Speculation swirls over who will succeed lame duck Macron
French politics – always febrile, always awash with gossip – is dominated these days by speculation on who is best placed to succeed Emmanuel Macron as President. In former times, which is to say anytime up to the arrival in the Élysée Palace of Jacques Chirac in 1995, the question of who next did not move centre-stage until the last two years of the incumbent’s time in office.
De Gaulle could afford to scoff at the ambitions of his followers and underlings, who lived in his shadow, until the évenéments of 1968 put the skids under him. Mitterrand regarded the presidency as his right and stamped down hard on anyone who dared suggest that the State was perhaps not him. But, with the possible exception of François Hollande, who in 2017 refused to stand for re-election out of sheer embarrassment, all serving presidents have demanded that they be honoured and respected until the moment the removals men turn up to take their effects back to their equivalent of Colombey-les-Deux-Églises.
What is different this time is that, with nearly four years remaining of the Macron Supremacy, the contenders on all sides are already up and running. It is as if France has become America, where little more than a year into a President’s second term the shift from Hail to the Chief to lame duck can be completed inside of 12 months.
Marine Le Pen, of the Far-Right, is already acting like a President-in-waiting. No longer a rabble-rouser, she has worked effectively as doyenne of the Rassemblement National (formerly the Front National) to convey the sense that mother knows best and that she is the strong, yet sensible leader for which France is waiting.
On the further right, Éric Zemmour, the Old Pretender, at the head of his Réconquete movement, may go for gold himself or he may give way to his protegé, Marion Maréchal (Le Pen’s estranged niece), just 33, who still believes that the old ways are best when it comes to populism. Neither has any hope of winning the prize, but they could muddy the water.
On the centre-right, the conch has passed to Éric Ciotti, leader of Les Republicains for the last ten months, who sees himself as the man to end the humiliating exclusion of the conservatives from power since the fall of Nicolas Sarkozy – the King of Bling – in 2012. Ciotti, a former president of the Alpes-Maritimes department, centred on Nice, is a hardliner and a street-fighter, who says he will be hard on crime and harder on criminals, including illegal immigrants. His weakness many prove to be that France has heard it all before.
But then again, it has heard it all before from all of them.
The Far Left, beneath the banner extravagantly held aloft by the firebrand Jean-Luc-Mélenchon, featured prominently in the protests that greeted Macron’s decision to increase the age of retirement from 62 to 64. The 72-year-old, France’s Jeremy Corbyn, exudes messianic certainties. The problem for Mélenchon is that that particular fight was lost, leaving him exposed as the mouse that roared. Not only that, but his party, France Insoumise (France Unbowed) can only function effectively in cooperation with the currently moribund Socialist Party (which has ambitions of its own) and the Greens, neither of whom regard the veteran marxist as a realistic candidate second time round, for the country’s top post.
So where does Emmanuel Macron fit into all this? He will not, or course, be standing. He would dearly love a third term, but would be advised to concentrate on his time remaining. The President is a self-regarding smarty-pants. There’s no denying that. If he had been named Chanteclere, after the cock who believed it was his crowing that caused the Sun to rise each morning, few would be surprised. But he is up there with De Gaulle and François Mitterrand as one of the few leaders of the Fifth Republic likely to be remembered, if not exactly honoured, for his contribution to the life of the nation.
In the ordinary course of events, as a President in the the first half of his second term, Macron could expect to be above the fray, promoting any outstanding signature legislation while fully engaging in the great international debates of the day – in this case, Russia and Ukraine, climate change, what to do about an overbearing China, mass immigration and unrest in what used to be known as French Equatorial Africa. Sadly for him, his influence in the first four of these is strictly limited, while in the Sahel French troops and French diplomats have been reduced to helpless bystanders, elbowed out by rebels and Moscow-backed mercenaries.
It may be that Macron will have one more hurrah. His stewardship of the economy has been quietly successful, France, with its inbuilt advantage of large-scale nuclear power, has left Germany standing and has also outpaced the UK. Unemployment is down and growth, though slow, is steady. An export drive that works could do wonders for his ratings. On the overseas front, the Ukraine crisis could move in his favour, allowing him to capitalise on his relative good standing with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. He might even have some success on the EU front, lining himself up for a future tilt at the presidency of the Commission or European Council.
So, all to play for and everything to lose. It was one of Macron’s key selling points in 2017 that he represented a clean break with a broken past. Sarkozy looked sleazy, Hollande just looked broken. En Marche, the party and movement he founded in 2016, boasted of being an ideology-free zone, in which good ideas were welcome from whichever point of the compass. But the years have taken their toll. The gilets-jaune, the railway workers, pension reform, most of all Covid, sapped the reformer’s strength, leaving him still standing but less steady on his feet.
It used to be that En Marche (now, with no hint of irony, Renaissance) could be whatever you wanted it to be. Seven years on, no one knows what the hell it is. No wonder that the party’s big beasts, like interior minister Gérald Dermamin and finance minister Bruno Le Maire, both from the dominant right of the party, and Gabriel Attal, the intensely ambitious budget minister and former government spokesman, from the left, are known to be weighing their positions. The Macron years came in with a bang. If the President is not careful, they could go out with a whimper.
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