite the continuing rightwards drift of his policies, the sitting president has an appeal that goes beyond just the political elites. “Emmanuel Macron continues to enjoy a certain support among social democrat voters close to the PS who were central to his election [in 2017],” write political specialists Vincent Martigny and Sylvie Strudel in a collective work that appraises the performance of Macron's presidency.
In other words, the support the head of state has received from all directions is not simply about internal shifts within the political class; it also finds an echo in more disinterested sections of the wider electorate.
Perhaps one day we should consider cutting off both ends of the omelette so that reasonable people can govern together.
In reality, the merging of political cultures and backgrounds of former rivals stems from the ability of a political entrepreneur - in this case Emmanuel Macron - to respond to an underlying crisis in France's Fifth Republic. He has done so using a method that has never been tried under this regime; in effect a “grand coalition”, even though it is not described as such.
In fact, that expression has mostly been used for countries such as Germany, Austria and even Greece during the same period to describe a government that includes the two main parties from Left and Right. It was exactly this kind of arrangement, which is helped by proportional representation, that some French politicians wanted to see in the years before Emmanuel Macron launched his own bid for the presidency in the 2017 election.
It was, for example, an idea championed by centrist politician François Bayrou at the presidential elections of 2007 and 2012. Ahead of the 2017 election, meanwhile, Alain Juppé, a former prime minister and then mayor of Bordeaux, also raised the idea, employing a very colourful culinary metaphor. He told Le Point weekly news magazine in January 2015: “Perhaps one day we should consider cutting off both ends of the omelette so that reasonable people can govern together, and leave to one side the two extremes, from both Right and Left, who have understood nothing about the world.”
The governmental thinking that is considered “reasonable” here is, of course, the thinking employed in the context of globalisation and European integration. It is true that this context has been shaped - or passively accepted by - the majority on the Left and Right who had swapped power up to 2017. However, there had already been growing signs of chronic disappointment among voters towards the traditional parties of government. At the same time, the governing elites themselves felt more and more constrained in their actions, by their systems of allegiance or by the pledges they had had to make to their respective electoral bases.
This was what economists Bruno Amable and Stefano Palombarini have documented in the field of political economy. According to them, the underlying crisis in French political life before 2017 could be explained by the long-term inability of the governing forces to forge social blocs that truly corresponded to the neo-liberal transformation of the country they had undertaken. The omelette with its “two ends cut off” corresponded to what the economists call the “bourgeois bloc”. This was a merging of the well-off and university-educated sections from both the former Left and Right blocs. Emmanuel Macron succeeded in becoming their new champion in 2017.
Other, non-economic, factors also led to the ganging together of the “reasonable governing classes”, minus their radical fringes. Under Nicolas Sarkozy and his successors the mainstream Right thought it could negate the far-right by adopting its themes and even its proposals. The result, apart from legitimising the far-right party of Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen, was to massively raise the expectations of those on the Right who stayed, making their xenophobic views and demands on law on order hard to satisfy. The socialist government headed by prime minister Manuel Valls (2014-2016) under President Hollande broke ever more openly with the ecological and radical Left on similar themes, accusing the latter of being indulgent towards ethnic and religious “separatism”.
It is revealing that in 2016 a fellow minister and Valls's right-hand man at the time, Jean-Marie Le Guen, published a slim volume in which he called for the building of “common ground” between the Republican Right and Left. The plan was to construct a pact that would enable the two mainstream sides to do away with knee-jerk reactions on issues such as the fight against terrorism or structural reforms to make the French model more “competitive”, subjects they could all agree on. With the far-right rapidly growing in support at the time, the idea was to allow for the two sides to have the potential for 'opt outs' on certain policy issues, while at the same time guaranteeing continuity in core public policies. It meant in effect an agreement that nothing would change - or at least always change in the same direction.
The right person at the right time
However, Bayrou failed in its electoral attempts to create a coalition and both Juppé and Valls remained prisoners of their parties, with the primary elections in 2016 stopping either from becoming presidential candidates for their respective camps. In contrast, Macron surged through at the right time by having the appropriate strategy. Equipped with an ad hoc party of his own making, the former economy minister took advantage of the fact that the loss of legitimacy of both the post-Gaullist Right and the socialist Left had now reached the point of no return. The many supporters of Bayrou and Juppé who rallied to the cause were on the money.
To adopt the terminology of the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci, as interpreted by the philosopher André Tosel, what had occurred was a “crisis of authority”, in other words a gap had grown between the representatives and those they represented. In Gramsci's reasoning such episodes can end up with the “passage of the troops of many different parties under the banner of a single party, which better represents and resumes the needs of the entire class....It represents the fusion of an entire social class under a single leadership, which alone is held to be capable of solving an overriding problem of its existence and of fending off a mortal danger.”
Emmanuel Macron was the man behind this fusion, stepping in from outside the old party machines and their badly-eroded support bases. This was what was unique about the French experience of creating a 'grand coalition' compared with coalitions in other countries (except during times of crisis, such as during the recent sovereign debt crises in Europe, when technocrats have been called in to help). In fact, his background was in three different areas across the higher echelons of French power – the senior civil service, high finance and his work as a government minister – rather that in party politics.
The sociological make-up of his government during his presidency shows the same trend, as Valentin Behr and Sébastien Michon show in the previously cited assessment of Macron's presidency. The president's ministers are characterised by having “little political experience, having spent more time in large private groups and by a reaffirmation of senior civil servants to the detriment of professional politicians,” they write. They also note that his ministerial teams have also brought together “professional politicians from a variety of parties in a way that is unprecedented in the Fifth Republic”, which indeed reflects the “logic of coalition”.
