President Emmanuel Macron Has Plunged France into Chaos
A Reporter at LargeLawmakers have toppled the government for the first time since 1962. How did we get here?By Lauren CollinsDecember 7, 2024Messy though France’s politics currently are, it is easy to trace the evolution of the turmoil, and to pinpoint when the political situation tipped from uncertain yet orderly into surrealistic and totally unpredictable.Illustration by Simon BaillyAt the end of July, Lucie Castets was planning to go to Italy with a group of friends. Every year, they rented a house and followed the same ritual: pool, spritzes, a viewing of “Gladiator.” For the past year, Castets had worked as the finance director for the City of Paris. On July 22nd, shortly after noon, she was in the bike garage of her office building, in the Thirteenth Arrondissement, when her phone started buzzing. The caller was Olivier Faure, the head of the French Socialist Party. Just before picking up, Castets texted her wife, then took the call.“What does he want?” her wife wrote back.“I don’t know,” Castets replied.“Maybe he’s gonna ask you to be Prime Minister or something.”“Haha.”After Castets hung up, the text conversation continued.“Actually, he is,” she wrote.“No shit?” her wife replied.Soon, Castets would burst onto the political scene in what the French press took to calling her “Warholian summer” of instant notoriety. For the moment, however, practically no one knew who she was. After the phone conversation, Faure ran Castets’s name by his fellow party heads in the left-wing alliance known as the Nouveau Front Populaire, or N.F.P. “Who?” one of them replied. But Castets made an appealing candidate: a thirty-seven-year-old woman from civil society, fresh-faced and sincere, yet not without a streak of swagger; impeccably credentialled and indisputably of the left, but obscure enough to have neither a record that would raise hackles nor political enemies of consequence.Cartoon by Roland HighCopy link to cartoonCopy link to cartoonLink copiedShopShopAs the party heads deliberated, Castets went on with her day. She got on her bike and pedalled across the neighborhood, arriving at a restaurant where she was supposed to meet an acquaintance. It had already been a wild summer in France. In three days, the Paris Olympics would begin, superimposing live contests of might and savvy over a grunting, deadlocked struggle for political power that had transfixed the country for weeks. Castets didn’t know the person she was having lunch with very well, so she said nothing about Faure’s call. “I think I had a poke bowl,” she told me. That weekend, the plane to Italy took off without her.On December 4th, members of the Assemblée Nationale, the lower house of the French parliament, passed a no-confidence vote against Prime Minister Michel Barnier, toppling the country’s third government of the year only twelve weeks after it had been formed. “It’s a singular moment, because the vote of no confidence is accompanied by huge questions about what happens next,” Christophe Bellon, a parliamentary historian at the Catholic University of Lille, told me. Messy though France’s politics currently are, it is easy to trace the evolution of the turmoil, and to pinpoint when the political situation tipped from uncertain yet orderly into surrealistic and totally unpredictable.Back in June, a little more than a month before Castets received the unexpected call, French people went to the polls to elect representatives to the European Parliament. The outlook was not particularly good for the group anchored by President Emmanuel Macron’s party. Macron had squandered a large mandate since taking office, in 2017, as a paradigm-busting centrist who would govern not from the left or the right but, as he liked to say, from the left and the right “at the same time.” The promise of Macronism was social progressivism and economic liberalism. The practice of Macronism was the tenacious pursuit of economic reforms at the expense of sweeping social programs, which were always just about to materialize.Macron had reduced unemployment from more than ten per cent to around seven per cent, made France a far more attractive place for foreign investment, and streamlined a complicated retirement system. But his comparative neglect of such areas as health care and housing, combined with the fact that he instituted a tax policy that favored the rich and that he raised the retirement age from sixty-two to sixty-four, had eroded support in the left-leaning part of his coalition. In the eyes of many voters, he was a centrist President tacking ever rightward, hardening his stances on immigration and Islam as the extreme-right party, the Rassemblement National, or R.N., soared in polls. Many French people, whatever their politics, loathed Macron personally, citing his arrogance, exemplified by comments such as one that he made to an unemployed gardener: “I could find you a job just by crossing the street.” On a good day, his approval rating was around thirty per cent
At the end of July, Lucie Castets was planning to go to Italy with a group of friends. Every year, they rented a house and followed the same ritual: pool, spritzes, a viewing of “Gladiator.” For the past year, Castets had worked as the finance director for the City of Paris. On July 22nd, shortly after noon, she was in the bike garage of her office building, in the Thirteenth Arrondissement, when her phone started buzzing. The caller was Olivier Faure, the head of the French Socialist Party. Just before picking up, Castets texted her wife, then took the call.
“What does he want?” her wife wrote back.
“I don’t know,” Castets replied.
“Maybe he’s gonna ask you to be Prime Minister or something.”
“Haha.”
After Castets hung up, the text conversation continued.
“Actually, he is,” she wrote.
“No shit?” her wife replied.
