How Macron dodged political death … for now

PARIS — French President Emmanuel Macron defied the laws of gravity in French politics this summer. But he’s never looked more alone.

In the last three months, he lost one election, then hastily dissolved parliament and sent his troops unprepared into another election, lost that election and then triggered weeks of chaos and confusion by waiting to appoint a prime minister.

Macron’s allies dropped dozens of of seats at the hands of the left and the far right after he massively gambled on the future of the country and lost. Somehow the president himself emerged from the wreckage bruised, but appearing to land on his feet with the nomination of former Brexit chief negotiator Michel Barnier as prime minister.

“You have to recognize that after a serious setback in the European election, and another in parliamentary election, he shored up the essentials: his political autonomy at the Elysée and the continuation of his political agenda,” said Gaspard Gantzer, a former Elysée adviser under Macron’s predecessor François Hollande.

The price Macron has paid for the current reprieve is a high one. The damage done to his camp is permanent. Key allies have openly turned against the president, accusing him of “killing” his coalition. The images of Macron’s ministers staggering in shock after his decision to call a snap election will linger.

His weakness has been noticed by rivals and allies alike. Macron was the first to blink in a standoff with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen over France’s European commission. Macron decided to sacrifice his choice for commissioner, the firebrand and von der Leyen nemesis Thierry Breton, in the hopes of getting a better portfolio. But Paris ended up with less influence than it had before.

And then there’s the larger question of legacy and what Macron stands for. In appointing Barnier, a fiscally prudent conservative grandee who was twice a European commissioner and four times a government minister, Macron has ensured that his hard-earned, pro-business reforms — especially his controversial decision to raise the retirement age — will survive.

But Macronism — his particular brand of politics that is a mixture of pragmatism and innovation and which was supposed to transcend traditional left-right party divisions —  appears dead.

“It’s almost comical. You start off promising a revolution, and you end bringing in a politician from the old world,” said Christopher Weissberg, a former lawmaker from Macron’s Renaissance party.

Macron is no longer the Jupiterian president he aspired to be, an executive who stays above the fray by governing through symbolic gestures which set the terms of the debate. He is now getting his hands dirty with the business of political horse-trading and arm-twisting that he had tried to avoid.

He is now, in Weissberg’s words, just “a guy who wants to hold on to power until the very last minute.”

Legacy on the line

Politics is awash with betrayals and back-stabbings. Macron’s own rise to power began with a secret bid for the presidency while he was a minister in Hollande’s government in 2016. At the time, Hollande’s prospects were fading but he had not yet announced he would not seek reelection.

Macron has also shown a ruthless streak with his prime ministers. Left-wing technocrat Élisabeth Borne was appointed to the premiership and tasked with the thankless job of pushing through the government’s retirement reform last year in the face of widespread public opposition, only to be booted out once the job was done. The French president then brought in one of the stars of the so-called Macron generation, Gabriel Attal, to take her place, only to call a snap election behind his back months later.

Less skilled politicians get fired when they lose elections or make serious mistakes. Former U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May, the architect of the Brexit deal signed off by her successor Boris Johnson, was forced to resign in 2019 in the face of election defeats. Hollande, Macron’s predecessor, shepherded France through the 2015 Paris attacks, but was arguably stopped from standing again because of bad poll numbers.

For the French president, the jury is still out on whether he will be able to survive this damaging episode. With Barnier, Macron’s pro-business reforms will be safe if the new prime minister survives in government long enough .

But how he saved his legacy was not a pretty sight.

After refusing to appoint the left’s preferred candidate as prime minister, a little-known civil servant named Lucie Castets, even though the left-wing coalition New Popular Front got the most seats in the parliamentary election, Macron spent weeks testing names, including one of his early mentors, former Socialist Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve. But Cazeneuve’s prospects began waning even before he met with the French president at the Elysée Palace.

Cooperating with the left quickly became an untenable proposition, given its insistence on unraveling Macron’s hard-earned pension reform. Giving in now would have undermined his legacy, explained constitutional expert Benjamin Morel. “You can understand why it became a totemic issue for him,” Morel said of the pension reforms.

Protecting his achievements came at a heavy cost.

The president had to endure the disgrace of hosting the Paris Olympic Games without a government (outgoing ministers stayed on to dispatch daily business.) After weeks of uncertainty, unprecedented in recent French history, the frenzy of speculation reached such a pitch that even children were grilling the outgoing PM on who his successor would be.

Then there’s the matter of empowering the far-right National Rally, a party Macron had vowed to fight again and again, but whose backing his government now needs to stay in power. With the left vowing to topple the government, the new prime minister needs at least tacit support of the far right to survive no-confidence votes in parliament.

With the nomination of Barnier, Marine Le Pen’s party was “put back in the saddle” as a kingmaker in France, one Renaissance ally said, who, like several other officials quoted in this story, was granted anonymity to speak candidly. And already the far right is threatening to bring down the government over budget talks.

For many, Macron’s international reputation as a steady hand at the helm has been damaged.

“He’s seen as a lame duck president who has plunged his country into political and institutional instability,” a European diplomat told POLITICO.

According to this diplomat, Macron’s decision to call a snap election created a crisis rather than resolved one. “He started off with 172 [Renaissance] MPs and ended up with 99 MPs.”

Storms gathering

The question on everybody’s lips is how long Macron will be able to keep going.

According to Morel, with this latest move, Macron “could stay in the game and finish his mandate with a kind of sovereign [distance], which could buy him back popularity.”

An old-timer in Macron’s coalition said his allies need to get over themselves and seek reconciliation. “He’s the boss … I see MPs who say they won their seats thanks to their own work, but that’s not true, it’s thanks to him that they are there,” he said.

Long term, however, the prospects don’t look good, even if Macron, whose mandate runs until 2027, cannot be forced to resign.

“His camp doesn’t emerge reinforced,” Morel said. “The left has a narrative they can sell,” given that their coalition stayed in the opposition, and “the National Rally benefits from the government’s dependence on it.”

Barnier also appears to be struggling to put together a government, with French media reporting of rivalries emerging among conservative wannabe ministers and the centrist bloc threatening to withdraw their support over possible tax hikes.

Macron likely hopes that he’ll be remembered as the president who saved France from fiscal ruin by making a tough-but-necessary choice on pension reform. But his dogmatic, uncompromising defense of a signature policy in the face of stiff resistance may saddle him with a less flattering legacy: the leader who put Le Pen one step closer to the presidency.

“We killed off the left and the right and let the extremes emerge. But we need a strong Socialist Party … and a strong [conservative party] with whom we can find a way,” Patrick Vignal, a former Renaissance lawmaker who lost his seat in Macron’s snap election, said.

“We never found the winning formula against the National Rally.”