In more colourful terms, borrowing from the world of finance rather than the culinary world, you could say that 'Macronism' played a role as a guarantor of last resort for the positions adopted by the Fifth Republic's elites for the last 40 years. He transformed the old LR and PS parties into 'bad banks', rather like those structures used to contain or eliminate toxic financial assets in order to protect the system from general collapse.
That was the the situation in 2017. But the narrowness of this bourgeois bloc identified by Bruno Amable and Stefano Palombarini remained a problem. The former recently told Mediapart that, out of necessity, Emmanuel Macron would be seeking to widen his political position on the Right for this election. The unveiling of his political manifesto duly supported this analysis, which suggests that what is happening is that neo-liberal elements are being joined with “illiberal” elements based on identity politics in order to form a “right-wing bloc 2.0”.
So how, then, does one explain the modicum of support that Macron gets from the centre-left or the support of Chevènement, who in the past has been contemptuous of neo-liberalism? In some respects the support of these groupings for Emmanuel Macron says more about their own evolution than about his ability to win support.
Mediapart recently published the comments of socialists from around France, who explain their support for Macron on “realism” or on their view that the “time of acquiring lots of social rights” has now ended. This reminds us that the notion of achieving social transformation had already largely deserted the Socialist Party.
As for Chevènement, his op-ed justifying his stance in Le Figaro is a disarming read. The former minister accepts at face value the current president's stated aims to re-industrialise the country, seeming not to have noticed the extent to which these objectives are in reality in contradiction with his neo-liberal decisions and his natural support for market forces. Chevènement even rewrites history, downgrading the work of the Centre of Socialist Studies, Research and Education (Centre d'études, de recherche et d'éducation socialistes or CERES) - the socialist research centre which he headed and which was the influential Marxist left-wing of the PS in the 1970s – to merely supplying “new blood” to the upper echelons of the state.
However, recent events have helped Emmanuel Macron achieve an unlikely political blend. During the pandemic the president's stated policy of doing “whatever it costs” helped convey the message that this was a pragmatic government that would not hesitate to pursue massive public spending to respond to the shock suffered by the economy, which was brought to a halt or slowed by the health restrictions.
In reality, this policy simply “froze” in place an unequal and production-led model of the social economy, and it is workers and those on benefits who face paying for it in the long term. So there was nothing especially left-wing about the policy. Nonetheless, everyone who has seen their income or their turnover preserved in this way has a reason to feel satisfied with the sitting president. At the very least, the idea has gained currency that no one else could have done better.
Growing overlap between a 'capitalist right' and an 'organising left'
In addition to the current political and economic context there are structural changes that strengthen the logic of Macron's political land grab. The loss of impetus suffered by contemporary capitalism, whether it is internal or linked to challenges such as climate disruption, requires increased government intervention, even if it is just to help the market operate. The rise in geopolitical tensions, which seem set to last, also gives greater importance to political decisions on issues such as energy, trade and industry.
The words 'planning', 'control' and 'protection' have thus become believable in the mouth of the current president, even if sometimes it is purely for show. And when these words are mixed with rhetoric about progress and patriotic references to the national interest, as in the case of the relaunch of the nuclear industry, something that a Chevènement or those socialists who favour a production-led model have always supported, then the boundaries get blurred.
The neo-liberal framework has been kept but more and more dirigiste methods have been used to plug the holes. The groups that are served first by this framework remain the same, but the way the economy is organised is adjusted according to higher interests, such as national or European autonomy or even saving the planet. In this respect Bruno Amable is right to underline that Macron is a direct descendant of those “modernisers” of the past, someone who is linked to the upper civil service as much as to the business world, but whose desire to intervene is mixed with a neo-liberal mindset.
We can therefore arrive at a hypothesis that in our modern form of society, as described by the philosopher Jacques Bidet, the “organising” centralised part of the dominant class is tending to rise in power in relation to the “market” part of the same class, though without their solidarity being affected. From the point of view of this ever-more balanced partnership, which still seeks to serve the same objectives as before, it makes perfect sense to have the political machinery of a “grand coalition”.
So compared with the pre-2017 period there has been a real political earthquake in terms of the political apparatus and the partisan French political system. But the balance of power and the inequalities between this country's different social groups are still the same as they were. Competition to make a profit continues to underpin our economy and our lives to an overwhelming extent. As for the worst-off levels of society, who lack privileges, they have been unable to make social gains. So we are not seeing a return to some form of social-democratic compromise, contrary to the illusions of the former Socialist Party Member of Parliament Eduardo Rohan Cypel, who has also joined Macron's camp.
Ultimately, the de facto grand coalition created under Emmanuel Macron betrays weakness as much as real strength. On the one hand it is the result of the need to reunite those forces and sectors of the population who continue to go along with a flawed and opposed neo-liberal logic. On the other it is, at a government level, the logical next step of an ever-growing overlap between the differing logics of centralised control and exploitation, which historically were represented by different forces on the left-right political spectrum.
But though the current president can be pleased that he has succeeded in having created a French grand coalition, a major problem remains. When such a phenomenon takes hold for a sustained period it stifles any opportunity to see change in government. Moreover, if the members of this grand coalition are not in a position to gain some form of autonomy on a regular basis in order to offer political alternatives once more, and if the politics that is carried out pleases only a small fraction of the public, then there is a massively increased risk of a major rupture with the rest of society.
That might be for the best, but equally it could be for the worst, as shown by fears that, just days before the first round of voting on Sunday April 10th, the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen could succeed in portraying herself as the “people's candidate”.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter