‘If we want a modernizing agenda, we need to put together two-thirds of the Socialist Party, all of the centrists, and part of the centre-right. That would give us a pro-European market-friendly majority in favour of modernizing the social model.’
Emmanuel Macron to the author, June 2015
The annual Bastille Day military parade along the Avenue des Champs-Elysées, to mark the country’s founding revolutionary moment, is a tightly choreographed and usually sober display of troops, tanks and fighter planes. It is France’s opportunity to put on an unapologetic muscular parade, and remind the world, or perhaps itself, that it is still a country to be reckoned with. When Emmanuel Macron invited Donald Trump to be his guest of honour for his first parade as president in 2017, he treated his guest to a surprise finale that seemed to delight the host as much as it left his American visitor baffled. The top French military band, their trombones and trumpets darting about in a frantic dance sequence, broke into an improbable, hilarious and high-camp rendition of Daft Punk’s ‘Get Lucky’. It could have been the soundtrack to Macron’s run for the presidency.
Macron owed his election, in part, to an incredible run of good luck. At the end of 2016, just eight months after he launched En Marche and with only four months to go before the first-round vote, the electoral novice was languishing far behind the two leading contenders for the presidency. François Fillon, a tweedy former prime minister standing for the conservative Republicans, was firmly in the lead on 26 per cent, followed closely by Marine Le Pen, on 24 per cent. Macron was trailing on 13 per cent, merely one of a cluster of possible third-placed candidates. After the disappointments of the Hollande Socialist presidency, the election at that point looked set to turn into a run-off between the right and far right. Indeed, this was precisely the calculation that Sarkozy had made, and which prompted him to return to politics in 2014 from the lecture circuit to mount what turned out to be a failed bid for the Republican primary. Since no poll at the start of 2017 suggested that Le Pen would be able to beat Fillon, the boulevard, as the French would put it, was wide open for the Republican candidate.
Yet towards the end of January 2017 a parliamentary payroll scandal broke that was to damage fatally the poll favourite. Fillon’s candidacy collapsed, Macron established himself as a credible contender, and by the end of that month he had overtaken the Republican in the polls. From early March the gap he opened up would never close. On 23 April the debutant outsider who had never run for elected office topped the first-round voting with 24 per cent. In second place on 21 per cent came Le Pen. Fillon crashed out of the race altogether. The liberal internationalist with the upbeat message faced the glowering far-right nationalist in a second-round run-off that upped the stakes, but also narrowed the odds on Macron. Two weeks later, after she put in a disastrous performance during a televised debate, he was elected president.
* * *
Before appointing his generals, Napoleon would ask whether they were lucky. Macron’s ‘coup d’état against the party system’, wrote Jean-Dominique Merchet, a military analyst, referring to the power grab that brought Napoleon Bonaparte to power as First Consul of France, ‘was a slow-motion 18 Brumaire, with its dose of lucky amateurism and muddled opportunism’.1 Fortune indeed seemed to favour the young man from La Providence. He appeared to know it too. With Macron, no symbol is without its purpose, and the choice of ‘Get Lucky’ on Bastille Day seemed to say it all.
Macron’s run of good luck had in fact begun three years before the 2017 election campaign, on a hot August day in a quiet corner of rural Burgundy, when a tall, dashing politician taunted President Hollande. Over dishes of locally reared chicken at a summer festival in the village of Frangy-en-Bresse, known as the Fête de la Rose, Arnaud Montebourg was in his element. The jovial economy minister was far from the corridors of government. The sun was strong, and the local burgundy was flowing. The wine list that day included bottles of specially labelled cuvée du redressement, a mocking reference to what Montebourg denounced as his government’s budgetary austerity policy and its alignment with the ‘obsessions’ of the German centre-right. ‘I’m going to send a good bottle of cuvée du redressement to the president,’ declared Montebourg to the assembled television cameras, visibly amused by his own joke. It was ‘a declaration of war’, said an adviser to Hollande.2 The next day, on 25 August 2014, Montebourg was fired, and Macron was summoned from holiday to take his place.
Montebourg’s reckless moment of irreverence in the heat of the Burgundy summer opened up space for Macron in government, and propelled the unknown technocrat into the public eye. At that time, three years before the presidential election, the script looked set for the ballot in 2017 to end up as a re-run of 2012, and a contest between the same three main candidates: Hollande, the unloved portly president who took office promising to be ‘normal’; Nicolas Sarkozy, the indomitable former president who had earned a reputation as the ‘king of bling’; and Marine Le Pen, the strident, peroxide-haired daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the far-right National Front (FN). Macron, like many of his generation, was disturbed by this prospect, and what it said about political paralysis in France. When I went to see him at the Elysée Palace in June 2014, as he was packing up his boxes, he said: ‘If Sarkozy and Hollande are the two candidates in 2017, there will be a political crisis in France.’3 Perhaps Macron was already thinking about the opportunity for an upset that such a crisis might bring. If he was, he certainly didn’t say so. In any case, for most observers at the time, the candidates in reserve on the left and the right, should Hollande or Sarkozy flounder, were already identified. If there was a young, modernist challenger to Hollande on the left, it was Manuel Valls, the reformist centre-left moderate and brooding Spanish-born prime minister, who had been plucked from the Interior Ministry to run the government earlier that year. If there was a less abrasive alternative to the hyperactive Sarkozy on the centre-right, it was Alain Juppé, the aloof, rather stiff former prime minister and popular mayor of Bordeaux, the elegant city on the Garonne river.
What happened, instead, was a catalogue of twists beyond the hopes of any of Macron’s campaign team. It involved a serial run of unexpected decisions, judgements and events that, one by one, turned out to the young minister’s advantage.
For the first time ever, both the Republicans and the Socialists, the two political families that had between them shared power over the previous six decades, chose to hold presidential primaries open to the general public, in order to select their candidate for 2017. Each did Macron a huge favour, selecting an unlikely nominee, more suited to the extreme wing of their respective base. In November 2016, against all the odds, Republican voters selected as their nominee François Fillon, an inscrutable third man who had been considered a rank outsider only weeks before the vote. To understand his appeal, and how the secretive figure with the look of a country squire had seized the nomination, I went out to the little town of La Ferté-Bernard in La Sarthe, in rural western France. With its gently sloping hills and medieval churches, the charms of La Sarthe, where the son of a provincial notary grew up, are as discreet as its people. La Ferté-Bernard has an active parish and scout group, and rabbit was on the menu du jour at Le Dauphin restaurant. Volunteers at Secours Catholique, a charity, helped to distribute warm clothes, tinned food and weekly homework for families in difficulty. ‘People here say that they know things have to change, and that it will be difficult,’ Jean-Carles Grelier, then the town’s centre-right mayor, told me: ‘They are fed up with being sold dreams, and then being disappointed.’ In the café opposite the church, locals mentioned Fillon’s ‘common sense’ and ‘honesty’. On the wall of the mayor’s office hung a photo of the visit to La Ferté-Bernard by Charles de Gaulle, the last French president to come to the town, and whose image Fillon kept on his bedroom wall as a child.