Soon, Castets would burst onto the political scene in what the French press took to calling her “Warholian summer” of instant notoriety. For the moment, however, practically no one knew who she was. After the phone conversation, Faure ran Castets’s name by his fellow party heads in the left-wing alliance known as the Nouveau Front Populaire, or N.F.P. “Who?” one of them replied. But Castets made an appealing candidate: a thirty-seven-year-old woman from civil society, fresh-faced and sincere, yet not without a streak of swagger; impeccably credentialled and indisputably of the left, but obscure enough to have neither a record that would raise hackles nor political enemies of consequence.
As the party heads deliberated, Castets went on with her day. She got on her bike and pedalled across the neighborhood, arriving at a restaurant where she was supposed to meet an acquaintance. It had already been a wild summer in France. In three days, the Paris Olympics would begin, superimposing live contests of might and savvy over a grunting, deadlocked struggle for political power that had transfixed the country for weeks. Castets didn’t know the person she was having lunch with very well, so she said nothing about Faure’s call. “I think I had a poke bowl,” she told me. That weekend, the plane to Italy took off without her.
On December 4th, members of the Assemblée Nationale, the lower house of the French parliament, passed a no-confidence vote against Prime Minister Michel Barnier, toppling the country’s third government of the year only twelve weeks after it had been formed. “It’s a singular moment, because the vote of no confidence is accompanied by huge questions about what happens next,” Christophe Bellon, a parliamentary historian at the Catholic University of Lille, told me. Messy though France’s politics currently are, it is easy to trace the evolution of the turmoil, and to pinpoint when the political situation tipped from uncertain yet orderly into surrealistic and totally unpredictable.
Back in June, a little more than a month before Castets received the unexpected call, French people went to the polls to elect representatives to the European Parliament. The outlook was not particularly good for the group anchored by President Emmanuel Macron’s party. Macron had squandered a large mandate since taking office, in 2017, as a paradigm-busting centrist who would govern not from the left or the right but, as he liked to say, from the left and the right “at the same time.” The promise of Macronism was social progressivism and economic liberalism. The practice of Macronism was the tenacious pursuit of economic reforms at the expense of sweeping social programs, which were always just about to materialize.
Macron had reduced unemployment from more than ten per cent to around seven per cent, made France a far more attractive place for foreign investment, and streamlined a complicated retirement system. But his comparative neglect of such areas as health care and housing, combined with the fact that he instituted a tax policy that favored the rich and that he raised the retirement age from sixty-two to sixty-four, had eroded support in the left-leaning part of his coalition. In the eyes of many voters, he was a centrist President tacking ever rightward, hardening his stances on immigration and Islam as the extreme-right party, the Rassemblement National, or R.N., soared in polls. Many French people, whatever their politics, loathed Macron personally, citing his arrogance, exemplified by comments such as one that he made to an unemployed gardener: “I could find you a job just by crossing the street.” On a good day, his approval rating was around thirty per cent, considerably lower than Joe Biden’s.
The party that is now the R.N. was founded in 1972, in the aftermath of the Algerian War, by the torture apologist and Holocaust denier Jean-Marie Le Pen. “Tomorrow, immigrants will stay with you, eat your soup, and sleep with your wife, your daughter, or your son,” he once warned. The party is essentially a family firm, now fronted by his more politically supple daughter Marine Le Pen. It has never produced a President or a Prime Minister, but it is getting closer. Since 2022, the R.N. has constituted the largest opposition party in the Assemblée.
Domestically, the R.N. espouses a form of nationalist populism—more deportations, lower taxes on gas. In recent years, Le Pen has tried to detoxify the party’s reputation, but some members still promote colonial nostalgia and racist theories such as the “great replacement.” Regarding foreign policy, the R.N., historically a reliable friend to Vladimir Putin, could fairly be called more Europhobic than Euroskeptic. After years of lobbying to withdraw from the eurozone, the party reversed its position, but it continues to rail against, per its platform, “the woke excesses imposed by Brussels.”
Le Pen is sometimes compared to Donald Trump, but the analogy is not quite apt. Certainly, their movements share an anti-immigrant, selectively isolationist brand of nationalism—“Les nôtres avant les autres” (“Ours before others”) is the R.N.’s version of “America First.” Both have ties to strongmen and a taste for tariffs and fossil fuels. But Trump is more plutocratic than populist when it comes to policy. And, whereas the Republicans romanticize a bygone world, the R.N. is keen to present itself as a forward-looking concern. Trump is a soft man obsessed with seeming tough; Le Pen is a tough woman forever trying to project a soft touch.
“With Le Pen, in France, you have a strong element of continuity with historical fascism that doesn’t exist with Trump in the U.S.,” Jean-François Drolet, a professor of politics and international relations at Queen Mary University of London, told me. But, he added, “increasingly these far-right-wing movements share a sense of global interconnectedness. They all understand that in order to pursue their domestic programs they have to destroy the liberal international agenda as we know it.”
Elections for the European Parliament are paradoxical, in that the parties that enjoy disproportionate success in them often question the value of the entire European project. Le Pen’s party has historically fared better in these races than in France’s Presidential or legislative elections. This summer’s vote was the first since the implementation of Brexit, with wars raging in Ukraine and Gaza, and the R.N. was projected to pull ahead of Macron’s group. But when the results came in, on June 9th, they were unexpectedly lopsided: 31.5 per cent for the R.N. and just 14.6 per cent for Macron’s group. This represented the R.N.’s largest victory ever in a nationwide race, and the best performance by any French party in a European election since 1984.
