The meaning of Macron by Charles Grant
Emmanuel Macron is a man of courage. During the first of his two visits to the CER, in November 2014, he said that France was divided between conservatives and reformers, rather than left and right, and that the Socialist Party could disappear. “We are more likely to get reform if moderate socialists join the centrists and the moderate centre-right,” he said. That was a bold comment from the economy minister in a Socialist government. Macron left the government in August 2016, just after founding a movement called En Marche! Since declaring himself a candidate for the presidency in November, he has been lucky: the Socialist Party chose the hard-left Benoît Hamon as its candidate; the Gaullist candidate, François Fillon, has been damaged by stories of his family being paid for fake jobs; and the veteran centrist François Bayrou has thrown his weight behind Macron. Opinion polls put this 39-year old ingénu – whose political experience is just two years as an Elysée adviser and two years as a minister – ahead in the second round of the presidential election.
Image: Taken at the CER’s roundtable on ‘Brexit and the future of the EU’, London, September 9th 2016.
Macron is in some ways the heir of both Jacques Delors and Tony Blair, two convinced proEuropeans who backed pragmatic and fairly liberal versions of social democracy. Like Delors – who went into politics to work for a Gaullist prime minister, Jacques Chaban-Delmas, and later became a Socialist finance minister – Macron is a political outsider who is neither left nor right. He has worked for the civil service, for Jacques Attali’s commission on how to reform France and for the Rothschild bank. Like Blair in his heyday,
Macron is young, fresh and charismatic, and a great communicator. And like Blair, he reaches voters who would not normally support a pro-EU, pro-immigration economic liberal. A Macron victory would break the political mould of the Fifth Republic. Since 1958 France has been ruled by presidents who hail from the mainstream parties of left or right. No centrist has ever reached the Elysée. In 1995, opinion polls suggested that Delors would have won, if he had stood, though he would have been the Socialists’ candidate. If Macron wins, he will do so as an overt centrist without a traditional party machine. Economically, a Macron presidency would offer France a real opportunity to reform. Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande achieved a few useful reforms but did not do enough. Fifteen years ago, French and German per capita incomes were at a similar level, but the average German now has an income 17 percent higher. Unemployment in France is nearly 10 per cent, against 4 per cent in Germany – and youth unemployment of 25 per cent is among the worst in Europe.