With his thick eyebrows and forlorn gaze, Fillon had stood out during his time as prime minister in 2007–12 under Nicolas Sarkozy for his loyalty, and his ability to endure life in the shadow of a hot-blooded president whose aides nicknamed him ‘Mister Nobody’. He was both a solid rural traditionalist – a wife, five children, a manor house, horse and stables – and an adrenalin-seeker. His brother ran the Le Mans racetrack, and Fillon was an amateur racing driver, drawn to the thrill of top speeds. In some respects, he was an odd choice in 2016 for an essentially conservative Republican party. He ran on a radically liberal economic programme, vowing to shrink the country’s labour code from over 3,000 pages to just 150 and end the 35-hour working week, unapologetically invoking Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, an unusual reference point in a country with a lingering suspicion of free markets and a deep reverence for the state. During the primary campaign, his rival Juppé, who was by then the favourite to win both the nomination and the presidency, warned of the ‘brutality’ of Fillon’s economic programme.
Yet Fillon’s promises to restore respect to the presidency, freedom to the economy and firmness to social policy resonated with the traditional right, which turned out en masse during the primary to make sure that his name would be the one on the presidential ballot. The election was open to anybody who turned up on the day, paid two euros, and signed a charter supporting the values of the ‘right and the centre’. Fillon’s parliamentary vote against the legalization of gay marriage in 2013, his disapproval of adoption by gay couples, and his declaration of war against ‘Islamic totalitarianism’ all chimed in particular with the party’s highly mobilized conservative wing, and Sens Commun, a Catholic ultra-traditionalist movement active in politics. For this provincial conservative part of the electorate, Juppé was too socially liberal and centrist, Sarkozy too volatile and rough-edged. The mood at Fillon’s rallies, which drew disproportionate numbers of grey-haired supporters and Barbour jackets, was polite rather than feverish. The candidate, a model of self-control and poise during the primary debates, was above all regarded on the right as a safe pair of hands for France. He eliminated the former president, Sarkozy, in the first round of voting, and then the 71-year-old former prime minister, Juppé, in the second.
Two months later, the Socialists sprung their own surprise. Until the autumn of 2016, Hollande kept his option to seek re-election open. No healthy modern French president had failed to run again. Every one of Hollande’s four predecessors had done so: Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (defeated in 1981), François Mitterrand (re-elected in 1988), Jacques Chirac (re-elected in 2002) and Nicolas Sarkozy (defeated in 2012). As late as October, close aides urged Hollande not to give up, telling him: ‘François, you no longer have a choice. You have to be a candidate.’4 Yet the Socialist president’s chances were evaporating fast. His popularity had sunk to record lows. No poll suggested that Hollande could even make it into the presidential run-off in 2017. He faced a choice between two humiliations: declining to run again, or standing and facing first-round defeat.
In the end, Hollande was disqualified not only by the mediocrity of his performance, and the plunge in poll ratings this generated, but by his own indiscretion. In October 2016 two French reporters published a 662-page book, Un président ne devrait pas dire ça (A President Shouldn’t Say That), based on over four years and a hundred hours of recorded interviews with the Socialist president, for which they had met him at the Elysée Palace, or over dinner at their homes.5 In the book, Hollande insulted fellow Socialist politicians, called the judiciary a ‘cowardly institution’ and the national football team ‘badly brought-up kids’. En passant, he admitted to having authorized four targeted killings by the French secret service. Friends of Hollande say he had been too trusting of the reporters, too happy to gossip with them, persuaded that the book would be a flattering testament to his record. Instead, it destroyed him.
Within days, the president had dispatched eight letters of apology – to bodies representing judges, magistrates and prosecutors – claiming that his comments bore ‘no relation to the reality of my thinking’. A poll by Ipsos, taken just after the book’s publication, recorded Hollande’s approval rating at a staggeringly low 4 per cent. His friends, seeing him in a hole, handed him a spade. Manuel Valls spoke publicly of his ‘anger’, and his deputies’ ‘shame’. That a president seeking re-election could engage in such a politically suicidal exercise left his allies dumbstruck, and his political future in freefall. On 1 December 2016 Hollande delivered a live television address. He was ‘conscious of the risks’ that his candidacy would present, he said, and so would not be seeking re-election. His aides watched the sad spectacle in silence; his assistants were in tears. Days later, Valls confidently gathered his supporters in Evry, the multicultural banlieue south of Paris where he had cut his political teeth as mayor, and threw his hat into the ring. The En Marche team met at headquarters to listen to their boss via speakerphone: ‘This was an impeachment from the inside,’ Macron judged. ‘If there’s a traitor, someone who shot Hollande, it’s Valls.’6
Just as the Republicans handed Macron the gift of a divisive rival candidate who leaned towards their party’s extreme right, so the Socialists followed suit. In January 2017 seven candidates ran for the nomination, three of them with a good chance of victory. One was Valls, who led the first-round polls but struggled to fill his town-hall meetings. The other two were left-wingers: Arnaud Montebourg, the insubordinate former economy minister who had promised to send Hollande the bottle of burgundy, and Benoît Hamon, a former education minister advised by the economist Thomas Piketty, who believed in a post-productive economy and advocated a universal minimum income financed by a tax on robots. Had Valls, with his Blairite economic policy and tough line on law and order, secured the Socialist nomination, his reformist centre-left pitch would have cramped Macron’s space. Yet, as ever, Macron got lucky. Carried by a wave of left-wing Socialist protest at Valls’s authoritarian streak, Hamon squeezed out Montebourg in the first round, and then roundly beat Valls in the run-off. Over the course of just two months, between November 2016 and January 2017, a presidential election that had been shaping up to offer a re-run of 2012 was defying every page of the script.
The upshot was an unusually wide empty space in the unfashionable political centre, and a broad swathe of the centrist French electorate – those drawn to Juppé on the right, or to Valls on the left – who felt thoroughly disenfranchised. This opened up improbably promising territory for the En Marche candidate. On the left, Hamon led a pallid campaign, which spoke chiefly to his narrow metropolitan, environmentally friendly base – those who cycled and recycled – but failed to catch the broader electorate’s imagination. The Socialist ended up with just 6 per cent of the first-round vote at the presidential election, the party’s worst score since 1969. On the right, meanwhile, Fillon supplied Macron with his next, and most stunning, piece of good luck – by driving into a wall.
In a series of articles beginning on 25 January 2017, Le Canard Enchaîné, a satirical newspaper, dropped a bombshell. Over the years, it revealed, Fillon had employed on the parliamentary payroll his wife, Penelope, and two of his adult children, to the total accumulated tune of nearly €1 million, in what became known as Penelopegate. The former prime minister protested his innocence, charged his accusers with ‘misogyny’, yet failed to come up with convincing evidence that his wife had done substantial work for all these payments. It was a devastating revelation. The solemn Fillon had not only been the favourite for the presidency, but had based his campaign on moral probity and economic rigour. One cannot lead France, he declared during the Republicans’ primary campaign, unless one is ‘beyond reproach’. Now he was himself the subject of a judicial investigation. His electorate were dismayed. ‘We’re all in shock,’ Sylvianne Bessière, a retired air hostess told me, at a Fillon rally on the outskirts of Paris in late January. ‘I didn’t expect it from him. I thought he was a man of integrity. And he’s got the best programme.’ As more revelations followed, including the news that Fillon had accepted the gift of tailored suits worth €13,000 from a lawyer known for his web of links to African leaders, the party was speechless. His resignation as Republican candidate, just months from the election, was suddenly on the cards.