Libération called the results an “earthquake.” Macron’s response was to shake things up further. Just before eight o’clock that evening, his office announced that he would address the nation. Millions of screens lit up with speculation as the political class and regular citizens alike tried to figure out what the President could possibly be up to. In the control room at BFMTV, one of the country’s leading news channels, correspondents found themselves at a loss. “We joked that maybe he was going to do a referendum on banning mobile phones in schools,” Philippe Corbé, then the channel’s editorial director, told me. Roland Lescure, Macron’s industry and energy minister, was on a radio show discussing the election results when a journalist, during an ad break, asked him about a rumor that Macron was planning to call a snap election. “No way,” Lescure responded.
At nine o’clock, cameras cut to the Élysée Palace, its rooftop flag flapping melancholically under a pink-and-black sky. More than fifteen million people—sixty-five per cent of the French viewing public—watched as Macron appeared onscreen, perched on a balcony with the plane trees of the palace gardens behind him, filtering the day’s last light. After a curt denunciation of the extreme right, Macron got to the point: he was dissolving the Assemblée Nationale and holding new legislative elections, with a first round of voting in just three weeks. “At the end of this day, I cannot act as if nothing happened,” he said. His plan, he claimed, would provide an “indispensable clarification.” Never mind that the people had just spoken, rather unmistakably. Macron, leading boldly from behind, would force them to think hard about whether they really meant what they said. “To be French,” he reminded them, is “to choose to write history rather than to submit to it.” And, with that, he was gone.
Libération called the news a “double earthquake.” The French constitution gives the President the power to dissolve the Assemblée and call new elections whenever he wants to, up to once a year. If successful, dissolution can break a stalemate or deliver a majority for the President. But the maneuver is so risky that, since the Fifth Republic was established, in 1958, it had been used only five times. The move can backfire spectacularly, leading to a rare situation that the French call “cohabitation,” in which the offices of President and Prime Minister are held by different parties. (Unlike many European countries, France concentrates power in an unusually strong President and has little tradition of coalition government. And, unlike the U.S., France has no midterm elections.) The most recent dissolution, in 1997, saddled President Jacques Chirac with a hostile Assemblée for five years.
Macron pitched the dissolution as “an act of confidence,” but it radiated desperation. “He would say it’s de Gaullian, but it’s Bonapartian,” Corbé told me. “It’s this idea that you can get on your horse and take your sword, that even when you’re stuck somewhere there’s always a way to escape.” Given the massacre of the European Parliamentary elections, Macron’s decision seemed more akin to falling off his horse, losing his sword, and still insisting he held a strategic advantage. Had he done nothing, he would have had to swallow a humiliating loss, but he could have continued to govern more or less as before. Now he was risking his group’s relative majority and opening a path for the R.N. to take power.
If the R.N. gained a majority, Macron would have little choice but to allow the party to select a Prime Minister. The R.N.’s leaders quickly announced their pick: Jordan Bardella, the party’s scrubbed and dimpled twenty-eight-year-old dauphin. Biographically, Bardella is a godsend, one that the R.N. has been searching for for decades. He was born in Seine-Saint-Denis, France’s poorest department, and grew up in a housing project, the “little white kid” dodging drug dealers, he says, while his mother struggled to make ends meet as a nursery-school assistant. His maternal grandparents were Italian immigrants from Turin, and, according to Bardella, they gratefully embraced their new country. “If Iolanda and Severino’s integration worked, it’s because it was European,” he writes in a new memoir, contrasting his family’s culture to that of “populations from the other side of the world,” particularly Muslims, some of whose ideas are “profoundly contrary to who we are.”
Bardella’s opponents point out that he has never had a job outside of politics, other than briefly working at a vending-machine company owned by his father. They dismiss him as “Monsieur Selfie,” for his constant presence on social media, where he posts videos of himself eating Haribo gummy bears. Recent reporting has complicated his backstory, establishing that he spent weekends with his father in a well-off suburb, and that his paternal lineage includes an Algerian-immigrant great-grandfather. Politically, Bardella owes everything to Le Pen, whom he calls his “second mom” (and whose niece he long dated). French commentators sometimes refer to him as “the ideal son-in-law,” though they often fail to specify of what kind of family.
Macron’s decision to call the snap election elicited shock and clichés: he was playing with fire, rolling the dice, holding a gun to the country’s head. Seemingly on a whim, he had thrown the country into political pandemonium, making more probable than ever the scenario that French voters had been fending off for decades—the ascendance of the extreme right. Even Macron’s own people were stupefied. On television, the finance minister memorably described the clique of advisers who had urged the President to dissolve as “wood lice,” munching up “the palaces of the Republic.”
