If there’s one thing to know about French politics, it’s that people make a habit out of hating their political leaders. Former French President Jacques Chirac’s approval ratings dipped below 20 percent at the end of his 12-year presidency in 2007. Five years later, Nicolas Sarkozy suffered a similar fate. His successor, François Hollande, beat them both when around 90 percent of the population turned against him. By 2016, some polls suggested that Hollande’s approval rating hovered at around 4 percent.
Emmanuel Macron, the slick, youngest-ever president who rose to power in 2017 with over 60 percent of the vote, promised to usher in a new era of politics that would transcend national divisions. He even renamed his newly minted political party Renaissance, in case you didn’t understand what he was aiming to achieve. But seven years later, Macron has learned that he is no exception to the rule.
Even if his approval ratings aren’t quite as bad as those of his predecessors, they have dropped to record lows.
The affairs of the Fifth Republic
The July snap parliamentary election — which Macron called in response to an increase in votes for the far-right during the European parliamentary elections in June — left no party in the 577-seat National Assembly with a clear majority. A left-wing grouping of various political parties, called the New Popular Front (NFP), won around 190 seats. Macron’s centrists came in second with around 160, and the far-right National Rally came in third with 140 seats.
The next French presidential election won’t occur until 2027, meaning Macron’s job is safe for now. But he must appoint a new prime minister to govern a divided legislature for the next several years. The NFP has put forward a candidate, arguing that they should pick the premier because they had the strongest showing. But so far, Macron has stalled and deliberated and refused to appoint the candidate the left wants.
Amidst all this mess, Lazo Magazine spoke to independent journalist Olly Haynes. He splits his time between France and the United Kingdom and can often be found “Franceposting” on Twitter (the platform we will never call X). This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Why won’t Macron pick a prime minister from the NFP, given that they’ve won the most seats?
The short answer is that the NFP’s program is essentially to undo everything that Macron spent the last several years doing. Macron already didn’t have a parliamentary majority starting in 2022. But he had a working majority because he could sign into legislation lots of stuff with the help of the right-wing party Les Républicains. He could also use what’s called article 49.3, which is when the prime minister overrules parliament to pass laws.
He is only able to do this once per legislative session for something that isn’t a budget. But they’ve been very tactically clever in making lots of things that aren’t necessarily part of the budget a budgetary question. A lot of the anger over pension reform in France was about the fact that it was passed using this measure.
Macron has pursued this very ambitious program of what you might call neoliberal reforms. He’s also beefed up the police and implemented a low-key war on terror. He’s moved closer to the right on the question of the border. He doesn’t want any of this undone.
He came into politics to break apart the cozy duopoly of the socialists and Les Républicains. He sees himself as a modernizer. He wants to turn France into a startup nation, high-energy, dynamic, and he sees politics essentially as a dragging force.
A lot of people accuse him of what they call neo-Bonapartism. His philosophy of the presidency is that he was elected, and therefore power ultimately lies in his hands.
What do we know about the NFP’s choice of candidate, Lucie Castet? She has said the left would reverse the pension reforms and restore public services. Is that why Macron won’t appoint her?
The government resigned over 50 days ago. But we’re in this really weird situation where the ministers who quit are still acting as if they’re in power. The finance ministry has prepared an austerity budget. They’ve baked in a lot of cuts to the health system and schools and other public services. That’s partly a political maneuver to tie the hands of a potential NFP government.
Lucie Castets is a civil servant and an economist. She works in the administration of Paris. She headed a commission within the finance ministry looking at money laundering and financial crime. She’s a big “tax the rich” person. She’s got a similar line to the economist Thomas Piketty about taxation at the European level.
She was a member of the center-left Socialist Party. She eventually left the party over disagreements with Hollande, although she remained close with other members, like Anne Hidalgo, the Paris mayor.
The NFP chose her because she’s not the leader of any individual parties inside the alliance. Castets, because of her history in the Socialist Party, but then leaving it on a left-wing line, but never being affiliated with the La France Insoumise of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, was an acceptable middle ground for everyone. She’s fairly radical on improving public services, but she’s within the institutional world that is acceptable to the Socialist Party.
What is Macron holding out for? He called snap elections. Shouldn’t he face the consequences and appoint the compromise figure?
The president can dissolve the parliament once every year. That means it’s pretty much guaranteed that there’s going to be a dissolution next July. One theory about why Macron is dragging this out is to run down the clock as much as he can.
There’s also a fringe within the Socialist Party. They’re going to try to bring a vote at the next Congress to change the line of the party away from the current leader Olivier Faure. That’s important because Olivier Faure is in favor of an alliance that includes La France Insoumise. He believes in left-wing unity, and the other faction in his party does not.
They would be much more open to joining a so-called “technical government” of center-left to center-right. That would be able to conserve, from Macron’s perspective, more of his reforms. It would be much less about breaking with Macron.
The longer he tries to hold out, to wear down the optimism of the voters of the New Popular Front, and the parties of the New Popular Front, the more he can try to exacerbate these divisions and maybe break off this socialist flank in order to build this technical government.
Macron has not put forward a candidate from the centrist block. They’ve proposed candidates such as Bernard Cazeneuve. These are figures in the Socialist Party who are not in agreement with an alliance with La France Insoumise, and this is an attempt to try to prise away the socialists from the New Popular Front into a centrist technical government.
Is it fair to say this is undemocratic?
Yes, I think that’s a fair assessment. The leader of the French Communist Party, Fabien Roussel, summed it up on television quite pithily. He said if this were happening in Latin America we would call this either a coup or a dangerous blow to democracy.
Partly this is a function of the Fifth Republic system itself, which was born of [Former President Charles] De Gaulle’s coup d’état and institutionalized a huge amount of power in the presidency. Lots of people think the system itself is quite undemocratic. Things like article 49.3 of the constitution allow for the overruling of parliament, often on an arbitrary basis.
That is not necessarily a problem until you have a figure like Macron, who is very clever, very creative, and incredibly stubborn. He also has this almost mystical belief about what democracy is supposed to be, which is that he incarnates the will of the people.
What is the mood in the country right now?
What keeps coming up in conversation is this word “bordel,” which kind of means catastrophe, and there’s this sense of irritation that there’s no government.
There’s a deep anger on the left at the frustration of their democratic expression. There’s lots of gilets jaune-style murmurings on Facebook pages about the lack of democracy in France. But in general, among the less political people, there’s a sense that they don’t like Macron, but this is a catastrophe, we don’t have a government, what is going to happen?
What does this say about the state of French politics and how the system works?
The line that people keep throwing around is that this is the emergence of the Fourth Republic within the Fifth Republic. This kind of chaos and disorder and parliamentary wrangling is exactly what the Fifth Republic was designed to prevent.
Alleviating the system and making it more democratic probably would help with things. However, fundamentally, what I think this is a product of is that there are three blocks within French society, and these blocks have fundamentally quite different interests and ideas.
France has become divided in a tripartite structure, where urban young people, educated but downwardly mobile people, vote overwhelmingly for the New Popular Front, as do the immigrant populations around the cities, in the banlieues.
The rich parts of the cities vote for Macron, and older people vote for Macron, so people whose pensions are not affected by his reforms because they are already taking them.
Then, in deep France, the France profonde, as it’s called, in small towns and villages, people tend to vote for the far-right.
Society is very divided, and I don’t think that will go away even with fixes to the system.