Yet, as the revelations rolled in, Fillon continued to insist that he had done nothing wrong. He would not resign as nominee, he told TF1 television evening news, unless he was mis en examen, meaning that preliminary charges would have to be brought against him. On 1 March, less than two months before voting day, judges informed him that this would happen; Fillon clung on all the same. His team began to fall apart. Fillon’s priestly-looking campaign director, Patrick Stefanini, resigned in dismay. Leading Republican figures, including Bruno Le Maire, who went on to become Macron’s finance minister, deserted him. A senior Republican told me that he and a colleague went to see Fillon to try to ‘unplug him’. But Fillon would have none of it. Nor was Sarkozy willing to push him out because, a friend of the former president told me, he did not want his lifelong rival Juppé to step in. There was too much bitterness between them all. On 5 March 2017, Fillon mounted a last-minute show of force at an open-air rally at the Trocadéro in Paris, the Eiffel Tower as a backdrop, and with the help of Sens Commun and the anti-gay-marriage movement. The turnout was impressive, kept Fillon in the race, and prompted Juppé to rule himself out as a back-up. But it was too late to rescue Fillon. Macron had overtaken him in the polls. By April, Fillon was ignominiously eliminated in the first round, beaten by Le Pen.
It remains a mystery how exactly Le Canard Enchaîné got hold of the Fillon revelations. Old-fashioned digging in Fillon’s constituency, claimed the satirical paper. Unbeknown to Fillon’s own campaign director, its reporters had started to question the Republican candidate back in November 2016. Robert Bourgi, the Franco-Lebanese lawyer close to Sarkozy who had offered Fillon his tailored suits, told a French documentary that he fed the information about the suits directly to the press in order to destroy Fillon. Whatever the manoeuvrings and intrigue that led to Fillon’s demise, Macron was the clear beneficiary. After eliminating Fillon, Macron found himself in a run-off against Marine Le Pen, France’s deadliest but most beatable candidate.
In the preceding years, the third and last daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen had emerged as what looked like a politically classy act, and was all the scarier for it. Her bombastic father, all bluster, paranoia and red-blooded xenophobia, was always ready to launch into an offensive diatribe, repeating as recently as 2015 his claim that the Nazi gas chambers were a mere ‘detail’ of the history of the Second World War. In a dual attempt to free herself from her father’s shadow, and her party from his jack-booted and anti-Semitic thugs, Marine Le Pen had embarked on a strategy of dédiabolisation (de-demonization) to try to turn a toxic fringe movement with neo-Nazi links into a ‘patriotic’ party of government. To that end, she was generally more careful in her use of language than other European ultra-nationalists. Geert Wilders, her counterpart in the Netherlands and leader of the anti-immigrant Party for Freedom (PVV), called Islam ‘the ideology of a retarded culture’, and the Koran ‘fascist’. Marine Le Pen, by contrast, appealed to shared French secular values by denouncing ‘Islamification’, rather than Islam. ‘I don’t believe that Islam is incompatible with Western values,’ she said in 2011. ‘But sharia law is, and that’s what fundamentalists want to impose in France.’7
Marine Le Pen knew full well the power of the symbol. She was taken to court, although acquitted, for comparing Muslims praying in the street to the Occupation. But for the most part she focused on building a veneer of respectability. She dressed in sharp skirts and high heels, stepping from her black car like a rock star when she turned up to campaign. The girl who grew up in a mansion behind wrought-iron gates in Saint-Cloud, perched on a bluff west of Paris, turned into a champion of the forgotten. Her ear for a simple slogan –‘They built Europe on coal and steel; now there’s no more coal and no more steel!’ or ‘While they are fighting against the FN, we are fighting for the French!’ – turned her rallies into a strange form of family entertainment. On a Saturday evening in 2015 at the municipal theatre in Saint-Quentin, a town in the flat plains of the Somme, I watched Marine Le Pen onstage. ‘Left, right, right, left,’ she called out, mimicking the beat of a metronome: ‘They both want to put France to sleep!’ About half the faces in the audience were female, and almost all white. One couple had brought their three little girls, who sat patiently twirling their hair as the FN leader did her stand-up routine. Backstage after her speech, while FN activists sipped champagne from white plastic cups, and anti-FN protestors gathered in the street outside, she sat nonchalantly on the dressing table, swinging her legs and puffing on an electronic cigarette. Three satsumas were perched inside her open black handbag. Was she ever worried about her own safety, I asked her? With a chillingly steady gaze, she replied: ‘I am impermeable to fear.’ Jean-Marie Le Pen sought controversy, not power. Marine Le Pen, it seemed, wanted to govern.
Until the last moment, she ran a smart presidential campaign in 2017, taking her message to small villages and rural areas, winning over the working-class vote, although her position on the euro – did she really want to take France out of it? – always looked deeply confused. At any rate, her performance was good enough to carry her into the run-off. Then on 3 May, during the second-round televised presidential debate, she self-destructed. Dressed in a navy trouser suit, a pile of multi-coloured paper files before her and a rigid smile on her face, Marine Le Pen seemed to lose it. Like the Dobermans her father keeps in the garden of his villa, and which she once accused of killing one of her beloved cats, Le Pen attacked, putting on a display of increasingly deranged aggression that cruelly exposed how unfit she was to govern, and left even her own team baffled. Macron’s campaign arguments had been ‘shameful’, she said, and revealed the ‘coldness of the banker’ he had never ceased to be. He was the candidate of ‘savage globalization’ and ‘indulgent to Islamic fundamentalism’. ‘I hope we won’t learn that you have an offshore account in the Bahamas!’ she declared. Macron pushed back, but kept his calm. ‘Don’t play the professor with me,’ Le Pen pleaded at one point, while he pointed out that she had confused two big French industrial firms: ‘one makes phones, the other makes turbines’. ‘France,’ he told her, ‘deserves better than you.’
Months later, Le Pen recognized that she blew it. What made the former lawyer put on such a display? Was she exhausted? Did she panic at the prospect of having to defend France’s withdrawal from the euro, a policy her party subsequently dropped? Had she been too much under the sway of advisers who told her to provoke Macron to lose his nerve, as reports subsequently suggested? Or, in the end, did she find the prospect of power too frightening? Whatever the reason, she put in a calamitous performance, and Macron held steady. Four days later he was elected president.
