Macron’s trial by fire

But then came the French soccer (football) icon Zinedine Zidane with the Olympic torch. The French flag lit up the Austerlitz Bridge, Lady Gaga sang alongside the Parisian quais, a decapitated Marie Antoinette appeared to the sound of heavy metal music at the Conciergerie, and boats bearing national Olympic teams floated down the Seine. The Olympic flame was lit to the sound of Céline Dion, who had come out of retirement for the occasion, serenading global viewers from the Eiffel Tower. With that, everything changed. Even Parisians stopped grumbling and started to feel proud. The Games could begin.

France achieved its objective of finishing in the top five of the medals table, coming in fifth – a considerable achievement for a country with half the population (or less) of those above it (except Australia). Moreover, France came in first among European countries. The star of the show was the young French swimmer Léon Marchand, who won four gold medals.

Sport and Disport

Macron lapped it up, seemingly appearing everywhere at once as he cheered on the French athletes. One of the most memorable moments was when he embraced the behemoth French judoka Teddy Riner after he won yet another gold medal.

Images of Macron celebrating French sporting successes over the years are now legion. Perhaps the most famous is the photograph of him celebrating France’s 2018 Football World Cup. He seems to have developed a relationship with Killian Mbappé, France’s star footballer, consoling him after the loss to Argentina at the 2022 finals. Then, after Macron surprised everyone by calling a snap election earlier this summer, Mbappé returned the favor during the second round, when he publicly urged his fellow citizens to vote against Marine le Pen’s far-right National Rally.

Such support was not trivial. While National Rally did almost double its seats in the National Assembly, Macron managed to avoid the scenario of a National Rally government, with the boyish Jordan Bardella as prime minister, presiding over the Games.

To the surprise of most observers, National Rally ultimately finished third in the second round of the election, putting it behind the left-wing New Popular Front – a grouping of the Socialists, Communists, Greens, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s left-populist La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) – and Macron’s own Ensemble (Together) coalition. One way to read this result is to conclude that Macron’s gambit of forcing the French to confront the possibility of a far-right government paid off.

National Rally has been strangely quiet since the Olympics and its failure to form a government, licking its wounds after yet another failed bid for power. The success of the Games did the party no favors. France was presented to the world as the kind of open, multicultural society that the far right abhors. Riner, Macron’s hug-buddy, is black, and even more irksome to National Rally were the images of the French-Malian singer Aya Nakamura doing a medley of songs with the French Republican Guard during the opening ceremony.

Macron also benefited from the fact that the June European Parliament elections did not feature the far-right wave that so many feared. In July, Ursula von der Leyen was comfortably re-elected to a second term as president of the European Commission despite a vote against her from Italy’s right-wing prime minister, Giorgia Meloni. The European center held.

Most importantly, the Olympics gave Macron time, which can be an invaluable resource in politics. As the Games approached, he declared an “Olympic Truce,” invoking the ancient tradition of warring Greek city-states putting down their arms so that their athletes could compete. In doing so, he became maître des horloges (master of the clocks). On the eve of the Games, he declared on national television that, “The issue is not whether we have a name [for the premiership], but whether we can have a majority at the Assembly.”

Hats in the Ring

After the start of the Games, the political initiative remained with Macron, and he used it to torpedo the New Popular Front’s candidate for prime minister, Lucie Castets, a 37-year-old senior civil servant who has worked at the general directorate of the treasury and the French anti-money-laundering authority. Macron had invited all the political parties for consultations on August 23, and the timing was no accident. To show that he was in command, the talks would coincide with many political parties’ “summer schools” (a type of party conference).

Macron’s own party and the Republican Right group – which split from the wing of the Republicans led by Éric Ciotti, after Ciotti called for an alliance with National Rally – said that they would vote down any government with members of La France Insoumise. At that point, the president wasted no time burying Castets’s bid for the premiership.

Macron’s strategy for finding a governing coalition is to break up the New Popular Front by peeling away the Socialists and including them in a coalition with his own Renaissance party and the center right. At their summer school, the Socialists started tearing themselves apart, with one faction sticking to the New Popular Front and the other moving toward Macron. So far, the alliance has held, but a number of elected members might be tempted by a position within the new government.

The Socialists had performed well in the legislative elections, winning almost the same number of seats as La France Insoumise. This has brought about a power struggle within the French left, the outcome of which could change everything. Were the New Popular Front to break up, Macron’s camp would become the biggest grouping in the National Assembly.

In this context, one of the possibilities previously floated for the premiership was Bernard Cazeneuve, who held the position under the last Socialist president, François Hollande. Although Cazeneuve is a Socialist, he opposed the alliance with Mélenchon, and his appointment would have forced the party to join Macron’s coalition. Similarly, on the right, one of the names that was circulated was Xavier Bertrand, the president of the regional council of Hauts-de-France, whose appointment to the premiership would have forced the Republican Right to join. Both men might still be called upon by Barnier.

