How Macron Lost France to the Extremes

One short month ago, France seemed like a relatively stable Western democracy whose president, Emmanuel Macron, may have been losing altitude but was at least expected to serve out his mandate until 2027.  Then, in June, he shocked the country and most of his own cabinet by calling snap elections. Now the far right is on the brink of power in France for the first time since World War II: One in three French voters last Sunday chose Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, an animated leftist coalition is trailing not far behind, and Macron’s political center has collapsed.  

What just happened here? And what will happen next? Polls project that the National Rally and its allies will either win an outright full majority in the second and final round of the vote, on July 7, or, more likely, there will be a hung Parliament, split between far-right and leftist blocs, which will be virtually unable to govern. Either scenario would be an earthquake in hierarchical France, where much of the economy and social cohesion—fraternité—depends on the government. A volatile period is sure to follow.

Paris is to France as Washington, New York, and Hollywood combined are to the United States—and tout Paris has been in stunned shock and full of dread since June 9, when Macron announced his dramatic choice to dissolve the National Assembly and call legislative elections following his party’s disastrous showing in elections for the European Parliament. Two days later, the singer Françoise Hardy died, and the airwaves were filled with her mellifluous, sexy voice singing “Le temps de l’amour,” now the soundtrack to an epochal political reckoning.

France votes for legislators and presidents in different elections, so no matter what the results are on Sunday, Macron will remain president. But he will have diminished clout. “In a sense, Macron is dead, but the problem is the way he will die, and that will really depend on the result of the election,” Gérard Araud, a former French ambassador to the United States, told me. One possibility is that the country will become so ungovernable that Macron will be forced to step down and call early presidential elections.

Like most of the French establishment, Araud is critical of Macron, if not furious with him. “Narcissus died because he loved his own reflection too much,” he posted on X a few days after we spoke. In another post, Araud quoted Ecclesiastes: “Woe to you, o Land, when your king is a child.” That seemed aimed at Macron, but if the far right wins an absolute majority, Jordan Bardella, the TikTok-savvy head of the National Rally, could become prime minister—and he is 28, barely touched by the 20th century.

Macron, nicknamed “Jupiter,” has governed France with extreme confidence to the point of recklessness, certain of his judgment and heedless of the damage. His wager in calling early elections was that the left couldn’t unite in three weeks and the center right would support him. Instead, the left united within days, and some on the center right are now supporting the far right. What was once unthinkable has become all but unavoidable.  

The dam that used to hold Bardella’s party and its predecessor, the National Front, back from actually governing France may not hold on Sunday. The far right once occupied the outer fringe of acceptability in French politics; in recent years, it has both remade itself in search of populist appeal and become normalized. Macron won the presidency in 2017 and was reelected in 2022, in large part because political forces united to block Le Pen from coming to power. But she still won 41 percent of the vote in 2022. Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded the National Front in 1972, once called the Nazi gas chambers “a detail of history.” Today, in an ironic twist, the younger Le Pen and Bardella have cast themselves as defenders of Jews against Muslim anti-Semitism and Islamist terrorism, doubling down on their party’s attacks on Muslim immigrants.

This turnabout has played well for the National Rally in some quarters. Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his far-left France Unbowed party have alienated many French Jews with recent anti-Semitic outbursts, including toward some French Jewish lawmakers. France Unbowed has been heavily courting Muslim voters by making its support for the Palestinian cause a central campaign issue. For this reason, Serge Klarsfeld, an activist who has spent his life tracking down Nazis, has said that he would support the National Rally over a leftist coalition in this election. The public intellectual Alain Finkielkraut also said he wouldn’t rule out voting for the National Rally against the leftist coalition.

The far right has picked up other new bedfellows. Le Figaro, the bourgeois center-right daily, came out this week for the National Rally, calling the election (not quite accurately) a showdown between Bardella and Mélenchon. A recent poll by the Financial Times found that French people trust the National Rally with the economy more than they would a leftist government. The leftist coalition has proposed raising the minimum wage and bringing back a wealth tax that Macron eliminated in a move that helped bring foreign investment to France.