So fortune favoured the candidate more than he could have reasonably hoped. ‘He is phenomenally talented and stands head and shoulders above the others of his generation. But to this day I tell him: never forget that you’ve had a lot of luck,’ Mathieu Laine, the liberal intellectual and early backer of Macron’s bid, told me. ‘It’s never just a matter of talent.’ As an insurgent outsider, Macron was also the beneficiary of the French two-round presidential system that makes it possible, in a crowded field, to get into the second round with just a fifth of the total vote. A place in the run-off can hinge on a tiny number of votes. When Jean-Marie Le Pen beat the Socialists’ Lionel Jospin into the second round in 2002, he did so by a margin of fewer than 200,000 votes. In 2017 Macron secured 24 per cent – less than his two immediate predecessors, but more than Chirac managed in both 1995 and 2002, and only a little below the 25.9 per cent that François Mitterrand scored when the Socialist made history in 1981. The lucky gambler became president under a system in which he was the first choice of less than a quarter of voters.
Yet, for all the luck that came his way, it would be a misreading of the presidential election of 2017 to argue that Macron owed his victory only to chance. The candidate was dealt a good hand. But he also shaped his own chances, seized opportunities as they opened up, and created new ones when he needed them. In this sense, he was a gambler too. ‘There were a lot of people who argued that French society was ready for change. But the only one who actually did it, and knew he had to do it differently, was him. He dared to take risks where others didn’t,’ Christian Dargnat, the fundraiser, said: ‘A lot of people accept the existing framework, are used to the fact that there is one. Emmanuel dared to break out of the framework. His life is a series of transgressions.’8
Macron’s path to the presidency was in fact marked by five audacious bets, placed over a period of six years, which positioned him for the lucky turns that came his way. Had Macron not moved early to put himself in the race, the weaknesses of the mainstream candidates in early 2017 might have led to a far darker outcome for France.
The first of these dates back to 2010, when the young investment banker was making his mark at Rothschild’s, and considering a possible return to public service, or a run for parliament. At a dinner hosted by the Paris financier Serge Weinberg – which was attended by members of the capital’s gauche caviar, or left-leaning financial elite – Jean-Pierre Jouyet, Macron’s former boss, came across his protégé. Jouyet took him into a corner and asked him what he wanted to do. Macron replied that he was thinking of looking for a constituency in which to run for parliament as a Socialist candidate, possibly in the Pyrenees, where he had family roots. Jouyet was supportive. But, he told me, ‘I recommended that he join François Hollande’. The prospects and political skills of the man who had been the leader of the Socialist Party for 11 years until 2008, Jouyet judged, were underrated and could make him a smart bet.
At the time, the expectation in France was that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the wealthy silver-haired former finance minister with rock-star appeal in Paris, would quit his job running the International Monetary Fund in Washington D.C., and return to France to run in the primary. Polls consistently showed that, with his international stature and reputation for centre-left reformism, the IMF boss was well placed to win the nomination, and beat Sarkozy in the 2012 presidential election. Hollande, by contrast, looked like a primary loser. A balding, portly party hack, he was dismissed by one colleague as a ‘woodland strawberry’ and nicknamed ‘Flanby’ after a caramel pudding. One poll, in December 2010, put Hollande on just 3 per cent for the Socialist primary the following year. ‘The key weakness of François Hollande is inaction,’ Ségolène Royal, his former partner and herself a defeated presidential candidate in 2007, sneered to Le Figaro: ‘Can the French point to a single thing that he has achieved in 30 years of politics?’
Jouyet and Hollande had been friends since their days together on the benches of ENA, in the graduating class of 1980 that included Royal too, and Macron had already met the former Socialist Party boss at a dinner at Jacques Attali’s home. Macron had also suspected that Strauss-Kahn’s personal wealth would make him a problematic candidate for the Socialist Party. So he offered his services to the Socialist outsider, Hollande. ‘He’s a risk-taker,’ Alain Minc told me, and one with a preference for a particular sort of punt: ‘He prefers to put a bet on a high-risk, high-return option.’9 The gamble paid off, and sooner than expected. On 14 May 2011, Strauss-Kahn was arrested in New York, hauled off a plane, and later charged with the sexual assault of a maid in a Manhattan hotel room. The charges were later dropped in return for an undisclosed agreement, but the affair wrecked his political future and threw the Socialist primary race wide open. That October, at a popular primary vote that was open to any Socialist supporter for the first time, Hollande secured the party nomination with 57 per cent of the second-round vote, putting himself well ahead in the race for the presidency the following year. Macron made himself indispensable to the nominee, organizing his working groups on economic policy, which would meet after hours in La Rotonde, Macron’s local brasserie on the boulevard du Montparnasse. When Hollande was elected, Macron was the natural choice to become economic adviser at the Elysée Palace.
Backing Hollande early on was either far-sighted, or lucky, or both. But it was only one of several high-risk punts that Macron took. The second was his decision two years later, in 2014, to leave his plum job as deputy secretary-general at the Elysée, considered to be among the best posts in the French administration. It was a surprising choice for a driven young aide with ambitions for office, and I recall thinking at the time that something about the decision just didn’t quite add up. In his coveted position at the heart of French power, Macron had the ear of the president, and belonged to a small circle of three or four advisers who took pretty much all the decisions between them. At a young age, he also acted as ‘sherpa’, preparing the big international leaders’ meetings, a position that secured him vital contacts in the chancelleries and cabinet offices of the world’s biggest powers, as well as a ringside seat from which to observe global affairs. It was a job of unusual influence. Yet Macron sensed that his prospects under Hollande had narrowed. He felt that it was increasingly difficult to make his voice heard. ‘We need finer execution, and a more precise and clearer line,’ he told me in 2013, visibly dissatisfied.10 The following year he was passed over for two big jobs – as chief of staff to the president, a post that went to his former boss Jouyet; and as budget minister under the new prime minister, Manuel Valls – and had grown frustrated. Moreover, Macron’s relationship with Hollande was no longer as close as it had been. He was particularly wounded by the president’s indifference to the death of his grandmother, Manette, an event that shook the young adviser. ‘It’s finished with Hollande,’ he told a friend at the time.11 Macron, says another acquaintance, has built a hard shell around him, but it masks a sensitive core. When the mother of his press attaché, Sibeth Ndiaye, died in 2015, he offered her a copy of Journal de deuil (Mourning Diary) by Roland Barthes. Hollande showed no such understanding.
With a couple of associates, Macron decided to move on to other things. He had some lectures lined up at the London School of Economics, and a plan to launch a boutique advisory business under the name Macron Partners, as well as an e-learning start-up. A friend had lent him office space in Paris. He had registered the domain name. He was heading to California with Brigitte, for a holiday and to talk to tech contacts in Silicon Valley. ‘He always had political ambitions. But I don’t think he thought then that a job in government was an option,’ said Shahin Vallée, an economist who was planning to join his business venture: ‘Hollande’s message was clear; he did not want technocrats as ministers. Macron planned to set up this company, and then return to politics later on.’12 After Montebourg’s provocations in Burgundy that August, Vallée sent Macron a text message to say: ‘I’m guessing this might change your plans’. ‘No,’ Macron texted back, ‘let’s keep going as planned.’