The announcement also surprised the sitting Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, whom Macron had informed only an hour before. At thirty-five, Attal had been in office for just six months. Like Bardella, he has hardly had a job outside of politics. He is tousle-haired and mediagenic (despite a minor slipup during the Olympics, when, after meeting Lady Gaga, he accidentally disclosed her engagement). Because of their common youth and charisma, Bardella and Attal are often referred to as the “fraternal twins” of French politics, popping out of their respective party wombs at roughly the same time. But, if Bardella is the ideal political son-in-law, Attal seemed to be dealing with degenerating family ties. At a cabinet meeting shortly before the President’s public announcement, Attal sat staring at Macron with what Vanity Fair France described as “the look of a serial killer.” He was so stung by the betrayal that he went M.I.A. for twenty-four hours. At a later meeting, Roland Lescure, the industry and energy minister, raised his hand. “Mr. President, you said, rightly, that an election is a matter of dynamics,” he began. “Well, we just lost one.”
The twenty-one-day scramble toward the snap election promised to be chaotic, and in the wake of the announcement Macron’s popularity plunged to new lows. “It was unprecedented, rickety, baroque,” someone close to Attal told me of the period. “Nobody knew what was going to happen.” Attal, citing a sense of duty, ultimately agreed to lead the campaign. Internally, hopes for victory were modest. The person close to Attal, borrowing a slogan from Dua Lipa, characterized the Prime Minister’s attitude as “radically optimistic.”
When Jacques Chirac dissolved the parliament, in 1997, Dominique de Villepin was one of the President’s top advisers. On a rainy afternoon, I went to see him at his office, on one of the grandest streets in Paris. Americans remember de Villepin as the most quintessentially French of politicians, publishing volumes of poetry and sparking the “freedom fries” foolishness of the early two-thousands with a now historic speech opposing the invasion of Iraq. Dressed in a suit and tie, his silver mane undiminished, he took my coat and offered me a glass of water, which an employee delivered as we settled into deep couches in a vast salon filled with sculptures and masks.
De Villepin, who later served as Chirac’s Prime Minister, told me that he had long believed Macron’s hauteur would be his downfall. Watching his showy, solitary stride across the Louvre courtyard on the night of his first victory, in 2017, de Villepin recalled, “I realized that we weren’t in France—we were in Hollywood.”
De Villepin told me, “Lots of French people voted for him not because they supported him but by default, because they didn’t have a good choice. And he never understood that.” Since his dramatic entry into electoral politics, Macron had explicitly positioned himself as a bulwark—the bulwark—against the extreme right. Yet although he owed both of his elections to a ramshackle coalition of voters, he had insisted on managing France “by certitude,” talking much but listening little to traditional partners such as local officials and trade unions. “He doesn’t change, he doesn’t learn, and he doesn’t draw lessons from his failures,” de Villepin said.
When I asked other political observers what had just happened and how to understand it, they, like de Villepin, often wanted to talk about Macron’s character. “I think he’s a narcissistic pervert,” Marine Tondelier, the head of the Green Party, told me. “He enjoys manipulating people. Everyone thinks it, but I’ll say it out loud.” At the end of the summer, Jean-Michel Blanquer published a juicy memoir of his five years as Macron’s education minister, recounting how his initial appreciation for the “snake charmer” President had given way to dismay at his egocentrism, his inability to know when enough was enough, and his willingness “to fly blindly without culture, without vision, and without values.” Blanquer writes, “Like a fallen angel of politics, Macron began to carry a black light.” Blanquer told me that the book could help people understand the masochistic side of Macron’s personality: “How could a strong, intelligent guy do something so destructive to himself?” (Macron’s office did not respond to requests for comment.)
Several interlocutors insisted that Macron was “having a midlife crisis.” Others wanted to talk about the influence of Brigitte Macron, his wife, who, as the political debacle continued, attended a Dior fashion show in a branded look and appeared on “Emily in Paris,” agreeing to a selfie with the show’s protagonist, an apparently tolerable immigrant. “Can you imagine Mrs. Nixon starring in ‘Columbo’ in the middle of the Watergate affair?” Le Nouvel Obs wrote.
The word I heard about Macron more than any other was “isolated.” News reports, too, drew a picture of a sequestered and susceptible leader, huddled over late-night whiskeys with a dwindling boys’ club of flatterers. This was a far cry from the progressive, transparent leadership that Macron had once promised. When I interviewed him in 2019, I was struck by his appetite for transgression. He had fallen in love with his high-school drama teacher and married her. He had backstabbed mentors and shunned traditional left-right party affiliations, blowing up the political system to launch his first Presidential bid. The dissolution seemed like confirmation of his tendency to think that he could always brazen it out. “I think we have a duty not to abandon any of our idealism but to be as pragmatic as the extremists are,” he told me in 2019. “This is a battle. And, even if you die with good principles, you die.”
