Macron and Trudeau: The downfall of a pair of liberal bros

OTTAWA — Montreal’s Laura Palestini and northern France’s Violette Spillebout may live thousands of kilometers apart in very different countries, but when they ran for higher office in recent months, they pursued similar strategies.

Each deemed the leader of their country so politically toxic that they deliberately chose not to feature them on their campaign materials, even though they are members of the same party and officially support them.

Once seen as emblematic of a new generation of liberals, both Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and French President Emmanuel Macron have seen their political legacies bruised after years in power, with right-wing movements posing a growing threat to their leadership.

As Trudeau prepares to host Macron for a two-day visit, both leaders share a common concern: the Obama effect. Each could be succeeded by someone who is their polar opposite and threatens to tarnish their legacy, as former President Donald Trump did to Barack Obama following the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

New faces of liberalism

Trudeau and Macron first met at a G7 summit in Sicily in 2017, just a week after the French president took office. The Canadian prime minister was already in the second year of his first term at the time.

“The French-Canadian friendship has a new face. Justin Trudeau, it’s up to us to meet the challenges of our generation!” Macron posted on social media at the time.

Early comparisons between Macron and Trudeau were frequent — especially when contrasted with Trump, who had also just been elected. French political scientist Dominique Moïsi noted in 2018 that the two were the same age and exuded a similar empathy and charisma.

“They are both positioned at the center of the political spectrum and share a similar vision of the world,” Moïsi said.

Macron, a former investment banker and economy minister, ran outside France’s traditional left- and right-wing parties and upended the political status quo when he became the youngest president in the country’s modern history. As head of state, he promised to open up the French economy and rally the country around a “progressive” agenda.

Trudeau contrasted himself as a young and dynamic new kind of politician against then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper, whose Conservative government had become known for its secrecy and constant fights with the media.

Trudeau’s Liberals aggressively took notes from the positive messaging and social media strategy that sprang out of Obama’s presidential campaigning. They carefully constructed a narrative arc that positioned Trudeau as an underdog — despite being heir to Canada’s most famous political dynasty.

After winning power, he branded the new Liberal era as “sunny ways” for Canadians, with his new government focusing on equity and shunning balanced budgets.

Falling short on a promise of change

Christopher Weissberg, a former lawmaker from Macron’s Renaissance party who represented French citizens living in North America and lived in Canada at the time of Trudeau’s 2015 election, saw both leaders as people who “represented a new world, at odds with what even their own political currents represented.”

In the end, however, both found themselves hamstrung by what Weissberg called “traditional politics” and failed to live up to their lofty promises of change.

“Trudeau managed to embody a new way of doing politics to a certain extent, with at least some real progress in defending minorities, whereas we [in France] didn’t have a clear message by trying to be a little on the right and a little on the left,” Weissberg said.

After nearly a decade in power, recent biographies of Trudeau have painted his government as being more reactive than pitching a grand vision for the country.

That’s cut both ways, though. His government is credited for its successful full-court press against the trade threats posed by the Trump administration that would have upended the Canadian economy, and its relatively quick response to the Covid-19 pandemic, pumping out funds to bolster financially struggling Canadians at breakneck speed. 

But now, Trudeau is pitching continuity in a country that’s hungry for change — almost a mirror image of former U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s situation just before his fall from power.

Like many incumbent leaders struggling with a post-pandemic economy plagued by a high cost of living and a national housing crisis, polls show Canadians are eager for a replacement to a tired-looking Liberal government, which is starting to lose key players.

French voters also appear ready for something different. While Macron has victories he can hang his hat on — France’s unemployment rate has dropped to around 7 percent after stagnating at 10 percent during François Hollande’s presidency and the country has emerged as a European leader in foreign direct investment  — his tenure has faced a series of roadblocks and seen moments of extreme tension in French society, including the monthslong Yellow Jackets movement and mass protests last year in opposition to the government’s unpopular decision to raise the minimum retirement age to 64 from 62 for most workers without a vote.

Constitutionally barred from running for a third term and with a weakened grasp on power after losing control of parliament, Macron now runs the risk of seeing these instances of deep division and anger in French society stick as the most visible symbols of his presidency.