Éric Ciotti, the head of the center-right Republicans, broke with his Gaullist party’s position and called for an alliance with the National Rally after years of saying the party would never do so. Ciotti and Marine Le Pen sat in the front row like proud parents at a recent news conference in Paris where Bardella presented the party’s platform, which includes lowering fuel taxes (hiking them sparked the Yellow Vests uprising against Macron in 2018), lowering the retirement age for some workers (reversing a Macron policy that also provoked street protests), cutting French contributions to the European Union’s budget, and eliminating birthright citizenship for children born in France to foreign-born parents. He also proposed banning cellphones in schools and insisting that primary and secondary students use the formal vous to address their teachers.

This mix of blood-and-soil nationalism, law-and-order tough talk, and economic incentives has helped the party expand its appeal to French citizens who feel squeezed by rising prices and stagnant wages. The party has used criticism of Macron to advance a divisive agenda that would include banning dual nationals from sensitive public posts. In last Sunday’s vote, the National Rally increased its standing significantly among women, retirees, voters under 35, and those who live in large cities and have relatively high incomes, a poll by Ipsos reported. The poll also found that half of voters under the age of 25 voted for the leftist coalition, which won 28 percent of the vote and includes the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, a green party, France Unbowed, and the center-left party of Raphaël Glucksmann. Glucksmann’s coalition performed almost as well in the European elections as Macron’s.

What happened to the center? Renaissance and its allies won about 20 percent of the vote last Sunday. The crisis has been long in coming and is also of Macron’s own making.

Macron rode personal charisma to power in 2017 after a center-right candidate collapsed. He never had the support of a grassroots movement behind him, and he went on to run France like a tech bro excited to break things, rather than a political leader seeking to build alliances and consensus, or to make voters feel that they were part of a collective project that would improve their lives. Many of Macron’s reforms likely left France in better shape. But to pass some of them, he used constitutional powers to circumvent the National Assembly, and in doing so, he weakened French democracy.

Macron has won the admiration of urban elites, the foreign press, and investors. His labor reforms helped the economy by allowing managers to more easily hire and fire workers; raising the retirement age lightened the burden on the state. But these measures also made people feel less secure. The French heartland knows Macron as a “president of the rich”—a reputation he hasn’t even tried to shake. He doesn’t make voters feel seen, heard, or recognized. Macron and his allies communicate with ideas, whereas the far right and the far left communicate with emotions.

The election has revealed Macron’s technocratic centrism as a fragile facade, behind which the country is still deeply divided, as is much of the West, between right and left, urban and rural, rich and poor, educated and not, globalist and nationalist, young and old. Results after the first round of voting on June 30 showed the centrists winning only in large urban areas, and the leftist bloc winning in the banlieues and some left-leaning smaller cities. The rest of the electoral map belonged almost entirely to the National Rally.

According to a study by a commission affiliated with the French government, 84 percent of National Rally voters say that they live less well than they used to—almost twice the proportion of Macron voters. This sense of déclassement, of going backwards, is pervasive in la France profonde, as swaths of rural and small-town France are known. These voters also feel a strong pull toward dégagisme—French for “throw the bums out.”

At a street market in Avallon, a pretty town in Burgundy, every vegetable and food vendor I spoke with ahead of the elections was enthusiastically supporting the far right. When I asked why, Didier Martinez, who was selling sausages, told me, “We can’t take in all the misery of the world.” He said there were too many immigrants, too much delinquency, too much petty crime. “We no longer feel at home,” he said.

Right-wing media amplify this existential dread, especially the radio and television networks owned by Vincent Bolloré, a conservative Catholic businessman associated with the 2017 launch of CNews, France’s answer to Fox News. The week before the election, CNews ran prime-time ads for home-security alarms and home-security cameras amid its right-wing commentary, targeting an audience presumed receptive to the National Rally’s call for order, rules, enforcement, and borders.

[From the December 2021 issue: Why is France so afraid of God?]

Le Pen has said that she would ban headscarves in public if she became president. Hijabs are currently banned in French primary and secondary schools. In St. Ouen, a northern suburb of Paris that will host some events for the Summer Olympics, which begin on July 26, I spoke with Massilya Oualghazi, a 19-year-old French Moroccan medical student in a cotton-candy-pink abaya. She follows politics closely and supports the far-left France Unbowed. “It respects the rights of the Muslim community,” she told me. “The National Rally favors the interests of Macron and the ultrarich.”

The collapse of Macron’s center has thrown open the doors of power to the far right and to a leftist coalition that includes the far left. The question now is whether the extremes will moderate if they’re in power. For all its centralized strength, the French state has never seemed so fragile.