Macronology could go only so far, though, in explaining why France found itself in such a fix. De Villepin spoke emphatically about the President’s disconnect from “anxieties, concerns, and situations that he largely neglected”—things like the plight of farmers and fisherman, who were fighting double crises of climate and inflation, or the prospects of residents of the banlieues, whom he had promised to “emancipate,” commissioning a major report that he then cast aside. Like many democracies, France is grappling with immigration, globalization, electoral polarization, and a changing media landscape that concentrates power in the hands of billionaires. Many people have the sensation that their quality of life is declining, that they are working harder for thinner rewards, while plutocrats skim the foam off the café crème. In 2018, this phenomenon of déclassement, or being downgraded, real and perceived, brought hundreds of thousands of French citizens into the streets during the “yellow vests” popular uprising. Macron threw money at the problem, granting tax concessions and wage increases to the protesters. He did the same during Covid, promising the French people that “the state will pay.”
Macron’s strategy of blunting financial pain through profligate spending allowed him to survive in the short term. Unlike the United States government, the French government responded to inflation by capping prices on energy and some food items, and, unlike Joe Biden, Macron wasn’t widely blamed for the cost of eggs, even as French people told pollsters that purchasing power was their top priority. However, Macron’s bills were coming due. With 2025 budget deliberations approaching, officials were projecting massive shortfalls, and Macron’s ability to buy his way out of a tight spot was clearly constrained. The looming fiscal crisis cast doubt on his mastery of the economy, previously his greatest strength.
On the evening of June 10th, a third earthquake rumbled the political landscape. After hours of deliberation, representatives of the major parties of the notoriously fractured French left emerged from the Green Party’s headquarters, in the Tenth Arrondissement, and announced to a vigil-keeping crowd that they had reached a surprise accord. In tribute to the antifascist Front Populaire of 1936, they were forming a coalition, to be called the Nouveau Front Populaire. Its mission was “to avoid the trap that has been set for us”—the forced choice between technocracy and demagoguery, rightish and righter, Macron and Le Pen.
Taken together, the six main left-wing parties had garnered about thirty per cent of the vote in the European Parliamentary elections. But few people—including, putatively, Macron—had guessed that they would succeed in putting aside their stark differences. For some mainstream leftists, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the hard-left party La France Insoumise, posed a particular obstacle. A former teacher and a Trotskyist, Mélenchon is known for marrying erudition to aggression in fiery orations against finance, NATO, and American imperialism, while admiring Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez. He is one of few high-profile French politicians to treat French Muslims as a desired constituency, not as a problem to be solved. One poll suggests that sixty-nine per cent of Muslim voters supported his 2022 Presidential bid. Mélenchon’s detractors accuse him of antisemitism, which he has denied, and point to a worryingly autocratic tendency. In 2018, when police showed up to search his party’s headquarters on funding matters, Mélenchon yelled into an officer’s face, “La République, c’est moi!” (He was convicted on charges of “intimidation and rebellion.”)
In 2023, a less ambitious leftist alliance exploded over Mélenchon’s refusal, after October 7th, to denounce Hamas’s acts as terrorism. (His party has called October 7th “an armed offensive by Palestinian forces” and prefers the designation “war crimes.”) Yet now, in the span of twenty-four hours, every significant voting bloc to the left of Macron had joined together. “It was a miracle, even though I prefer not to use religious language,” Tondelier, from the Green Party, told me, leaning back in a chair in her office at the party’s headquarters. Over the summer, Tondelier emerged as one of the N.F.P.’s stars—a hard-core tactician who wasn’t afraid to cry a few hot tears in public, or to wear a bright-green jacket everywhere if it helped get her point across. “We’re the anti-Macron and the anti-R.N.,” she told me.
Within days, the alliance settled on a single candidate for almost all of the country’s nearly six hundred legislative districts and hammered out a common platform, calling for a minimum-wage hike, a price freeze on energy bills, and the reinstatement of wealth taxes that Macron had cancelled. The former President François Hollande, a Socialist who had long refused to associate with Mélenchon, emerged from political retirement to offer his benediction. Then, as Le Monde noted, he added “the final brick” to the coalition, announcing that he would return to public life, running in his home district as an N.F.P. candidate. The situation was “more serious than it has ever been,” Hollande told reporters. “Never has the extreme right been so close to power.”
Facing an unexpected threat from the left, Macron denounced the coalition as an “extreme” movement, to be ostracized and rebuffed in equal measure to the R.N. At Second World War commemorations in Brittany, Macron called the N.F.P. “totally immigrationist,” parroting a phrase used by the far right. He accused the coalition of being obsessed with identity politics, and said that it would encourage “grotesque things like going to change your sex at city hall.”
The first round of voting took place on June 30th. Turnout was enormous, the highest in more than thirty years. The R.N. emerged in first place, but another round of voting was still to come the following week, and in many districts three or four candidates qualified. Immediately, the N.F.P., joined by Macron and most of the center right, called for the deployment of a front républicain—a sort of electoral firewall constructed by parties all along the spectrum to retract vote-splitting candidates and encourage people who would have voted for them to throw support to anyone but the R.N.
On Election Night, the R.N. invited supporters to a swank venue in the Bois de Vincennes. They were expecting a victory party. For months, Bardella and his colleagues had been putting together a “Matignon plan” (referring to the Prime Minister’s residence), and there was hope that his group might even secure an absolute majority, giving the R.N. control of the Assemblée Nationale. The faithful gathered in cocktail attire, continually refreshing Swiss and Belgian Web sites, which aren’t subject to a rule that restricts French outlets from reporting on election results until 8 P.M. But when the hour arrived, Le Monde reported, “there was a great silence in the ranks.” And then disbelief made itself heard: “The French are dumbasses!” “Fuck, we’re third.”