A threat on the right, criticism on the left

Despite growing discontent among their populations, the French and Canadian leaders have managed to maintain unusually long tenures in office. Macron was reelected in 2022, becoming the first French president to win a second term in two decades. Trudeau, meanwhile, kept his post as prime minister following elections in 2019 and 2021 and will have spent a decade in power if he makes it to the next national contest.

Macron and Trudeau’s electoral fortunes, however, seem to have taken an irreversible turn for the worse.

In June, after Macron’s party suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of the far-right National Rally during the European elections — a result widely seen as a rejection of his presidency —the French president took the political class aback by deciding to dissolve parliament and hold snap elections.

The gamble backfired. His coalition went on to lose a third of its seats in the French lower house and its status as the main force in parliament. They were replaced by the pan-left New Popular Front (NFP) coalition, which came out of the elections with the most seats in parliament but short of an absolute majority. Macron, however, refused to appoint the NFP’s choice for prime minister, arguing the coalition held too few seats to govern with stability. The left had also promised to unravel some of Macron’s landmark pieces of legislation, including his controversial pensions reform. Macron instead entered into a coalition with the weakened conservative party Les Républicains, forming a government that needs the tacit backing of the far right to survive.

Across the Atlantic, the left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP) recently pulled out of a confidence-and-supply agreement with Trudeau’s minority government, putting it at risk of falling to a motion of no confidence which would bring about an early election.

That could spell trouble for Trudeau’s Liberal Party, which recently suffered two stunning by-election losses in urban Montreal and Toronto districts which were considered its strongholds.

Trudeau can’t shake the question of when he will step down and who his successor will be, but the knives still haven’t come out. Liberal lawmakers all owe their careers to his name, and the Canadian prime minister has managed to keep support within his troops, who would have little to gain by breaking with their leader despite knowing he’s unpopular.

So there’s no clear successor waiting in the wings.

Legacies thrown into question

During his visit to Canada, Macron will attend a private dinner with Trudeau to discuss global affairs, meet with representatives of Francophone communities across Canada and meet Quebec’s Premier François Legault.

But both leaders are likely to have domestic affairs front of mind, haunted by the possibility that their successors may be politicians who represent the antithesis of the progressive promises on which they were elected.

At large, societies remain supportive of the progressive ideals of tolerance and support for minority rights championed by liberal leaders. Yet a hard-right wave is sweeping much of the Western world, with Canada and France potentially in its path.

The far-right National Rally secured a landslide win in June’s EU election in France, making it the favorite in Macron’s subsequent snap vote. Though the party ended up finishing in third place, well below expectations, it still gained seats and remains broadly popular. A recent poll showed that if a presidential election were to be held today, the National Rally would receive around 40 percent of the vote.

Trudeau, Canada’s positive-vibes-only prime minister, now finds himself similarly threatened, facing a firebrand populist leader who is successfully marshaling the country’s anger and frustration against its leader.

Conservative Pierre Poilievre is rocketing ahead of Trudeau in the polls, decisively winning political ground on inflation, drug “safe supply” policies and by campaigning against the PM’s capstone environmental policy of carbon pricing. Poilievre has seen success in dropping incendiary apocalyptic slogans and streamlining his rhetoric — “axe the tax,” or else the economy will enter a “nuclear winter.”

On the defensive, Trudeau has argued Poilievre is attacking the country’s institutions with a “flamethrower” — and that in Canada’s next election, voters will face a stark choice that cuts to the very heart of their democracy, echoing the never-Trump strategy employed by U.S. President Joe Biden’s now-abandoned reelection campaign.

Trudeau will remain in office at least until October 2025, unless an early election is called. He insists he will not resign.

Macron’s term is scheduled to end in 2027, but it remains unclear to what extent he will govern amid France’s increasingly fragmented political landscape.

“Macron and Trudeau are both individuals who came into politics with no strong or sincere ideology other than wanting to represent political modernity, espousing a broadly liberal-progressive platform,” said Fréderic Mérand, a political science professor at the Université de Montréal. “The paradox is that they will leave power at a time when these ideas have never been stronger, with an increasingly progressive society.”

Victor Goury-Laffont reported from Paris. Kyle Duggan reported from Ottawa.