From American Affairs Journal, Volume VI, Number 3, Fall 2022:
The 2010s were a dangerous decade in Western politics. In the span of a single year, between June 2016 and June 2017, the Brexit referendum began Britain’s departure from the EU, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, and France’s party system collapsed. But whereas Brexit and Trump were seen as breakthroughs of nationalist populism, what emerged from the French upheaval in that year was populism turned on its head. Emmanuel Macron, a centrist newcomer of impeccable technocratic, neoliberal, and pro-EU credentials, routed establishment center-left and center-right parties and took over the presidency in May 2017, putting a political party he had launched barely a year before at the center of French politics.
Against a backdrop of widespread discontent with the status quo in the dying days of François Hollande’s crumbling presidency, Macron looked in 2017 as though he had saved the day for the established order in France. In Perry Anderson’s biting words, Macron was a “simulacrum” of populism, an “antibody” generated by a threatened system to protect itself from being overturned, ultimately demonstrating—a reference to W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming”—that “the centre can hold.”
Five years on, how is Macron’s center faring? In April this year, he was reelected as French president for another five-year term, beating, for the second time, right-wing candidate Marine Le Pen in the runoff. This in itself was a triumph of sorts, as France’s Fifth Republic tends to be unforgiving to incumbents, and the last time a sitting president was reelected was Jacques Chirac in 2002. Two months later, however, the president’s party and its allies lost their outright parliamentary majority in the legislative elections, obtaining only 42 percent of seats (245 out of 577), although remaining the largest political force in the National Assembly.
There is much more at stake in Macron’s shifting fortunes than adjustments in the composition of the French political class from one election cycle to the next. Over the past five years, France has faced, with the Yellow Vests movement followed by the Covid-19 epidemic, two episodes whose destabilizing potential exceeded anything the nation had experienced since the street protests of May 1968. Beyond these exceptional events, the country currently finds itself in a vortex of change that is reshaping economy, polity, and ideology both domestically and at the European level.
Emerging from the pandemic, France’s economic policy has become significantly more interventionist, while political rhetoric from all quarters today foregrounds issues of sovereignty, independence, protection, and planning—in sharp contrast to the neoliberal idiom on which Macron rode to power five years ago. The French president has navigated this shifting terrain deftly enough to ensure his reelection, striving to remake himself from neoliberal upstart to post-neoliberal statesman between 2017 and 2022.Yet antiestablishment political forces are steadily rising, now representing half or more of the electorate depending on the election. These forces are currently, on the right, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement national (National Rally, RN), and on the left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France insoumise (France Unbowed, FI). Both made major gains in parliament this June and are anticipating more decisive wins in the future, posing the question of how France’s current power structure will react if and when they gain a foothold in the executive. At a fundamental level, past, present, and future developments in French politics are shaped by the nation’s political economy. On this premise, what follows takes a deeper look at the French and European contexts, setting out how socioeconomic circumstances and major policy choices interacted to produce Hollande’s fall, Macron’s victories, and persistent discontent expressed by the Yellow Vests and the inexorable rise of antiestablishment forces.
Given the present-day French trajectory, there are two major unknowns that carry vast implications for the future of France and Europe. First, how real is the French government and the EU’s post-pandemic embrace of neo-statism in economic policy? Is neoliberalism truly fading away as a guiding paradigm? And second, how will ruling institutions and incumbent elites accommodate the ascendancy of antiestablishment movements like RN and FI? Put differently, are these rising counter-elites on the radical right and the radical left preparing themselves to tear the system down, or to be co-opted by it?France’s Long-Simmering CrisisThe acute political turbulence of recent years in France was a long time coming. After the first oil shock of 1973 put an end to a prolonged postwar economic boom known as the Trente Glorieuses (thirty glorious years), the country recorded lackluster growth almost continuously in the 1980s, ’90s, and 2000s. Most damaging from the standpoint of the French public, the tight labor market of the 1950s and ’60s gave way to mass unemployment—increasing from eight hundred thousand registered unemployed in 1975 to three million in the 1990s. Sweeping marketization reforms imposed by Left and Right politicians alike from the mid-1980s onward under the two-term presidencies of François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac did little to revive the economy, or to dissipate a widespread feeling of dissatisfaction vis-à-vis the political class.........As it happened, the one locus of power in Europe that went against the grain of neoliberal orthodoxy in the 2010s was not France’s “socialist” government under Hollande but the European Central Bank (ECB). Under Mario Draghi’s leadership, it pledged in 2012 to do “whatever it takes” to ensure the euro’s survival, thereby alleviating market speculation on member-states’ sovereign debt. From 2015 onward, this was followed by large-scale buying of government bonds under the ECB’s Public Sector Purchase Programme (PSPP), reaching over €2 trillion by 2019. As shown by Jens van’t Klooster, this “technocratic Keynesianism” on the part of Draghi and the ECB amounted to de facto monetary financing of government deficits in the euro area, in total reversal of the Friedmanite monetarist precepts of a prior generation, even though the ECB itself would not admit to this much....
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