And he obviously can’t defend the pillaging and looting on Saturday night, but he’s very clever. He says when he’s asked, Well, I’m not the government. It’s not for me to make a comment on that. I’m going to say that I think the students are at least legitimate in their demands, and I’m completely with them, and I will demonstrate with them. And it’s not for me to comment on the violence because that’s something the state should deal with. And it’s obviously a completely devious answer.
But what’s very interesting is that what you might call the centrist politicians have almost been completely inaudible over the last few days. They just don’t know what to say. So, yes, I think it is a radicalizing moment, but in both directions. I think it will win Mélenchon new support and win Marine Le Pen new support. So I agree with your skepticism. Who knows whether it’s a turning point, but it sort of feels like that at the moment.
And the way the French election works is that there’s a first round for the Presidential contenders and then the two front-runners go forward. And Le Pen is polling well against the centrist candidates in a possible final round, with small to medium leads. But she beats Mélenchon by over thirty points.
Absolutely. And all I would say about that is that if, and it is an if, a centrist candidate does get to the second round, at that point there’s a chance they could be in a position to actually win six months down the line, but we don’t know how long the impact of what happened on Saturday is going to go on because there are more demonstrations coming up, obviously. I had the sense, talking to people, that they’re living on a volcano and they’re sort of tiptoeing around, knowing that the government’s paralyzed, and it can’t do anything, so they just wait till the Presidential election. And there’s this sort of strange, ghostly expectancy, which is quite weird, a mixture of apprehension and fear.
You said the centrist candidates, from the socialist center-left to the center-right, seem somewhat paralyzed. Why?
Well, Mélenchon has been with the lycée a hundred per cent from Day One, they love him, and Le Pen basically says, We need order. Meanwhile, the centrists are not sure where to situate themselves. If they go too close to the school protesters, they seem to be legitimatizing disorder, but then if they go too close to supporting everything the police does, that is a problem, too. It is the classic problem of centrism when the two extremes are so voluble and actually convincing to their own constituencies, and also some of the centrists were in Macron’s government, so that is also a problem for them, and it is difficult for them to find their voice.
And the reason for that is that the one thing you cannot underestimate at this moment is the cold contempt everyone has for Macron. I have not met a person who has anything good to say about Macron. Actually, I had lunch with one of his ministers the other day who obviously did say good stuff about him. But beyond that, it’s almost impossible. And, of course, the picture people have of Macron at one level is a rather authoritarian figure telling people what to do, a sort of vertical President. But then another, a vertical President who simply has no power. He’s the worst of both worlds.
I was about to say he seems helpless, but people also think he’s a top-down–
They’re right; he is. But unfortunately, without being able to do anything, because there are no levers to pull any longer, which is a very sort of strange situation.
Saying the only person you met who likes him is a minister of his reminds me of the Onion headline, “Dukakis Wins 80 Percent of Dukakis Family Vote.”
Yes, absolutely. I remember that actually.
I remember something people were saying four or five years ago, maybe around the second time that Macron fought off Le Pen, in 2022, that basically Macron has had incredible political success, and he will have been President for ten years, but at the same time, he’s killed off the center right and the center left and not provided any alternative. And so you’ve had this chasm that, when he leaves, is going to exist. I remember political analysts saying that five years ago, and it seems like sometimes political analysts say things that turn out to be true and sometimes it turns out to be not true. But it turned out to be exactly right.
I completely agree. I have written something along those lines myself in various pieces about Macron. And I think I must have written five years ago myself that the tragedy of Macron, really, who did seem to offer something, was that he either seemed indifferent to or incapable of thinking about the succession. If you want to take a contrast with a President who he resembles, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who was also a centrist liberal, but who really did make efforts to build a center party between the Gaullists and the left. And Macron simply has either not bothered to do it or failed to do it. I don’t think he’s particularly bothered to do it. And what’s so striking is that whenever he’s had a prime minister, he immediately sets out to undermine that person who should be a credible successor.
Macronism was always going to be strange because it does move from the center left to the center right. Some of the people under the Macron umbrella are really very far right, and the people on the left are not very far left, but they’re certainly not far from the Socialists. So he had succeeded, but he only succeeded in bringing over individuals. He was never interested enough in a structure. You know what people jokingly said about how his movement was originally called En Marche? And people said, typically, that the initials of the movement were his own initials.
I think Macron both profited from the weakness of the political parties, first the Socialists and then the Gaullists on the right, and also hastened it, as it were. And he created no alternative future. He also really did show too much contempt in the early days for what the French call intermediary organizations. He sort of thought it was just him and the people. So, trade unions, local mayors, local associations—he was terribly dismissive of those sort of civil-society organisms that can actually make it possible to get things done. Admittedly, I started off as an admirer, and I had great hope, like so many people. I think he’s politically been brilliant at exploiting the possibilities of coming to power and then disastrous at knowing what to do with it.
.jpg)