When I went to see Macron in his office at the Elysée Palace in June 2014, he looked unreasonably cheerful, as if relieved to be leaving it all behind. He had become particularly frustrated with the difficulties of implementing a more business-friendly policy on the back of a presidential election campaign that never made this explicit. ‘Our problem was that we didn’t abolish Clause Four before the election,’ he told me, referring to the British Labour Party’s statutory promise to nationalize industry, which Tony Blair expunged before his election in 1997. ‘The Socialist Party hasn’t moulted its old skin. It’s pretty retro. Valls will have to fight for every vote. The real point is that there wasn’t an ideological renovation ahead of political action.’13 If Hollande was not ready to trust him with better things, Macron had other things to do. Arguably, had Macron stayed on at the Elysée, Hollande might have called him into government that summer anyway. At any rate, his loss was felt. When a last-minute replacement was needed for Montebourg in late August, Valls and Jouyet – ever the mentor – pushed for Macron. ‘He wasn’t expecting it, and said he’d think about it,’ Jouyet told me years later. ‘An hour later, he rang back and accepted.’14 As chief of staff, Jouyet had the job of standing on the steps of the courtyard at the Elysée Palace, to read out the names of the reshuffled government before a bank of television cameras. When he got to Macron’s name, he could not stop himself smiling.
At the Finance Ministry, Macron soon carved out his own brand, as an outspoken, liberal-minded, tech-embracing maverick. Some of his comments were clumsy, offensive and downright rude. After drawing up plans to deregulate the coach industry, he declared that this would help ‘the poor’ to travel. The minister at one point apologized in parliament after calling workers in an abattoir ‘illiterate’. When he told a striking worker that ‘the best way to pay for a suit is to work’, though, he refused to apologize. Macron was turning out to be independent-minded, and stubborn. Perhaps this was impatience, mixed with arrogance. Or an uncommon belief in his own destiny. Or the sense of freedom gained from confidence that other options would be open to him if politics did not work out. Whatever the reason, he exasperated ministerial colleagues, delighted tech types, and seemed to impress the French. Polls started to test his popularity, and it steadily climbed. All the while, he used the job to expand his network. With a need for very little sleep – he manages, his friend Ferracci said, on four hours a night – Macron would linger late after dinner, standing as guests gravitated towards him, displaying little of the usual ministerial arrogance that tells others in the room that his time is not worth theirs.
Just over a year after he entered government, Macron began preparations for his boldest move: the decision to set up a political movement outside the Socialist Party, with only a year to go before the presidential election. This involved months of secret talks and clandestine planning, which is covered in detail in chapter four. The point here is to measure the nature of this gamble. The decision to launch En Marche set Macron on a collision course with the Socialist barons, marginalized him from all the power networks on the left, and deprived him of any party funds. At the time of the launch, Macron was an unconvincing public speaker, suffered from his image as a well-paid former banker and member of the capitalist elite, and seemed to lack the common touch. His chances of mounting a presidential campaign seemed utterly remote. Nobody was even sure when he launched En Marche what it was supposed to be for. Much of the Paris commentariat assumed that it must be some sort of vehicle to prepare the way for Hollande’s re-election campaign. ‘If he’s elected president of the republic in 2017,’ said a wide-eyed Christophe Barbier, editor of L’Express magazine, in August 2016, ‘it would be a quasi-revolutionary phenomenon.’ Renaud Dartevelle, Macron’s old school friend, put it to me this way. ‘If he can’t see how to win, the conclusion for him is that the system is broken. So he says: “Let’s change the rules.” He thought outside the box,’ Dartevelle said. ‘That’s what he does.’
At times, Macron’s touch faltered. Having launched En Marche, he wavered, hanging around in government for months, leaving outsiders confused about what he was up to, and whether he really had the guts to run. A fellow minister told me at the time that the rest of government had had enough of Macron and his self-centred projects. He was no longer a team player, and it would be better for him to go. Some of his advisers urged him to quit right away. But Macron couldn’t quite let go. ‘He feared disappearing, just like Montebourg had,’ one of his aides told me. Once outside government, with no portfolio, staff or chauffeured car, Macron would no longer be guaranteed air time or column inches. He would have to rely on his own brand, and fundraising, to keep himself in the public eye. Macron ‘wants to leave, but has trouble making a move’, noted a presidential adviser in August that year.15 For somebody who did not like to owe anybody, the minister seemed to feel the unusual burden of his debt to Hollande. ‘He owes nothing to Valls,’ another adviser told me while Macron was still in government, and mulling over his options. ‘But it’s thanks to Hollande that he returned to public life.’
Finally, Macron made the break, resigning at the end of August 2016, eight months before the election. When Gaspard Gantzer, Hollande’s communications director, and a former drinking buddy and football teammate of Macron’s from ENA, learned late that month that the minister was about to quit, he saw red. Gantzer knew his old friend too well. ‘He is putting his own personal destiny over collective success,’ he noted at the time: ‘A stabbing. It’s intolerable.’16 Hollande was dismayed. Macron resigned by sending the president a text message – like a teenager jilting a girlfriend, noted Gantzer. After summoning Macron to the Elysée Palace to say it to his face, Hollande reported back: ‘He told me that he was leaving because there was no more space to act, that it wasn’t against me, that he would still support me.’ This time, for once, the president had no illusions: ‘I didn’t believe him. He has chosen to play a personal card.’17
The adviser was right. Macron’s strategy, another friend of his told me then, ‘is to make it impossible for Hollande to stand. I’m not sure it will work, and I’m not sure that Macron really will stand against Hollande.’ This was the last risk, and it was arguably the most opportunistic, and treacherous, of all. On 16 November 2016, Macron announced his decision to run for president before Hollande had unveiled his own plans. Throughout much of 2016, the prospect of running against Hollande had seemed to bother Macron. He was the one who for years had carried Hollande’s bags, passing him briefing notes in meetings, preparing his international summits. I had watched him in that role, and they seemed unusually close. ‘He’s loyal to Hollande, just not to his ideas,’ a friend of his told me in July that year. Yet Macron is also cunning and cold-headed, and was never completely straight with Hollande about his plans for En Marche. The president had been warned by some Socialist elders to watch out for his ambitious young minister. They worried that Hollande was too indulgent, blinded to the risks he posed. As early as the autumn of 2015 Hollande dismissed such alarmism: ‘Macron is not somebody who seeks to exist politically to the detriment of government ... He’s a decent guy, he’s not duplicitous.’18 Shortly before the launch of En Marche, Macron went to see the president at the Elysée Palace to explain his plans. ‘I want to do something,’ he told his boss.19 ‘There are people who are asking me. I can connect with voters, far from politics.’ Hollande replied: ‘Yes, go ahead. But be careful, don’t surround yourself with politicians, because that would be perceived as an operation within the Socialist Party, or worse, as competition.’ Macron told Hollande not to fret. ‘No, no,’ he reassured him, with brazen disingenuousness, ‘it’s going to be citizens.’20 Even after En Marche was born, the president continued to underrate the threat. ‘You will finish with 7, 8, perhaps 10 per cent,’ he told Macron, who replied: ‘We will see.’21
Instead, En Marche turned out to be a vehicle for the destruction of the Socialist Party and the crushing of Hollande’s options. The president’s misjudgement was total. Macron may have called Valls the traitor. But Hollande told colleagues that by leaving government when he did, Macron ‘betrayed me methodically’.22 On a wintry Wednesday morning, before the deadline for the Socialist primary candidates to declare, the former banker chose a hangar-like vocational training centre in Bobigny, a banlieue north of Paris, to announce his presidential bid: as an independent, for En Marche, and outside the Socialist primary. It was a heavy pre-emptive strike. Hollande was trapped. Not a single poll suggested that he could retain the presidency, nor even make the run-off. Macron’s decision to run made this prospect even more remote, as he had known it would. Manuel Valls, by repeatedly voicing his shock at the president’s indiscretions, hammered in the final nail. Two weeks after Macron declared his candidacy, Hollande announced that he would not run again.
