Long read: Where does Macron go from here?

This time next year, Emmanuel Macron will face the ultimate test of his political career. Can he be the first French President since Jacques Chirac in 2002 to be elected to a second term in office, or will he join Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande in the also-ran category of his country’s leaders? 

For the moment, no matter how counter-intuitive it sounds in the middle of a pandemic that has so far cost the lives of more than 100,000 of his fellow citizens and placed much of the economy in stasis, his message comes down to the assertion that he is the politician best placed to see France through its current traumas and into the dawn of a new age. 

It is a strategy that requires voters to believe that the President, having withstood crisis after crisis since winning election in 2017, is uniquely qualified to understand all that has gone wrong and what needs to be done to put it right. 

As evidence, his supporters – fewer in number with each passing month – cite the fact that the Covid crisis is at last being brought under control, so that it is now predicted that France will have caught up with the UK in terms of mass-vaccination by the late summer. But there is also evidence, despite the repeated failure of his pension reform programme, of a gradual restoration of something like “normal” politics. 

Ground-breaking laws have been enacted by the National Assembly, most recently a Global Security Bill that, while extending the requirement that riot police should wear head cameras, controversially restricts the right of the media to identify officers engaged in the performance of their duties. Earlier, an equally fraught set of measures, drafted in response to an Islamist murder spree, was passed, aimed at integrating French Muslims into the secularism that underpins the French Constitution.  

Just this week, Macron spoke out against Russia, warning Vladimir Putin that any military action he may be contemplating against Ukraine will meet with a united European response. He has strengthened French forces in the Sahel battling Islamist insurgents and approved a new nuclear-powered aircraft carrier for the French navy.

While seeking to make a fresh accord with French Muslims, he has at the same time defended the right of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo to show images of the Prophet against the charge by Pakistan and Turkey, among others, that he is encouraging blasphemy. Pursuing a related theme, he has called for a legal loophole to be closed that allowed the murderer of a Jewish woman by her Muslim neighbour in 2017 to be held not criminally responsible for his actions on the grounds that, though he shouted Allahu-Akbar! as he threw her out of a window, he was high on drugs at the time. 

The cost of France’s furlough scheme, compensating workers obliged to stay home during lockdown, has, as in the UK and elsewhere, run into many billions of euros. But, undaunted, Macron has since gone on to promise winemakers €1 billion in emergency funding to see them through a year in which up to 90 per cent of their crop has been destroyed by unseasonal frost. He has even said that with the rebuilding of Notre Dame proceeding apace, at a cost (much of it borne by private subscription) of a further billion euros, he is looking ahead to the first mass being celebrated in the national cathedral as early as 2024 – with himself, he had no need to add, as sitting head of state. 

Entertainingly, he announced in March that the École Nationale d’Administration (ENA) the elite post-graduate forcing house that produces more top political leaders – Énarques – than Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge combined, is to be replaced by an ostensibly more egalitarian body, occupying the same building and with the same mission, to be called L’Institut du Service Public, or, as just about everyone else has dubbed it, ENA II.

So Macron has done his best to keep the show on the road. But the question remains, has he done enough? 

There is no doubt that he has been a luckless President. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong, from the gilets-jaunes protests that came out of nowhere less than six months after he took office, by way of the protracted railway workers strike and the violent opposition to his proposed public sector pension reforms, all the way to the Covid-19 crisis that he neither anticipated nor for several months knew how to address. 

But luck is half the battle in politics. “Give me a general that is lucky” was one of Napoleon’s most famous axioms. Truly great men, like De Gaulle, can rise above misfortune and turn it to their advantage. The merely competent have to take life as it comes. 

It must be galling for a man who looked to have everything required to re-energise and transform a complacent France to accept that defeat might well be on the cards. But the fact is that from 25 May 2022, aged just 44, Macron could find himself checking out the situations-vacant pages of Bloomberg Businessweek while working on the first volume, Jupiter Ascendant, of his memoirs. 

On the other hand, who knows? Voters’ memories are short. They don’t so much forgive as forget. Covid, at least as an immediate threat, is starting to fade, replaced in the headlines by upbeat tales of the economic recovery. If the President runs a good campaign, his mistakes could end up as no more than political landfill, especially if those standing against him fail to inspire, which is all too likely to be the case. In the end, it will all come down to who has the will, and the élan, to take Macron on at his own game. 

But who are the contenders hoping to steal the top job – the most autocratic in Europe – from the incumbent’s nerveless grasp? 

Within Macron’s own party, La République en Marche (sketched on the back of an envelope by the Young Pretender while on a train to Bordeaux in 2016), there is no one. For better or worse, he is En Marche. But ranged against him from beyond the walls of the Élysée will be some at least of the following: 

From the Right, the curtains will part to reveal (who else?) Marine Le Pen, the veteran leader of what is now called Le Rassemblement National but was for many years (in English) the National Front. Still just 52, Le Pen stood for the presidency in 2012 and 2017, coming second in the first round against Macron but losing out heavily in the all-important second ballot. 

Her problem is that she uncomfortably bridges the ideological gap between her father, the redoubtable proto-fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen, and her niece from the more nuanced hard-right of Generation X, Marion Marechal, who is expected to carry the family torch long after 2022. 

