All hail Macron II: what might another five years bring?

It’s time to give Emmanuel Macron a little credit for what he has achieved, or at any rate tried to achieve, during his five years thus far as President of France. And while we’re about it, what about two cheers for his campaign promise to raise the official retirement age in France from 62 to 65?  

The undertaking to continue the fight against premature retirement – a peculiarly French vice – is not, in fact, anything new. Macron has said time and again that he remains determined to reform pension rights, of which an extension of the working lives of citizens is an integral part.  

But it is significant that, in the midst of an ever-worsening crisis in Ukraine that demands his full attention, he has repeated his pledge, making it the centrepiece of his domestic agenda. Moreover, he has done so in the knowledge that, by provoking both the populist right and the quasi-Marxist far-left (so often in collusion these days when it comes to the “workers”), he has practically guaranteed a return of the street violence that made his life such a misery during his first two years in office.  

The difference is that next time round the President will be ready for them. Macron #2, with an eye on his legacy rather than re-election, will be a very different animal from the centrist Macron (“neither right nor left”) who took power in 2017 at the head of the liberal evolutionary movement, En Marche.  

He has been through a lot and learned a lot in the last five years. There is no need here to rehearse again the incoherent protestations of the gilets-jaunes – Brexiteers without a cause – or the Pavlov’s dog response of the unions to any talk of pension reform. Nor need we devote time to the French approach to the now fading pandemic, save to say that it began badly and then got better, ending up marginally ahead of outcomes in the UK.  

With his return to the Élysée now, we are told, practically assured, Macron will be liberated. Even the anticipated fly in the ointment – a National Assembly in which En Marche is reduced to minority status – could work to his advantage. A cohabitation government that includes ministers from the centre-right Republicans as well as from En Marche and its partners in the Democratic Movement (MoDem), should be better able to focus on necessary reforms.  

Macron doesn’t expect his party to survive him in other than vestigial form. French political parties are no more than statements of the nation’s state of mind at any one time. It is a tool for advancing his agenda. What will matter to him beyond round two of the elections, to be held on 24 April, is the business of getting things done. And since the Republicans’ manifesto, written by the hapless Valerie Pécresse, is little more than a palimpsest of his own to-do list, the reality could be a united front.

Those opposed to Macron in his second mandate must face up to the fact that they had their chance and they blew it. It is far from impossible that the subsequent 2027 elections will be fought out between the centre-right, the far-right and some form of reborn Socialist coalition. But in the meantime, Macron is in charge and it is his priorities, and the opposition to them on the streets, that will make the headlines.  

But, I hear you say, never mind the President’s domestic foul-ups. Didn’t he make a fool of himself this year as the stooge at the other end of Putin’s Big Table? And wasn’t he fundamentally in error over the efficacy of the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine? And didn’t he put himself on the wrong side of history by positioning himself as the champion of the European Union against the post-Brexit United Kingdom?  

In each case, it all depends on your point of view. Just about no one in France thinks that Macron accomplished anything by talking peace to Vladimir Putin in Moscow. They know that he was always on to a loser. But they give him two cheers for trying. On the Oxford jab, it is true that he was needlessly rude and disparaging. Arrogance, usually careless and shot from the hip, is his abiding sin. But there is no doubting the fact that the British vaccine – which has never been approved in the US – has lost its early sheen when it was presented by its champions in the UK as almost a universal panacea. As far as Macron’s seemingly implacable opposition to Brexit is concerned, the negative fallout is mainly confined to the UK. In Brussels and across the EU27, they have other things to think about.  

Just as important for voters is the fact that the French economy, at least until the Ukraine crisis hit, along with the resulting surge in energy prices, emerged from the pandemic in good shape so that it is now one of the best-performing in Europe. Macron may have been unlucky with the gilets-jaunes and the unions, but business and industry have powered ahead during his time as President, and unemployment is at a near-record low. 

The question of what to do about Vladimir Putin’s Russia is sure to dominate the next 12 months, and quite possibly the next five years. Macron’s single-minded promotion of a meaningful EU defence capability, with or without the support of the UK, as well as the rescue of what remains of Ukraine from Putin’s clutches, might well be thought agenda enough in itself for any leader. Yet time will still be put aside in which to pursue a far-reaching social and economic agenda, probably under the day-to-day direction of a new, more powerful prime minister. 

In his pursuit of greatness, real or imagined, Macron will make mistakes. Events will disrupt his routine and place obstacles in his path that he never expected. Almost certainly, he will continue to struggle with voters’ perception of him as an elected monarch with a tendency in a crisis to have his chauffeur drive him to the front steps of the Palace of Versailles.  

But short of a dramatic shift in the public mood, he is not going away anytime soon. Unless the Gods make a dramatic U-turn in their short-term allegiance, or some scandal comes to light that knocks him off his lofty pedestal, France, Europe and Britain look set to be stuck with Emmanuel Macron for the next five years. Boris Johnson – himself an authority on political survival – had better get used to the fact.