So Macron was lucky, but he also created his chances and took his own risks. Why did those risks pay off as they did? How did Macron manage to make a success of campaigning on the liberal centre ground with a party that was barely a year old and at his first attempt at running for elected office? Four factors help explain this victory. One was his reading of the unstable, shifting forces of French party politics. The second was the underlying historical changes in France that made insurrection possible. Third was the engineering of En Marche as a movement to wage the campaign. And the final factor was the compelling personality of the candidate himself. The first of these factors will be explored in the rest of this chapter. The others each form the basis of the three chapters that follow.
* * *
In one sense, En Marche was born during the 18 hours that Macron spent speaking in parliament about shopping. Or, to be precise, the possibility for shops to stay open on Sundays and into the evenings. The year was 2015, he was economy minister, and he had put together a piece of draft legislation designed to deregulate the economy, which became known as the loi Macron (Macron law). This was his flagship bill, which the enthusiastic novice minister presented to parliament in January 2015, five months after he first joined government. Designed to stimulate economic activity, it was a mixed bag of measures: the loosening of Sunday-trading and late-opening rules; the liberalization of the country’s inter-city coach industry to try to create more cross-country services; and the deregulation of certain protected professions, such as notaries. For the minister, the many long hours that he spent in the National Assembly prompted a central insight: the French system was blocked, and political parties were the problem.
By international standards, many of the measures wrapped into Macron’s bill were meagre. He wanted to allow shops to open on one Sunday a month, up from five times a year under rules in place at the time, and those in certain tourist areas to open on Sundays all year round. He would allow coach companies to launch services between French cities, in competition for the first time with the country’s mighty SNCF railway. Such plans hardly constituted a full response to the country’s stagnating economic growth. Yet a measure of the bill’s boldness in France, a nation built with the dirigiste hand of the state, was that it upset both the political right and the left. Before Macron’s draft was even unveiled, pharmacists and notaries – the backbone of provincial conservatism – took to the streets to protest. Left-wingers denounced it as a betrayal of the concept of social progress. Macron’s law ‘calls into question all the historic battles of the left’, declared Marie-Noëlle Lienemann, a Socialist senator. A stinging letter to Le Monde from Martine Aubry, the mayor of Lille and standard-bearer of the Socialist left, captured the indignation in her camp. ‘What kind of society do we want to live in?’ she wrote. ‘Has the left nothing better to propose for the organization of life than a Sunday walk in a shopping centre and the accumulation of consumer goods?’23
Macron had his hands full defending the bill. Despite the wariness of many Socialist backbenchers, he thought, perhaps naively, that he could win round enough deputies through force of persuasion. During those weeks in late January and early February 2015, a politician who had never been elected to parliament spent weeks at the National Assembly, speaking in the chamber and in committee rooms, eating at the parliamentary brasserie, known as the buvette. By the time deputies had finished debating all articles of the bill, at 5.54 a.m. on Sunday 15 February 2015 after a sitting that ran all night, there had been no fewer than 111 hours of parliamentary debate in the chamber. Altogether, Macron had spent a cumulative total of 18 hours speaking. ‘During those debates,’ one of his advisers told me later, ‘the minister acted in a way that was, for us, self-evident: that is to say, he answered questions on matters of substance, refused to reject an amendment just because it came from the opposition. Not falling back on traditional partisan roles seemed to be an absolute novelty.’
Macron’s hope was that there was a consensus to be found among both Socialists and those on the centre-right, which could defeat left-wing backbench rebels. ‘He also wanted to win over public opinion, and to make sure it was perceived as a French initiative, not something imposed by Brussels,’ an adviser told me at the time. Maybe this was inexperience, or excessive ambition. Perhaps Macron placed too much faith in his own capacity to get things done. Either way, his efforts were in vain. Centrist-leaning deputies from the right might have shared his views but, he said later, they were ‘prisoners of the logic of party machines’.24 On 17 February, Manuel Valls, the prime minister, judged that a parliamentary majority was not possible; ministers were summoned to an emergency cabinet meeting and told that the law would be forced through by an accelerated procedure, under article 49.3 of the constitution. It was both a display of authority by Valls, and a defeat of Macron’s efforts at trans-partisan politics. When Gantzer caught his old friend as he left the cabinet meeting, he noted ‘a fold of bitterness in the corner of his mouth’. That evening, the economy minister appeared on the television evening news, deflated. Later, to calm himself down, he went home and played the piano until three in the morning.
Bruised, Macron took away from this episode a number of lessons. Among them was the conviction that the party-political system as it had existed in the post-war period was impeding the creation of a reforming consensus in France. ‘I’ve seen from the inside the emptiness of our political system which prevents a majority of ideas on the grounds that they undermine the political machines,’ Macron declared the following year, when he announced he was running for the presidency. France was blocked not because of its deputies, but by the parties they were beholden to, which ‘paralysed’ the country’s capacity to move forward. ‘That law turned him into a politician,’ said Laurent Bigorgne, the director of the liberal Institut Montaigne, and a friend.25 The debates taught Macron that legislators from the moderate centre-left and centre-right had more in common with each other than either side did with the extremes within their own parties. This consensus, Macron judged, reflected public opinion too. ‘My view is that public opinion is in advance of politicians,’ he told me in January 2016, when En Marche was still a secret project: ‘I think you can mobilize by creating a consensus for reform during a presidential election.’26 A majority of the French were in favour of Sunday trading. France was held back, in other words, not because of an innate resistance to change, nor an inclination to protest, but because the party system no longer reflected underlying divisions. ‘If we want a modernizing agenda,’ Macron told me when I interviewed him in June 2015, a few months after Valls’s decision to abandon a parliamentary vote, ‘we need to put together two-thirds of the Socialist Party, all of the centrists, and part of the centre-right. That would give us a pro-European market-friendly majority in favour of modernizing the social model.’27 Although I didn’t realize it at the time, he was already beginning to think through a potential disruption of the party system, which would give birth formally less than a year later to En Marche.
