Macronism after Macron
Attal, Philippe and Glucksmann battle for the centre.
In ten months, the French Presidential elections will be held, and with Macron unable to stand for more than two consecutive terms, the question is open of what will become of Macronism. The battle for the centrist position has now opened, with three candidates tearing the loyal Macronist electorate. The winner of this battle hopes to repeat the electoral strategy Macron successfully deployed in 2017 and 2022: to face a candidate of ‘the extremes’ in the second round and win by default. This is a dangerous tactic in 2027, however, and will risk seeing the centre, with its ten-year legacy, move to third place and be eclipsed altogether.
Edouard Philippe, Macron’s first Prime Minister, comes out as the most popular of these Macronist hopefuls. But Philippe comes from Les Républicains, the traditional party of the right, and struggles to find a voice that would differentiate him from other conservatives. His hard-handed treatment of the Gilets Jaunes is still a stain on his premiership, and his repeated calls for fiscal austerity will make it difficult to sell a positive vision for France past 2027. He is a popular mayor in Le Havre and has the credentials for executive power, but is being investigated for embezzlement, a possible obstacle to his campaign. He is the logical heir to the right wing of Macronism – a pleonasm in many ways. He is the heir to the ideal of merit I described in the Macron Régime, a credentialist, paternalistic vision in which elites rule unsophisticated masses who do not know what is good for them. Expect cuts to public services, lower taxes for high earners and heavy-handed repression of social protests. In short – what Philippe did as PM in 2017-2020.
If Philippe is the candidate of merit, Gabriel Attal is the candidate of hope. One of the cornerstones of Macronism was this use of the empty signifier, the call for hope as an abstract political principle. Hope to achieve what? Hope for whom? These remained undefined during the Macron presidency, but the concept served as a powerful motivator for the future. This was, of course, borrowed heavily from the 2008 Obama campaign. In a sign of a bygone age, when political liberalism seemed the only game in town, hope served as a catalyst for progressive politics even as progressives dismantled public services and encouraged privatisations. Macron was no exception, and Attal is hoping to carry the same torch in his campaign for the presidency. The youthful Attal is struggling to shake the image of a ‘mini-Macron’, a younger carbon copy of the original. His hope is placed almost entirely on the promise of AI investment – promising success for high-tech companies, and layoffs for the workers who will become unnecessary in the age of digital reproduction.
Attal is allowing himself one critique of Macron: on ‘regalian’ issues, on security. As I showed in the Macron Régime, however, the security dimension of Macronism was an integral part of the project, and other than Attal’s attempts to sound a little more like Sarkozy, with his often-repeated catchphrase: ‘You break something, you fix it. You make a mess, you clean it up. You disobey authority, we teach you to respect it.’ First addressed to school pupils when he was education minister, he has since generalised the saying, which uses the familiar ‘tu’, thereby accentuating its paternalistic tone. Attal’s appeal to young people will be the test of the strategy – with a large TikTok fan base, he is betting on a social media campaign to gain momentum on the old-fashioned Philippe.
The left wing of Macronism – an oxymoron of sorts – is incarnated in Raphaël Glucksmann. At the same time, running his campaign and not yet a candidate, Glucksmann embodies the philosophy of ambiguity so typical of Macronism, hedging his bets between gathering support from the centre left and attracting those who were disappointed with Macron. Glucksmann held a meeting to launch his non-candidate campaign, promising to unite the democratic left, by which he means excluding Mélenchon’s LFI from a left coalition. Glucksmann, an ex-adviser to Georgian autocrat Mikheil Saakashvili, is an economic liberal and convinced Europeanist who is sure to pursue the austerity politics of the past ten years. When he was advising Saakashvili, tens of thousands of public servants lost their jobs, and we can expect similar structural reforms if he takes power. Just like Macron called for a régime, a diet for the fat French state in 2017, Glucksmann will want to streamline liberal reforms à la Hollande. It was, after all, under Hollande that the loi Macron came into effect in 2015, and Glucksmann, who hopes for the support of the socialists, is a direct continuation of left neoliberalism. His refusal to come together with LFI shows that Glucksmann has embraced the Macronist position of the centre versus ‘the extremes’, equating the far right and the far left as similarly dangerous to democracy. Despite the NUPES agreement of 2022, and the NFP agreement of 2024, which showed that the left can run on a common programme with LFI, Glucksmann’s strategy is to divide the left, between its neoliberal supporters and neoliberal opponents. With a crowded centre stage, it could well split the Macronist vote that remained so stable between 2017 and 2022.
The danger for these three heirs of Macronism is that they divide the centrist electorate, which has proven quite stable over the last two Presidential elections. Macron secured his election not by winning the majority of the population over to his project, but by making sure he faced ‘the extremes’ in the second round of the elections. With a split centre, Philippe, Attal and Glucksmann will have difficulties securing first or second place in the first round of elections, the first step of the Macronist path to victory. With the RN polling higher than ever, and a successful launch of Mélenchon’s campaign, a RN – LFI runoff is looking more likely than ever.