Over at République, the square where the leftist coalition had gathered, a cheer went up. Not only had the front républicain held but the N.F.P.—the miracle alliance, the improbable and not entirely wanted child of electoral necessity—had finished in first place. Supporters scaled the base of a statue representing Marianne, the personification of the French Republic, and hung an enormous French flag bearing the words “LA FRANCE EST TISSU DE MIGRATIONS.” The slogan meant “France is woven from migrations,” but it played on the phrase issu de l’immigration, a way of saying that a person or his parents were born abroad. The words affirmed the reality of French diversity, rebuking the R.N.’s racism and xenophobia. “Everyone hates fachos! ” the crowd chanted. “First generation, second generation, third generation—who cares! We’re chez nous! ”
It was a rapturous evening for the left, yet voters hadn’t handed the coalition a clean victory. The N.F.P. had won the most seats, but the new legislature was still almost evenly divided between the N.F.P., Macron’s group, and the R.N., leaving no faction with a majority. It was a three-way parliamentary stalemate. Instead of providing an indispensable clarification, the election had utterly muddied the situation.
The constitution gives the President the right to name the Prime Minister, but it specifies no criteria or timetable. Custom dictated that Macron nominate someone from the majority party, but, for the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic, there wasn’t one. The only thing constraining Macron, really, was what he could get away with. It was likely that, in nineteen days, the Paris Olympics would begin with no one at the wheel of the government. Would there be a sports minister? Or, for that matter, anyone with the power to appoint one?
In the absence of clear guidelines, Mélenchon rushed to emphasize the importance of the N.F.P.’s first-place finish. “The President must invite the Nouveau Front Populaire to govern,” he proclaimed, standing behind a lectern at his party’s headquarters, in his signature carmine tie. His deputies, arrayed behind him, looked as though they could barely contain their glee as he thundered, “The Nouveau Front Populaire will implement its program, nothing but its program, and all of its program!”
Instead of choosing a Prime Minister quickly, Macron dragged the process out through the summer, announcing a political “trêve”—a truce or rest period—to last through the Olympics. It was a revelation to learn that someone could press Pause on politics—the jockeying and squabbling and speculating—and it would just go away, at least for nineteen days. There was hardly a public mention of the crisis, save for a sign that a pair of fans held up at the men’s two-hundred-metre breaststroke final, paying tribute to the star swimmer Léon Marchand and to the rugby player Antoine Dupont, sometimes called Toto: “LÉON, PRESIDENT. TOTO, PRIME MINISTER.”
The Olympics ended on August 11th, with Macron still no closer to resolving the dilemma of who would lead the government. At one point, Attal, the lame-duck Prime Minister, was spotted playing with a lightsabre in Matignon’s gardens. Some observers suspected that Macron was trying to run out the clock, hoping that the N.F.P. would fall apart. The coalition had first put forth Lucie Castets in late July, just an hour before Macron was scheduled to give a prime-time television interview. Asked whether he would appoint her, he brushed the possibility aside, saying that what mattered wasn’t a particular name but, rather, who could muster a working majority to pass legislation. N.F.P. leaders were livid—they had finished first, they had found a candidate, and now Macron was shooting her down on live TV without so much as a discussion. Someone Castets knew offered her a back channel to communicate with the President, but she declined. “We took him by surprise,” she recalled. “I think he was embarrassed. Let him deal with it, right?”
When I met Castets, on a sunny terrace at a local café, she drank an espresso and reflected on her supposedly Warholian summer. It had been more of a grind than people imagined: with no formal staff or funding, she shouldered media requests and policy research largely alone, and the selection process dragged on so long that she was forced to resign from her job at city hall. The experience reminded her less of the Factory than of giving birth. “I just dissociated,” she said.
Within Macron’s camp, some agreed that he should appoint Castets out of respect for the election result, even though the numbers showed that the opposing parties could, and probably would, find the votes to oust her immediately. “It’s like a series,” Roland Lescure told me. “If you don’t have Season 1, you can’t have Season 2.” Another point of view held that Macron should skip straight to a viable government that might be hospitable to preserving his most cherished policies. At the end of August, Macron invited Castets to the Élysée. She arrived in black pants and boots, flanked by a dozen of her partners from the coalition. By all accounts, the ninety-minute meeting went smoothly and Castets confidently passed what the media called her “grand oral exam,” answering the President’s questions on everything from the budget to the French territory of New Caledonia.
Centrists accused the left of refusing to compromise. Castets told me that her most profound disagreement with Macron was about disagreement itself. “It doesn’t hold up for long to pretend that the right and left can be similar and that there is no conflict or interests in politics,” she said. “It’s all about conflict and interests.” Macron’s attempt to create a political synthesis, she continued, had accomplished the inverse of what he aspired to. His legacy, culminating in the dissolution, would be the repolarization of the electorate. She said, “I think he’s in a very bad position, and he did exactly what he wanted to avoid.”
