POLITICO: Macron goes Napoleon or… Machiavelli?

Napoleon (left) and Macron (right).
Pic.: POLITICO

The French president dodged political death over the summer… by throwing his allies under the bus. Macronism — his particular brand of politics that is a mixture of pragmatism and innovation and which was supposed to transcend traditional left-right party divisions — appears dead, notes POLITICO.

French President Emmanuel Macron defied the laws of gravity in French politics this summer. But he’s never looked more alone.

In the last three months, he lost one election, then hastily dissolved parliament and sent his troops unprepared into another election, lost that election and then triggered weeks of chaos and confusion by waiting to appoint a prime minister.

Macron’s allies dropped dozens of seats at the hands of the left and the far right after he massively gambled on the future of the country and lost. Somehow the president himself emerged from the wreckage bruised, but appearing to land on his feet with the nomination of former Brexit chief negotiator Michel Barnier as prime minister.

“You have to recognize that after a serious setback in the European election, and another in parliamentary election, he shored up the essentials: his political autonomy at the Elysée and the continuation of his political agenda,” said Gaspard Gantzer, a former Elysée adviser under Macron’s predecessor François Hollande.

The price Macron has paid for the current reprieve is a high one. The damage done to his camp is permanent. Key allies have openly turned against the president, accusing him of “killing” his coalition.  

His weakness has been noticed by rivals and allies alike. Macron was the first to blink in a standoff with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen over France’s European commission. Macron decided to sacrifice his choice for commissioner, the firebrand and von der Leyen nemesis Thierry Breton, in the hopes of getting a better portfolio. But Paris ended up with less influence than it had before.

And then there’s the larger question of legacy and what Macron stands for. In appointing Barnier, a fiscally prudent conservative grandee who was twice a European commissioner and four times a government minister, Macron has ensured that his hard-earned, pro-business reforms — especially his controversial decision to raise the retirement age — will survive.

But Macronism — his particular brand of politics that is a mixture of pragmatism and innovation and which was supposed to transcend traditional left-right party divisions —  appears dead.

“It’s almost comical. You start off promising a revolution, and you end bringing in a politician from the old world,” said Christopher Weissberg, a former lawmaker from Macron’s Renaissance party.

Macron is no longer the Jupiterian president he aspired to be, an executive who stays above the fray by governing through symbolic gestures which set the terms of the debate. He is now getting his hands dirty with the business of political horse-trading and arm-twisting that he had tried to avoid.

He is now, in Weissberg’s words, just “a guy who wants to hold on to power until the very last minute.”

But how he saved his legacy was not a pretty sight.

The president had to endure the disgrace of hosting the Paris Olympic Games without a government (outgoing ministers stayed on to dispatch daily business.) After weeks of uncertainty, unprecedented in recent French history, the frenzy of speculation reached such a pitch that even children were grilling the outgoing PM on who his successor would be.

Then there’s the matter of empowering the far-right National Rally, a party Macron had vowed to fight again and again, but whose backing his government now needs to stay in power. With the left vowing to topple the government, the new prime minister needs at least tacit support of the far right to survive no-confidence votes in parliament.

With the nomination of Barnier, Marine Le Pen’s party was “put back in the saddle” as a kingmaker in France, one Renaissance ally said, who, like several other officials quoted in this story, was granted anonymity to speak candidly. And already the far right is threatening to bring down the government over budget talks.

For many, Macron’s international reputation as a steady hand at the helm has been damaged.

“He’s seen as a lame duck president who has plunged his country into political and institutional instability,” a European diplomat told POLITICO.

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