French Elections

Emmanuel Macron has just made history.  For the first time since the first election of a president of the 5^th Republic by universal suffrage was held in 1965, this 2022 election has not brought about a change of power but has instead confirmed the incumbent president and his government in office. 

In every single previous national vote for nearly 60 years, power has changed hands one way or another.  all other presidents have been defeated in either presidential or parliamentary elections, thus losing control over their own governments.

At the last presidential election in 2017 Macron replaced François Hollande.  In 2012 Hollande beat Nicolas Sarkozy.  In 2007 Sarkozy succeeded Jacques Chirac.  In 2002 Chirac won a second term but against his own prime minister who had been the real holder of power since 1997, because the Socialists had won the parliamentary elections in that year and therefore controlled the government. In 1995 Chirac succeeded François Mitterrand.  In 1988 Mitterrand won a second term, but that election, like the one in 2002, was also a change of power because Mitterrand had lost control of the parliament in 1986 (to Chirac) and therefore was in office but without power.  In 1981 Mitterrand beat Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. In 1974 Giscard replaced Pompidou (who died in office); in 1969 Pompidou replaced De Gaulle. 

The last election when an incumbent and his government were confirmed in office was in 1965 when De Gaulle saw off his challenger François Mitterrand.  The only comparable figure to Macron in the 5^th Republic is therefore its founder, Charles de Gaulle.

The same see-saw effect can be observed in parliamentary elections.  In 2017 Macron devastated the political landscape by bringing to power a party that bore his own initials and wiped out the Socialist Party.  In 2012 the Socialists defeated the centre-right. In 2007 the centre-right held on to power but under a new president, Sarkozy. In 2002 the Right beat the incumbent Left.  In 1997 the Left beat the Right.  In 1993 the Right beat the Left.  In 1988 the Left beat the Right.  In 1986 the Right beat the Left.  In 1981 the Left beat the Right.  You have to go back to 1978, 44 years ago, when Emmanuel Macron was a three month-old baby, to find the last French parliamentary election in which the incumbent majority was re-elected.

How does he do it?  Macron has pulled off this astonishing success because he embodies, even more than his predecessors, the centrist logic which they followed.  He famously came from the Left to capture an essentially centre-right electorate: he had been secretary-general of the French presidency and then Economics Minister under the Socialist Hollande, without himself ever being formally Socialist, while his two prime ministers have both been centre-right. 

Macron’s predecessors also cross-dressed politically but not to the same extent: Hollande and Chirac were centrists (Chirac put more and more ‘water into his wine’, as they say in French, as he got older), while the campaign firebrand and supposedly hardline former interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy appointed the radical globalist-leftist, Bernard Kouchner, to high office.  Mitterrand was elected on a hard-left programme in 1981 but abandoned it in 1983 in favour of the pro-European post-nationalism embodied by his special adviser from 1981 to 1991, the uber-globalist ex-Marxist Jacques Attali, who is one of Macron’s mentors. Mitterrand’s predecessor, Giscard, was, like Macron, a former Finance Minister who embodied, like all of them, a commitment to progress, modernisation and, above all, Europe.  Even de Gaulle was a centrist of sorts.  Today he seems like a giant in comparison with his successors but he also combined elements of left and right – “le progrès, mais pas la pagaille” (progress but not chaos) as he once put it in a very funny broadcast.  During the war, de Gaulle famously had Communists on his side even though he was the very embodiment of “la vieille France” of the army and the Church.

Macron’s historic victory has been obtained in spite of the fact that the anti-system vote in the first round of this election was higher than ever: over 52% voted for Le Pen, Zemmour and the hard left Jean-Luc Mélenchon, not to mention the other anti-system candidates.  The turnout was also historically low in the second round: 28% of the electorate that it was not worth voting.  France has a historic reputation for revolution which, in fact, has transmogrified for over two generations into nothing but sullenness and apathy. 

As for Marine Le Pen, the list is very long of policy positions she abandoned, especially on the core issues like immigration, like a balloonist losing height who chucks as much ballast as possible out of the basket in a vain attempt to stave off the inevitable.  Most people switched off during the debate between her and Macron on Wednesday because, after two hours of argument between the two candidates about growth rates, pensions and unemployment figures, the exhausted audience had not heard anything about the great issues of state such as immigration, law and order or foreign policy.

If we all have the face we deserve at 50, as Orwell said, this is surely also true of the public face of France.  The unbearable banality of Macron’s slogans about progress and optimism, Europe and ecology; the trashy wife; the smarmy logorrhoea (he loves nothing more than being in front of a crowd with a microphone for hours on end); these all correspond to the sociological reality of France today, a country whose famous traditional magic has been largely dissolved away into post-modernity.  Above all, it is the cloying message of safety and protection which explains Macron’s success, at least by default.  The Covid crisis demonstrated that Europeans in general, and the French in particular, prefer (supposed) safety to liberty and the comfort of a reassuring illusion to the anxiety of someone who sounds the alarm.  Like the feckless young Hans Castorp, they prefer to retreat to the Magic Mountain of illusion and apparent safety, where a quack doctor administers ever more damaging ‘cures’ which in fact make their state worse, precisely because they then demand more of the same.  Davos-man Macron is the logical choice of those who have succumbed to the Flucht in die Krankheit diagnosed by Freud, and to the escape from freedom analysed by Erich Fromm, and who say, with every greater insistence, like the Germans, according to Thomas Mann: “I don’t want politics, I want a fairy-tale.”