The bane of centrism is weakness, irresolution and the politics of the lowest common denominator. Emmanuel Macron, as he comes up next month for an apparently shoo-in re-election, has turned centrism into a strong insurgency movement. This applies to Europe as much as to France since he has seized Angela Merkel’s mantle as unstated leader of the EU. But given his capacity to veer both left and right, and to act as both dove and hawk on Ukraine, his second term will be as unpredictable as his first.
The shoo-in comes if, as polls predict, the second round of the presidential election—a run-off between the top two candidates in the first round on 10th April—is a choice between Macron and either Marine Le Pen of the far right or Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the far left. Macron probably takes upwards of 60 per cent of the vote in either scenario.
The key development is Macron’s success in eliminating serious rivals on both centre-left and centre-right. The socialists on the centre-left have never recovered from Macron’s humiliation of his former presidential boss François Hollande after his resignation to set up his centrist movement En Marche in 2016, while the moderate right Republican party of former president Nicolas Sarkozy has, in Valérie Pécresse, a centrist candidate far less agile and dynamic than Macron, who has been increasingly eclipsed.
The low point for Pécresse, from which she has never recovered, was a rally in February where she not only pitched to the far right but appeared to endorse its “great replacement” theory that waves of Muslim immigration are replacing the native French population. “In ten years’ time, will we be a sovereign nation, a US satellite or a Chinese trading post?” she asked. “Nothing is written, whether it is loss of economic status or the Great Replacement.”
Macron already had a strong base on the centre-right, to which he has tilted in his ministerial appointments and economic policies, including cuts in top tax rates, since taking office in 2017. His early battles with street protesters—the famous gilets jaunes (yellow vests) agitating for radical economic and political reform—give him a law-and-order mantra which solidifies his position across the centre and right.
For the same reason, support for Macron on the left has been more problematic, despite his elimination of the socialists, whose candidate Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, is now polling in low single figures. Mélenchon, a kind of French Jeremy Corbyn, has not only outflanked the left of the socialist party but surpassed its whole appeal of radical social and economic justice. But inevitably this alienates more moderate voters of the traditional left, who want incremental not radical change. Given a straight second-round choice between Macron and the far right, there is only one way for left voters to go, although there will probably be a high abstention rate because of the intense unpopularity on the left of his pension and tax reforms.
However, describing this French election in terms of left-right and manifestos is largely beside the point. It is dominated above all by Ukraine, an issue on which Macron is a president of ceaseless dynamism and initiative, almost impossible to oppose from either left or right. Le Pen’s links with Putin alone make her now unelectable.
Macron has played Ukraine in a blaze of hyper-activity, in leading the European response but also in engaging with Putin more intensively than any other western leader. This has aroused the public ire of Volodymyr Zelensky, but keeping channels open to Putin may yet prove invaluable in the end game of an invasion which could hardly have gone worse for the Russian dictator.
Either way, Macron is unlikely to suffer electorally in the next few weeks. But as a prospectus for a Macron second term, it reveals little beyond the immediate dynamics of crisis management. What he will actually do with a renewed mandate, and the shape of his agenda of economic and European reform after the twin traumas of Covid and Ukraine, is a debate still largely to come.
