The dazzling rise and fall of Macronism

Flushed with victory over Marine Le Pen in 2017, Emmanuel Macron strode up the Elysée palace steps with a special calling: to finally release France from the lure of the far right.

The president, then 39, and his cadre of bright, optimistic aides — dubbed the “Mormons” — aimed to rejuvenate France’s economy and international standing, champion the EU and transcend the left-right divide in politics.

“If we do not get a grip, whether it be in a few months, in five or 10 years, the Front National will be in power,” wrote Macron in “Revolution”, his manifesto written before the 2017 election.

Seven years on, Le Pen is closer than ever to taking office with her rebranded Rassemblement National party. Optimism around Macron has long evaporated. And his decision to call a snap parliamentary election, with a first-round vote on Sunday, has hastened a political reckoning that could shake the foundations of the Fifth Republic.

Macron’s project, launched with éclat, is fighting for its life.

The arrival of Macronism — and its central tenet of dépassement, seizing policy ideas and talent from all sides — swept aside the traditional left and right parties. But his time in office has coincided with a boom in support for extreme parties — the RN and far-left La France Insoumise (LFI).

Almost regardless of the election outcome, Macron’s role is set to dramatically change. To stand a chance of holding on to power after the second-round vote on July 7, Macron’s movement will hope to peel off support from centre-right and moderate left parties — the very groups it set out to eclipse. 

François Patriat, a veteran senator and one of Macron’s earliest backers, admitted that Macron’s Ensemble alliance “risked being crushed” in the election. “The core values and vision of Macronism are still alive,” he said. “We should be rallying around them or the next phase will be very difficult.”

Macron defended the dissolution of parliament, which stunned his colleagues, as a necessary moment of “clarification”, hoping voters opt for cold reason rather than the siren calls of populism.

“He’s a pure Cartesian, not at all emotive,” said one longtime adviser. But such a rational assessment seems ill-suited to the angry, contemptuous mood of the French electorate. Even some of Macron’s allies admit the scent of dégagisme — a wholesale clearout — is in the political air.

In a sign of how far Macron’s star has fallen, his face no longer appears on the leaflets and posters for his alliance’s campaign. Friends have urged him to lay low; allies of political convenience have begun to look elsewhere.

The president’s critics, meanwhile, have relished the moment. Serge July, the founding editor of leftwing daily Libération, drily noted that Macron dissolved himself as well as parliament. Raphael Glucksmann, a rising star of the centre-left, declared: “Macronism is over.”

Opinion polls suggest RN and its allies could come close to an outright majority in the 577-seat chamber, while the centrists could lose more than half their 250 MPs.

If the RN secured 289 MPs, it would plunge Macron into an uncomfortable power-sharing government — known as “cohabitation” — with Le Pen’s lieutenant, Jordan Bardella. The president would be mostly reduced to managing foreign affairs and defence, while the RN would run domestic affairs, the government and the budget.

Gallows humour is spreading among Macron allies. When asked for an interview to discuss what remained of the original Macron project, one staffer texted in reply: “Nothing. LOL.”

If the election produces a hung parliament, which polls suggest is a more likely scenario, gridlock or an institutional crisis could set in if no faction can form a government. A technocratic government may be needed, although not typical in French political culture.

“The exercise of power is going to have to change completely,” the longtime adviser said. Does Macron have the character for that? “He has no choice.”

Some defenders of Macron refuse to concede that the snap elections will wipe away his achievements — such as lowering unemployment and attracting foreign investment — or that he will be hamstrung for the remaining three years of his term. 

His broad EU vision — a robust union defending its economic interests and co-operating more closely on defence — is now largely accepted by France’s partners.

Macron is also a champion of supply-side reform, overhauling labour laws to make it easier for companies to hire and fire workers. He replaced the wealth tax — earning the former investment banker the moniker “president of the rich”.

Unemployment fell to a 15-year low. France became a favoured destination for international investors, and a crop of tech “unicorns” emerged in Macron’s “start-up nation”. But voters have been reluctant to give him the credit.