Days later, Macron announced that, seeking “institutional stability,” he was eliminating Castets from the running. Le Gorafi, the French equivalent of The Onion, captured the brutal anticlimax to the left’s remarkable run with the headline “Emmanuel Macron Asks Lucie Castets, Leaving the Élysée, to Take Out the Trash.” As ever, personal explanations competed with political ones. Macronologists saw a control freak contending poorly with the attrition of his authority—“a shrunken, confused power, who still dreams of himself as a Machiavelli,” as Le Figaro put it. People interested in policy pointed out that Macron was hellbent on protecting the reforms that had taken him years to pass—particularly the retirement overhaul—and that, even if an N.F.P. government was doomed to fall, Castets could have used executive orders to obstruct the reforms within weeks.
Whatever Macron’s rationale, the left argued, the decision amounted to a subversion of democracy. “I think that the President has decided to declare war,” Fabien Roussel, the head of the Communist Party, proclaimed. Sarah Bennani, a nineteen-year-old student who had found time between schoolwork and a nannying job to get out the vote in working-class areas like Seine-Saint-Denis, where the abstention rate had previously reached almost seventy per cent, told me that she felt “sad talking about what finally happened,” and even conflicted about having urged her friends and neighbors to vote. “Those arguments aren’t valid anymore,” she said. “The government betrayed the people who we encouraged to give politics a chance.”
Macron continued to float names. So did the media. They were all over the place, in terms of both profile and ideology: younger, older, inexperienced, experienced, rural, urban, left, right, completely out of left field. The longer he procrastinated, the less time whomever he selected would have to try to put together a budget and a working majority to push it through. Talking with voters, I heard many versions of the same complaint: He gave us twenty-one days to keep the fascists out of power, but allows himself the luxury of eight weeks of deliberation.
Finally, on September 5th, Macron announced that he had come to a decision: the new Prime Minister would be Michel Barnier, a septuagenarian political hand who had previously served as minister of the environment (1993-95), minister of European affairs (1995-97), minister of foreign affairs (2004-05), and minister of agriculture and fisheries (2007-09) before acting as the European Union’s chief Brexit negotiator (2016-21). Barnier hailed from the traditional right and called himself a “social Gaullist.” Statuesque and snowy-haired, he was best known to many French people as the co-president of the Albertville Olympics, which took place in 1992 in his home region of Savoie. Despite a late-career anti-immigrant turn, he was a reasonably consensual figure, with a kitsch factor that worked in his favor. It was kind of like bringing back Bob Dole.
Yet, seen from a certain angle, Barnier’s appointment was a provocation. His center-right party had finished fourth in the snap election, garnering a mere five per cent of the vote. Worse still, his appointment required the blessing of Marine Le Pen—who signalled that she wouldn’t immediately vote to oust Barnier—and the stability of his government would depend on the tacit approval of her deputies, who crowed that Barnier would have to work under their “surveillance.” Dominique de Villepin marvelled, “It proves the Gospels right—the first will be the last, and the last will be the first.” Effectively, French voters had narrowly chosen the left-wing N.F.P. only to get a right-wing government, serving at the pleasure of Le Pen.
In October, I flew to Nice to attend an R.N. rally. I started the day at the market, where a man handed me a flyer encouraging me to say “no to the explosion of real-estate taxes.” I bought a slice of pissaladière and a chard frittata and ate them on an embankment facing the Mediterranean Sea, then took the tram to the Palais Nikaïa, an exurban theatre where the R.N.’s stars, including Le Pen and Bardella, were set to appear for their first big event since the snap election. When I got there, another man handed me another flyer. It featured a lot of blue, white, and red and an angry-looking eagle hovering over a Marianne. “We are the best of the youth because we defend our COUNTRY, our frontiers, and our PEOPLE in the face of the system changes and the demography that lie in wait for them,” it read.
The theatre would soon be hosting a Beatles tribute band and a Celtic Legends dance performance. Inside, some five thousand people were settling into their seats as Charles Aznavour’s “Emmenez-moi” played on the sound system. In the row in front of me, three generations of one family—grandmother, daughter, grandson—nudged one another in excitement as a blockbuster-style trailer filled the screen.
Then a handful of deputies took the stage for panel discussions. The conversations weren’t the barn burners one might have expected. They were heavy on acronyms, and on shopkeeperish concerns of neighborhood safety and personal finance. Anyone who had been following Le Pen, however, would know that this sandpapered discourse was the outcome of a decade’s work of dédiabolisation, or “undemonizing” the party—a campaign that had resulted in the R.N.’s legislative presence growing from eight deputies to a hundred and twenty-six in just seven years. Given these electoral successes and the unprecedented defection of mainstream politicians to the party, the dédiabolisation phase was effectively over. Now it was all about désenclavement, or opening the party up to a wider audience. The journalist Tristan Berteloot writes in his new book, “La Machine à Gagner” (“The Winning Machine”), that the R.N. quietly maintains links with neo-Fascist and white-supremacist movements, but that recently it has been far more disciplined publicly as it tries “to break the ‘glass ceiling’ that, according to it, has prevented it from gaining power.” (The R.N. denied these claims through a spokesperson.)
