As he took over the position of French prime minister on 13 December, the veteran centrist politician François Bayrou spoke of two “obsessions” that would guide his government. The first was breaking down the “separation” between citizens and their democratic institutions. The second was a meritocratic agenda which Emmanuel Macron had voiced upon his first election seven years ago. In Bayrou’s words, French people should be able to control their own lives, not “handed a fate which they have no mastery of” just because of where they happened to be born.
Such promises sounded tired – not least because Bayrou is the third new prime minister in 2024 to make them. Taking over from Michel Barnier, he spoke of a new, more open way of doing politics, echoing Macron’s call to unite “both left and right”. Yet such an offer sways few today. After being punished in the summer’s snap elections, the Macronist alliance of which Bayrou is part has fewer than a third of MPs. It will have a tough time building majorities for legislation, unless it can win over both the conservative Republicans and the centre-left Socialists.
Yet forming odd alliances to pass budget cuts may not serve Bayrou’s promise to bring politics closer to citizens. His government is built on parties that did poorly in the election, and for the Socialists to back austerity would go against their manifesto. On 14 December, the left-wing economist Thomas Piketty damned Bayrou’s idea of “bringing together all the so-called reasonable parties” in a piece for Le Monde. For Piketty, this search for grand coalitions has upset the usual democratic exchange of power between left and right – forming a “coalition of the better off” only.
The condition of being “better off” is one with which few French people identify. The Fractures françaises survey conducted by the pollster Ipsos in late November – the latest in a series of annual studies of the country’s mood – some 87 per cent of respondents said that France is in decline; 70 per cent that their own living conditions are getting worse; and 55 per cent that they struggle to make ends meet. Nearly 80 per cent consider political institutions poorly representative; just 3 per cent feel “satisfied and at peace”.
Such responses speak to a loss of confidence that goes beyond this or that government. Indeed, the problem clearly isn’t just Macron’s perceived arrogance or the clashes in a fragmented parliament. A historical comparison is instructive: after 1945, the Fourth Republic saw continual crises, with 21 governments in just 12 years, ending in the colonial quagmire in Algeria. Yet this was also an era of strong social mobility, the improving economic prospects of the Trente glorieuses – a 30-year period of growth – and a great contest over different visions of progress and modernisation.
Today’s malaise is something different: grinding, long-term, and with exit routes difficult to identify. If half of French people no longer see Marine Le Pen’s hard-right National Rally (RN) as a danger to democracy, it would seem to be not just a response to changes in the party, but also a barometer of what they think of the democracy they have.
Part of the mood of decline surely stems from Macron’s call for renewal, and its failure. If upon reaching office, he promised an entrepreneurial “revolution” in France – cutting red tape to create a “start-up nation” – he has not formed anything like a broad-based coalition for a change of model. If British Thatcherism exploited fault lines in the labour movement, created millions of homeowners, and spread the world-view of the individual entrepreneur, Macron’s project has offered fewer “carrots”, and since 2022 has had no majority in parliament, either. It has routinely relied on procedural tricks to force through unpopular reforms.
Such reforms have sparked intense social responses – such as the 2018-19 gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protests prompted by a fuel tax hike, or the huge resistance to Macron’s 2023 pension-age rise. France remains far more strike-prone than comparably large EU countries. And yet, this is not well understood as an iconoclastic government confronting a supposedly eternal French social model. Labour rights and the standing of trade unions were weakened well before Macron took office. Today, one in six French workers, including most under-25s, are on interim or short-term contracts – more than double the levels of the 1980s.
Foreign media often paints France as a land enthralled by the public realm and sceptical of business and markets. Yet many indicators suggest that, despite Macron’s unpopularity, France is marked by a rising creed of private autonomy. In the Fractures françaises poll, confidence in small and medium-sized businesses (82 per cent) is higher than in scientists, the army, or indeed any institutions; even confidence in big business (48 per cent) has risen ten points over the past decade. Politics earns the lowest trust: 14 per cent for parties, 22 per cent for MPs, at the same level as social media.
Popular individualism is often conveyed in the language of meritocracy – a value to which not just liberal-centrist politicians like Bayrou, but Le Pen’s RN, have claimed as their own. If often stereotyped as a party of the “left-behind” working classes in ex-industrial regions, the RN’s expanding and cross-class base is now likely to frame itself as hard-working individuals who are not given the respect they deserve. According to the pollster Luc Rouban, Le Pen’s electorate is more likely even than Macron voters to say that they would do well at running a business.
Rouban describes a tension within Le Pen’s base, between its economic liberalism in terms of entrepreneurial values, and its reluctance over cutting state budgets and the entitlements which are due to working people. This picture is strongly affirmed by reading Félicien Faury’s Les Électeurs ordinaires (2024). It discusses how parts of the Le Pen-voting working and middle classes see themselves in conflict with both highly educated elites and those they see as undue recipients of state funds – a category closely wrapped up with the spectre of the immigrant and Muslim poor.
This feeling of frustrated meritocracy – unbound from Michael Young’s sceptical use of the term – serves to fuse France’s woes. This is also because its different variants span very different social groups and electoral options. It is closely bound up with attitudes to one particular aspect of declining faith in institutions, namely the role of the republican school in creating meritocracy. Its functioning is questioned both by educated young people who feel a lack of economic advancement, and those with fewer qualifications, especially in small-town France, who feel disadvantaged by this system and have less faith in its values.
Today’s parliamentary logjam makes French national ills seem particularly acute. Covering the Fractures françaises poll, Le Monde noted that the mood of decline has risen by 18 points since Macron took office in 2017. But this isn’t the whole story. Nearly as many people felt the country was in decline in 2016 under François Hollande. It would seem that Macron’s initial rise inspired some confidence, at least among his own supporters, that France could be “turned around”, and that this sentiment has since largely dissipated.
The mood of decline is surely amplified by the rising visibility of identity politics, and a spectre of civilisational threat no longer only voiced by far-right pundits such as Éric Zemmour. Recent Macronist interior minister Gérald Darmanin warned of ensauvagement (going savage) and even Macron has spoken of a threat of décivilisation. In adopting a similar language of cultural and ethnic threat, his ministers have routinely cast the left-wing opposition party France Unbowed as a vector of “Islamo-leftism” said to be overrunning French universities.
This isn’t the only issue being overhyped. France’s public debt is widely said to be the “highest in Europe” (which it is, if only in absolute terms) and becoming unmanageable, not least due to dubious official estimates of tax revenue. France’s budget deficit, at over 6 per cent, is double the EU target and not on course to fall below it any time soon. That France’s borrowing costs recently surpassed Greece’s caused a shudder in international media. But the comparison is in many ways exaggerated.
Macron’s tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations early in his rule didn’t translate into increased state revenues as promised. Public debt shot up during the Covid-19 lockdowns, and France – unlike the biggest recipients of post-pandemic EU funds, notably Italy – financed most of its own recovery programme. Still, neither France’s relatively stable growth rates nor likely European political responses suggest that the Republic is about to be pushed into a Greek-style sovereign debt crisis. France has rarely ever met the Maastricht Treaty limits on public debt or deficits.
Today’s odd combination of Fourth Republic-style congestion and the president’s habit of pushing through unpopular reforms are feeding demands for a different institutional model. Even if mainstream parties do allow Bayrou to last longer in office than his predecessors, the 2027 presidential election will likely punish those perceived as status-quo candidates. The ambient lack of faith in politics isn’t encouraging for left-wing alternatives. Meanwhile, pledging “order in the streets as well as in the public accounts”, Le Pen’s party promises a change of course, but also the whip of authority.
[See also: How did it go so wrong for Germany?]
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