A second episode later that year stiffened Macron’s resolve to go ahead. This was the government’s controversial response to the harrowing terrorist attacks of 13 November 2015 at the Bataclan theatre, Paris terrace cafés and the Stade de France, a bloodbath in which 130 were killed and scores wounded. The attack took place towards the end of a year that had put France on edge. After the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks of January came a series of further bloody assaults. On 26 June, Yassin Salhi, a French citizen, strangled his employer to death in the back of a van, hacked off his head with a kitchen knife, and attached it to the gates of a chemicals factory near Lyon. On 21 August a passenger armed with a Kalashnikov opened fire in a high-speed Thalys train between Amsterdam and Paris, injuring two passengers, before being overpowered by three others, two of them off-duty American military personnel. Among European countries, France felt particularly vulnerable. A pretext for jihadists seeking to stir violence against the country was not hard to find. France had dispatched troops to Mali in early 2013 to beat back an Islamist incursion in the Sahel. The country had banned the veil in state schools, and the burqa on the streets. Its fighter planes had been helping to bomb IS targets in Iraq and Syria. Online French-language jihadist videos were calling on the faithful to strike French infidels. Home to Europe’s biggest Muslim population, some five million strong, France was supplying more jihadist fighters to Syria and Iraq than any other. In January 2015, in a chilling address, Manuel Valls had told lycée students that they would have ‘to learn to live with’ terror.
The November terrorist attacks shook the nation, and darkened the mood. The government put in place a state of emergency. ‘France is at war,’ Hollande declared gravely to a joint sitting of the lower and upper houses of parliament in Versailles, in a martial speech that carried echoes of George W. Bush’s ‘war on terror’. In what was to become the most contentious element of the speech, Hollande announced that he planned to write into the constitution the power to strip nationality from French-born dual citizens convicted of terrorism, a measure known as déchéance. The Socialists were aghast. So were Republicans on the liberal centre-right. The proposal flew in the face of the French legal tradition of droit du sol, or the right to nationality based on birth on French soil, and created the impression that those of dual citizenship would become a second-class category of French nationals. Thomas Piketty, the economist on the left, accused the government of ‘running after the National Front’. Alain Juppé, on the centre-right, described its likely effectiveness as a counter-terrorism measure as ‘feeble, if not zero’.
This episode was the moment at which Macron’s plans accelerated. Not only did political parties no longer reflect underlying divisions on economic policy – the lesson the minister drew from the debate over his Sunday trading bill – but the same was also true for questions of citizenship and identity. Later that month, Macron decided to speak out. At a conference in Paris organized by Bernard Spitz of the Gracques, a centre-left pro-European group, he strayed off his ministerial territory. The terrorist bloodshed in Paris, Macron said, was not just the result of propaganda and madness. The French, he said, also had to recognize ‘our responsibility’ in creating a ‘fertile ground’. Abandoned by the state, some areas of the country had been left vulnerable to those recruiting for jihad. France, argued Macron, had to face the fact that this was a home-grown phenomenon, not just the work of mad men. Valls was irate. ‘There is no social, sociological or cultural excuse for terrorism,’ he seethed in parliament, adding, a few weeks later, that ‘To explain is to want to excuse.’ As the debate raged within the party, Macron became increasingly outspoken over his ‘philosophical discomfort’ with his government’s line on déchéance. He considered resigning, but couldn’t quite bring himself to go. In the end, Hollande realized that he lacked the support necessary to amend the constitution, and abandoned the text. But it was too late to mend the divisions within the party.
Such were the frustrations in government in 2015 that shaped Macron’s vision of a realignment of party politics. His emerging analysis, which formed the basis of the design of En Marche, was that the new politics should be fought not on the centre ground, but forced onto a different axis altogether. ‘If it had just been centrism, I don’t think we would have won,’ Macron told me in July 2017. ‘In France, the political families of the left and the right, structured in the post-war era, are exhausted because of their own divisions and inconsistencies, and no longer have answers to today’s challenges.’28 To get France moving, politics needed to be disrupted along a different fault line: between those broadly in favour of an open society, trade, markets and Europe on the one side; and Eurosceptic nationalists advocating protectionism and identity politics on the other. The underlying idea was that the big forces shaping the future – technology, the freelance economy, the environment, Europe, inequality, globalization – no longer fell neatly into the old ideological divide between left and right. ‘The biggest challenges facing this country and Europe – geopolitical threats and terrorism, the digital economy, the environment – are not those that have structured the left and the right,’ Macron told me in July 2016, shortly after launching En Marche. ‘The new political split is between those who are afraid of globalization, and those who see globalization as an opportunity, or at least a framework for policy that tries to offer progress for all.’29
These new fractures were emerging across Europe, but were particularly apparent in France. The French have long been more hostile in polls to globalization than others. In 2016, 54 per cent of the French judged that globalization was a threat, compared to 45 per cent of Germans and 39 per cent of Spaniards and Italians, according to a study by the Bertelsmann Stiftung, an independent foundation. Yet this average masked a wider divergence: 76 per cent of National Front voters on the far right, and 58 per cent of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party on the far left, considered globalization to be a menace. Those figures dropped to 43 per cent for Socialist voters and 39 per cent for Republicans. The same applied to French attitudes to Europe. Asked in a poll by TNS Sofres in June 2016 whether they were in favour of remaining in the European Union, a large majority of French Socialist (72 per cent), Green (80 per cent), centrist (70 per cent) and Republican (62 per cent) voters agreed. But only a minority of those on the far left (48 per cent) and far right (13 per cent) did. The former, drawn from across the party divide, made up the pool of post-partisan support that Macron sought to mobilize.
Moreover, former collective identities, forged in industrial societies, were beginning to split and fragment. Hyper-connectivity, digitalization, the hollowing out of middle-class jobs, the mobility of capital, the spread of the freelance economy, the decline of unionized heavy industries: all were combining to undermine the common interests of the left, and fracture values on the right. These changes were prompting new insecurities and fears. Most notably, the working-class vote – once the backbone of the post-war French Communist Party – began to shift. It had been allied under Mitterrand to that of the public-sector middle class, which supported the Socialist Party, enabling his election in 1981 on a common programme. Over the years, a big chunk of the working-class vote drifted from the Communists to the National Front. By 2017, Marine Le Pen’s far-right was the favourite party of blue-collar workers. Amid such fluid allegiances, there was space for a new sort of political identity, defined by different values. This evolution was taking place in other Western democracies too, whether those with polarized party systems, as in Britain and America, or those where party politics was fragmenting, including the Netherlands and Germany.
En Marche in other words did not seek merely to conquer and occupy the centre ground, but to upset the landscape. Its political position was ‘not centrism’, Ismaël Emelien, one of Macron’s closest advisers and co-founder of the movement, told me: ‘The challenge for us was to get away from the left-right analysis. Not because it has no value, but because we observed that, within the left and the right, nobody agreed on the matters we considered important: Europe, work, immigration, the future of the environment. These entities that we call left and right are artificial relics. For us, they contributed to the divorce between politics and the rest of the country.’ En Marche, argued Emelien, was ‘not an attempt to reinvent the centre, or create a new radical middle. To be at the centre is by definition to position yourself in relation to others. We reject that. We don’t want to be centrist.’30
Precedent, in any case, taught that French presidential elections could not be won from the political centre. France had a minor history of centrist leaders who came to nothing. In 1965, Jean Lecanuet, a dashing young senator, campaigned for the French presidency promising a ‘great democratic movement reaching from progressive liberals to reformist socialists’,31 with a slogan that seemed oddly to presage Macron’s: ‘Un homme neuf, une France en marche’ (‘A new man, a France on the move’). Lecanuet failed to make it into the run-off, in which Charles de Gaulle that year defeated François Mitterrand. A decade later, in 1974, Jacques Chaban-Delmas, Georges Pompidou’s prime minister from 1969 to 1972, ran for the presidency based on politics he too defined as ‘neither on the one side, neither on the other’. He failed to make the second round, crushed by the savvy campaign of a younger, more dynamic, figure from the centre-right, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who went on to defeat Mitterrand. François Bayrou, a centrist former presidential hopeful and horse-breeder from south-west France, ran three times for the presidency (2002, 2007, 2012), but never got through to the run-off. The centre ground, in short, was seen as electorally unfavourable under the French two-round system, and a place of soft, squishy compromise and moderation.