Aunt Marine has worked hard in recent years to tone down her anti-immigrant, anti-EU rhetoric and, in the opinion of some, may just score lucky third time round. Everything could hang on the readiness of conservative moderates to hold their noses and go for broke. If Le Pen does succeed against the odds, watch out for fireworks, especially if Germany in the meantime has turned both Socialist and Green. 

The 2017 elections were a disaster for the once powerful Parti Socialiste. They were roundly defeated in the presidentials and reduced to just 26 seats in the National Assembly. François Mitterrand wouldn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Ever since, they have floundered, splitting like an amoeba very five minutes and flirting with just about anyone on the Left who looked as if they might have the answer to the biggest question of all: what does Socialism mean in the twenty-first century? After their defeat, they were in the news mainly because of their decision to sell their plush headquarters in the Rue de Solférino, down the road from the Élysée, for €45.5m prior to moving to more workaday surroundings in the outer suburbs. 

So who might the Left put up? There is Olivier Faure, of course, who as PS first secretary would be an obvious choice, but only if he feels up to it, which he might not. It is thought he will wait until the party conference in December to make up his mind. Among the usual suspects from what used to be thought of as the fringe will be Jean Luc Melenchon, the cardigan-wearing but pitiless head of La France Insoumise, a Marxist faction with strong trade union links, and Julien Bayrou, leader of Europe Écologie Les Verts (The Greens), who could, however, choose instead to back a pan-Socialist candidate should the relevant contender be willing to operate under the PS-Social-Écologie brand. 

If the 2022 contest pans out as a simple choice between left, right and centre, Macron would soon find his past catching up with him. He is a known commodity and still commands a measure of respect from those who like their President to be an intellectual, able to cut a dash on the world stage. But he is also damaged goods. France has not prospered under his lofty tutelage. Fortunately for the one-time investment banker, the more likely scenario is a minefield. 

The conservatives, whose descent from De Gaulle has become a geneological nightmare, are in long-term disarray. They haven’t managed to find a voice in the four years since their former leader, François Fillon, was sensationally convicted of fraud and embezzlement and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. For a while, it looked as if Nicolas Sarkozy, the King of Bling, could be resurrected to fill the gap, but then he, too, was up on charges of false accounting and sentenced to two years in chokey. Could he campaign from his cell (to which he has yet to be committed pending an appeal)? Possibly, but it would not be a good look, and he would have to be sprung if he won. 

Step forward, then, Michel Barnier, reborn as a “Patriot and European,” who has let it be known that if push comes to shove he is ready to answer his country’s call. Briefly France’s foreign minister in the latter days of the Chirac regime, Barnier exudes a certain patrician authority and is widely admired for his role in the Brexit negotiations. But, aged 70, he has lived and worked in Brussels for the last eleven years and at this late stage in his career could be said to be more familiar with politics in the UK than with the situation in Paris. 

Unless a Macron-like surprise candidate emerges from the centre, that only leaves Rachida Dati, the mayor of Paris’s 7^th arrondissement, once Sarkozy’s spokesperson, later his no-nonsense justice minister, and Édouard Philippe, Macron’s first choice as premier, who rallied to En Marche from the Republicans but never actually signed up. 

Dati, of North African parentage, was striking as a young woman and allowed herself to be squired through high society by the ever-attentive Sarkozy. But, now aged 55, she has refused to let her image get in the way of her ambition. A tough nut, known for the hard line she took on terrorism, she polled well against the sitting mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, of the PS, in 2020 and still sees her career on an upwards path. 

The bearded Philippe returned to his old job as mayor of Le Havre after he was sacked during the first wave of Covid-19 to make way for the current PM, Jean Castex, a clean-shaven haute fonctionnaire with experience of medical procurement. An Énarque, like Castex (and Macron), he may, it is thought, allow his name to go forward if he feels it his duty and, more to the point, if he sniffs at least the possibility of success. 

If there is a wild card on the Left, it could take the form of Hidalgo, who as mayor of Paris has held on to a generally high level of support in spite of the fact that the capital has been hard hit by Covid. Ecologically sound and judged, like Philippe, to be a capable administrator, the Spanish-born 61-year-old could find herself backed in the second round not just by the hard Left, but by the Greens, whose candidates stormed six of France’s big cities in last year’s regional elections. Hidalgo – whose existing job is generally rated the second most prestigious in France – is no pussy cat. When challenged recently on a point of policy by Dati, from the 7^th, she advised her underling to “stick to cleaning the streets and emptying the bins”. 

France is not America, and campaigning for next year’s elections will not take a serious turn until at least the autumn, by which time the shape of the country’s exit from lockdown and economic stagnation should be clear. This doesn’t stop journalists and pollsters from calculating the odds, which are likely to turn as much on the parliamentary arithmetic as on who gets the keys to the Élysée. 

If Macron does make it through the electoral thickets and is awarded that increasingly rare second term, he may well have to face up to a wipeout of En Marche in the Assembly elections that follow four weeks later. In that event, a period of cohabitation will ensue, during which, as President, he will have only limited authority over government formation and the parliamentary agenda. The good news is that he would continue to enjoy all the trappings of office and the opportunity to concentrate on foreign policy and such high-flown matters as the nature of the European Union. For Macron, whose forays into domestic reform have all come to grief, such an outcome could even prove a blessing.