Successive crises overshadowed many of the achievements, putting the focus on living standards and a pervasive sense of social decline. In late 2018, the gilets jaunes movement exploded, morphing from a protest on petrol prices to an uprising over living standards and low pay.

Another trauma came with the beheading of teacher Samuel Paty in 2020 by a radical Islamist after having shown his pupils cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed in a lesson about freedom of speech. It prompted Macron to adopt a more hardline stance on security than his original message of promoting a tolerant, diverse France.

Then came the jolt of the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, triggering inflation and an energy shock that squeezed French households.

Macron ably navigated the storms, but his reformist project slowed and the deficit ballooned as he often reached for the cheque book to solve problems.

It was not just crises that eroded Macron’s popularity but the manner in which he governed. The lengthy town hall meetings he held as part of the so-called big debate helped defuse public anger during the gilets jaunes crisis — and exemplified his campaign promise to take a more consultative approach.

But for the most part there was very little sharing of power — even with his own colleagues. “A government has to be a team. There is no team,” said one former government member. “He doesn’t like his ministers.”

Macron stood astride a “hyper-presidential” executive, with decision- making concentrated in the Elysée. He built no local party machine to defend his programme on the ground, nor a policy engine to generate new ideas. It left him exposed when things went wrong and reinforced the charge that he was out of touch.

“Our way of governing has not been great,” conceded a friend and adviser from 2016 to 2020. “You cannot transform and reform without a culture of compromise. Instead our method was like it or lump it.”

Early Macronism sought to synthesise the best policy ideas from left and right, like the “Third Way” politics of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. It was encapsulated in Macron’s mantra of “en même temps” — at the same time. At one campaign rally in 2017, the crowd chanted it back at him with wild enthusiasm. 

The phrase is now derided by the president’s critics and even some one-time supporters, who say it has been emptied of meaning by Macron’s political zigzagging. That only accelerated in 2022 after voters handed him a second term as president, but clipped his wings by depriving his centrist group of its outright parliamentary majority.

So while a bold overhaul of the pension system was watered down — after months of street protests — Macron still had to ram it through parliament using a constitutional power. His government narrowly survived a no-confidence vote.

Another example was a bill to cut down on illegal immigration while helping undocumented workers to secure legal status — a textbook show of en même temps.

The bill was made harsher on foreigners to secure the conservative parliamentary votes needed to pass it. Half of its provisions were thrown out by the constitutional court. Macron claimed victory but left-leaning MPs in his group were aghast.

Having tacked to the right, the president then tacked to the left, passing a constitutional amendment to protect the right to abortion and proposing a draft law on assisted dying.

Government action had become unfathomable, said a third person who was also an early adviser.

“I think he himself totally forgot what Macronism meant,” the person said. “He turned it into ‘one day I appeal to the right or far right and the next to the left’. In the Elysée, they call it triangulation, but it is a betrayal of the original Macronism.”

Macron’s allies now say his record can only be judged at the end of his term in 2027. If the RN take the premiership and then stumble badly in government, it could inoculate France against electing Le Pen in 2027 — a victory of sorts for the nation, say people in his camp.

The polls suggest that one-fifth of the electorate still back Macron’s pro-business, pro-European centrism. His allies argue that this political current will outlast Macron himself and someone else will emerge to lead it.

Macron’s snap election has also liberated the politicians in his centrist alliance who aspire to replace him in 2027 from any remaining sense of loyalty. Former premier Édouard Philippe, the current prime minister Gabriel Attal, longtime finance minister Bruno Le Maire and interior minister Gérald Darmanin have already begun positioning themselves.

The Macron friend and longtime adviser lamented that it would be “terrible, devastating” if the rise of populism left Macron’s political proposition all but dead. But the dissolution was a huge error.

“The big mistake he made is that the president is supposed to bring people together and protect the public,” said the friend. “The dissolution is the opposite of that — the decision was like driving too fast on an icy road.”

In an open letter to the French on Sunday, Macron said dissolution was the “only way to allow our country to advance and unite”. He asked his fellow citizens to answer one question: “Who will govern France?”

Data visualisation by Clara Murray, Amy Borrett, Janina Conboye and Steve Bernard