Emmanuel Macron was not the only French politician to have identified the potential for a political realignment. Paradoxically, he shared his reading of the tremors remaking party politics with another insurgent from the opposite end of the political spectrum: Marine Le Pen. At a local level, under her leadership, the FN had begun to take hold of town halls and municipal councils. By 2014, at elections to the European Parliament, it had become the top-scoring party in France, securing 25 per cent of the vote. As Le Pen prepared her own assault on the French establishment, she too sought to force open a new political fault line, exploit the fragility of the traditional parties, and engineer their collapse.
Before Macron began to spell out his ideas about a new political alignment, Le Pen was already detailing hers. The ‘left-right split is artificial’, she told me when I went to interview her in November 2013, two years after she won the FN leadership, because ‘the left and the right are the same thing’.32 Swivelling on a black leather chair, behind a glass-topped executive-style desk in her office at the FN headquarters in the Paris suburb of Nanterre, Marine Le Pen was by turns disarmingly witty and icily caustic. In her view, a new political fracture would put an end to the cosy duopoly that had ruled France for the past six decades: an ‘inbred world of politicians, the media and big financial powerhouses’ that she said formed a ‘sort of oligarchy, which has grabbed hold of power without ever being elected’. The new party division, she declared, would instead pit ‘globalists, who think that the nation state is passé and that the future is about supra-national structures, against those who consider that the nation state is the guarantor of sovereignty’. It was curiously prescient, and such a line could be readily revived, by Le Pen or her successor, as a powerful counterpoint to Macron and his rootless metropolitan supporters in 2022. She outlined a long-term plan to widen the FN’s electoral base, by appealing to ‘patriotic’ voters both on the left and on the right. ‘We have emptied the Communist Party,’ she said to me triumphantly, ‘now we’re going after Socialist voters.’ The Republicans, she implied, would be next.
Macron and Le Pen, of course, were on diametrically opposing sides of this new fracture. But they shared an understanding that the issues dividing them were the ones that would frame future politics. That they ended up facing each other in the run-off in 2017 was a reflection of the yearning for something different, as well as the appeal of these two contrasting forms of post-ideological allegiance. Le Pen’s version, in her telling, was a ‘patriotic’ mission to defend France from an army of perceived outside threats: the euro, globalization, competition, immigration and Islamification. She promised to give ‘preference’ to French nationals, withdraw France from the euro, raise protectionist tariffs, curb immigration and reinstate welfare privileges. Hers was a blood-and-soil nationalism mixed with economic protectionism. Macron, by contrast, was an unapologetic champion of the EU, favouring (mostly) open borders, global trade, technical innovation and the adaptation of France’s welfare system to a less stable future job market. ‘At a time when some people believe that raising walls is a solution, we do think that openness is the right path,’ Macron declared soon after his election.
Each was the antithesis of the other. Le Pen was the favourite among blue-collar workers; Macron drew disproportionate support from university graduates. She climbed to the top of the polls on the back of dire warnings of an immigrant invasion and Islamist infiltration; he praised Angela Merkel for ‘rescuing our dignity’ over refugees. Their mutual antipathy was unambiguous. Le Pen called him an ‘ultra-liberal’ globalist, a sort of citizen of nowhere, who was ‘surfing on air’. Macron said that she pretended to speak ‘for the people’, but in truth spoke only for her clan. During their head-to-head televised presidential debate before the run-off vote, Le Pen accused him of being the candidate of ‘savage globalization’; he retorted that she was a ‘product of the system you denounce; you are its parasite’ and the ‘high priestess of fear’.
Macron and Le Pen held irreconcilable views, and were repugnant to each other. But they shared an analysis of the new French political divide. And Macron’s efforts to force a new fault line were in some ways served by hers. In 2016, when En Marche was still in its infancy, I asked him whether he worried that his strategy lent Le Pen legitimacy. He was unapologetic. It was ‘time to face up to reality’, he replied: the FN was ‘already the leading party in France’.33 The way to take on her party was neither to pander to it, nor to try to tame it by bringing it into the fold, nor to scare voters with the prospect of its victory. It was rather, he told me, ‘to propose an alternative political project with a pro-European narrative that is not based on fear’. Macron’s attempt to fashion a progressive, European alternative, infused with a message of hope, was both a means of remaking party politics and a response to the populist threat.
So, yes, Macron was lucky, and how. But not only. Plenty of obstacles were also placed in his way. Throughout the campaign, the candidate faced his share of personal attacks, sabotage, fake news and orchestrated rumours. During the campaign for the presidential run-off, Jean-Luc Mélenchon refused to call for a vote for Macron, and far-left demonstrators took to the streets with the anti-Macron and anti-Le Pen slogan, ‘Neither a banker nor a fascist’. After his election, and with Putin standing by his side, Macron accused Sputnik and RT, two Russian media, of being ‘organs of propaganda’. En Marche was also the victim of repeated hacking, which it suspected was organized by Russia-linked operatives. En Marche’s small cybersecurity team mounted a counter-sabotage manoeuvre, flooding phishing emails with false information to minimize the damage. Even so, a last-minute scare kept them up all night. On the evening of 5 May, just two days before the presidential run-off, the party announced that it had been the victim of a ‘massive and coordinated’ hacking operation, which ‘clearly amounts to democratic destabilization as was seen in the United States’. A digital dump of 9 gigabytes of internal emails and accounting files looked designed to upset Macron’s campaign in the final stretch.
In the end, Macron turned out to be a finer political analyst than many observers had imagined the former technocrat and one-time investment banker to be. For months he had been dismissed as an upstart, a kid, an intruder, a traitor, a media fantasy or a hologram. Yet Macron’s hunch that the old party system was exhausted was right, and this opened up the possibility for something new. What he also realized was that the opportunity would not last. Alain Minc, who had backed Alain Juppé for the Republican primary in 2016, recalled a conversation he had with Macron in early 2012. The two énarques, both belonging to that inner elite corps of inspecteurs des finances, discussed his possible future political ambitions, and aspirations one day to run for the presidency. ‘I told him to aim for 2022,’ Minc told me. ‘I got it totally wrong on timing. He told me that I was an old man, and didn’t understand the new world. And that I was part of the system, and that the system was dead.’34