By trying to bring together the center-left and center-right forces, Macron seems to have wanted to recreate the coalition that first brought him to power in 2017, when he was able to break the hold of France’s traditional parties and incorporate them into his own movement. But the dynamic was different this time, because each of the parties has proven more insistent on maintaining its own identity.

Will Lightning Strike Twice?

From the start of his presidency, Macron has likened himself to Jupiter, the premier Roman god. When he had an absolute majority in parliament, Macron ruled from on high. His original political movement was called En Marche !, which mirrored his own initials, and during his first term, he exercised power in a highly centralized and unilateral manner, sending out political thunderbolts through his unelected advisers.

But it is worth remembering a story that the Romans told about Jupiter. Once, following a series of storms that endangered the harvest, the legendary King Numa, the second ruler of Rome, asked for Jupiter’s help in preventing the weather from devastating his people’s crops. Jupiter agreed, and went even further by bestowing Numa and the Roman people with a shield from heaven. From that point on, he was the chief deity of the Roman state, which went on to conquer half of the known world.

This is now Macron’s challenge: to secure his legacy by finding a functioning coalition that can continue realizing his vision. While France has a long history of coalition building stretching back to the Fourth and especially the Third Republic, Charles de Gaulle set aside this tradition in 1958, when he instituted a much more centralized “semi-presidential” system. That change made the French president something close to an “elected monarch.”

Macron’s task this summer was unprecedented. Never before has France’s elected monarch had to figure out how to cobble together such a fragile coalition. Like Jupiter, he needed to find a Numa with whom he could negotiate. Will his newly appointed prime minister fit the bill?

By appointing Barnier, a right-wing politician, Macron has moved to secure part of his legacy, notably policies to raise the retirement age, tighten immigration, and reduce unemployment. This has been helped by the European Commission chastising France for running a budget deficit of 5.5% of GDP, well in excess of the 3% limit: cuts are needed. But a danger lurks here, too: Barnier has come to power in part with the complicity of Le Pen, who said that she would not table a motion of no-confidence in him.

Throughout his career, Barnier was known as a centrist Europhile, but following his stint in Brussels, he surprised everyone by running for his party’s nomination for the 2022 presidential election on a hard-right anti-immigration and anti-EU platform, declaring France should regain its “juridical sovereignty.” Here Le Pen would agree, and Macron is playing a dangerous game in allying himself with forces he was elected to restrain.

Perhaps Meloni offered him a cautionary tale. Her party, the Brothers of Italy, was the only one not to participate in Mario Draghi’s centrist technocratic government between February 2021 and October 2022. With even Matteo Salvini’s nationalist League party joining, Meloni became the only true opposition, and she used that platform as a springboard to power in the 2022 election. By making Le Pen complicit in Barnier’s premiership, Macron is trying once again to pull the rug from under her feet. But she might still pull the plug on the new government when it suits her and reap the political rewards.

Barbarians at the Gates

Even if Macron survives for now, the bigger question is what will become of Macronism, his famous strategy of bringing together ideas from the left and the right “at the same time.” When Macron called the snap election back in June, Édouard Philippe, Macron’s first prime minister, argued that it signaled the “end of Macronism.” Philippe has already declared his intention to run for the French presidency in 2027 – or earlier in the unlikely event that Macron resigns (French presidents are limited to two consecutive terms). A highly popular figure in France, Philippe might be able to stand on the “right leg” of the Macronism stool by bringing together the Republican Right and his own Horizons party.

Macron’s snap-election call also invited a similar response from his sitting prime minister, Gabriel Attal, who won praise for conducting a vigorous electoral campaign despite the difficult hand he had been dealt. In doing so, he scrupulously avoided mentioning Macron. Attal represents the “left leg” of Macronism, having cut his political teeth with the Socialists (as Macron did). Insofar as there is a tug-of-war between him and Philippe, it represents a battle for the soul of Macronism.

As is common in transformative moments that redefine political life, France is witnessing a new left and right emerge from a redefined political center. Macron established a new center ground in French politics by bringing together the old socialist left and the conservative right. In addition to Attal on the left and Philippe on the right, another former prime minister, Élisabeth Borne, originally of the left, is vying to lead Macron’s Renaissance party.

Should either Philippe or Attal be elected in 2027, and the extremes of Le Pen or Mélenchon kept at bay, Macron’s legacy would be secure. Once again, the center will need to hold. Only then will we know if Jupiter managed to furnish the Republic with a shield to fend off a disastrous political deluge.

About the author:

Hugo Drochon, Associate Professor of Political Theory at the University of Nottingham, is the author of Nietzsche’s Great Politics (Princeton University Press, 2016).