R.N. members now undergo media training. But, in the tumult of the snap election, dubious and outright vile comments came pouring forth. “I have a Jew as an ophthalmologist and a Muslim as a dentist,” one R.N. candidate asserted, by way of refuting accusations of racism. Others called immigrants “pieces of shit” and said French people of North African descent “didn’t belong in high office,” railed against vaccines, and questioned the moon landing. Confronted in an interview, Bardella acknowledged that there were four or five “problematic” candidates, but minimized them as “casting errors,” the inevitable by-products of a rushed nomination process.
It was harder to minimize the damage inflicted by the party’s proposal to bar French citizens who hold other nationalities from certain public jobs. The party had floated the idea in the legislature early in the year, but by the summer it was obvious that the plan was widely unpopular. Le Pen then claimed that binational employment was “a completely microscopic subject” that would involve only about thirty jobs of high sensitivity, even though, in 2011, she’d advocated for doing away with dual nationality altogether. “We are Algerian or we are French,” she once declared.
Despite obvious commonalities with the U.S. Republican Party, it’s not entirely clear what stance the R.N., should it come to power, would take toward a second Trump Presidency. Le Pen—a cat lady, though not childless—holds a breeder’s diploma and lives with six feline companions: Jazz, Paloma, Shadé, Shalimar, Oural, and Piccolina. She has defended reproductive rights, writing that although she would like to reduce abortions, she finds it “ineffective and cruel to do so by coercive measures,” particularly when poor women are most likely to suffer. In 2016, she welcomed Trump’s election fulsomely, but last month she offered only a bland tweet, and told a reporter, “At a moment when the United States is clearly going to defend its interests in an even more vigorous manner, Europe is going to have to wake up.” Drolet, the professor of politics and international relations, told me, “The French right is obviously pleased that you now have a much less Atlanticist America. Trump’s election also leaves more room for national autonomy and can be seen by the right as an opportunity for Europe to assert itself.” The belief that Le Pen and Trump hold most fervently in common is actually the one that is likeliest to keep them from ever becoming too cozy: nationalism is a zero-sum project.
At the rally, Le Pen spoke before Bardella. The fact that she was essentially serving as his opening act seemed to reflect an evolving power dynamic. Le Pen delivered a searing account of the political drama that had consumed the country since June 9th. “I’m not going to go back into the delays and the tricks of these past few months,” she said, “but I believe that the French people will remember with acuity the manner in which the political class twisted their arms during the legislative elections and has sought to invisibilize them ever since.” She paused a moment, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “The aspirations of the French have been ghostées”—ghosted—“as the youth say.”
Then Bardella descended from the heavens—or such was the implication, as he emerged from the upper reaches of the auditorium and floated down through the rows, flanked by bodyguards, while cheering fans waved flags and pawed at his clothes. As he strode onto the stage, resplendent in navy tailoring, I thought of him not as a well-scrubbed son-in-law but as a kind of launderer, spot-cleaning stains of racism and nepotism so that the R.N. wouldn’t have to get new clothes.
Bardella said that he was there to speak to “all those whose heart bleeds when they look at the state of France.”
“The left to the guillotine!” someone in the audience yelled.
The R.N., one former high-level civil servant told me, is “at a very different and quite difficult point in its life cycle. It has to remain the party of angry people while demonstrating that it can be relied upon to govern.” Macron’s position as the party’s primary villain, it seemed, was receding along with his share of votes. Bardella spent far more time talking about the danger of Mélenchon’s “regressive left,” supposedly stuffed with asinine diversity hires and terrorism apologists swaddled in Palestinian flags.
“Dirty cunt!” the grandmother in front of me cried out, slicing a hand through the air.
The atmosphere was growing febrile. I had the weird sensation that I’d seen someone with a Confederate flag, and, indeed, it later turned out that a man had shown up in a jacket decorated with a patch featuring the Stars and Bars, posing for a picture with an R.N. deputy. “If it wasn’t for wokeism, nobody would care,” the man said. Bardella wrapped up his speech with a call for “the people” to keep pressing on, promising that “our victory is not cancelled but deferred.”
“We are impatient to govern,” he declared. “The time of power is not far off.”
The first weeks of December were supposed to be a triumph for Macron, a respite from the churning negativity of the political crisis. On the second Sunday of Advent, five years after a fire nearly burned Notre-Dame de Paris to the ground, the fully renovated cathedral was set to reopen to the public. The restoration was Macron’s personal project; almost as soon as the flames were out, he promised that the cathedral would be rebuilt by 2024. He had fulfilled that vow, and the result was a marvel, a vindication of French aesthetic splendor and technical prowess and even, yes, a certain headstrong style of leadership. Yet, in the first days of December, from the moment that the Monday-morning talk shows kicked off and the legislative session opened, it became clear that this accomplishment was likely to be eclipsed by a rapidly deteriorating situation at the Assemblée Nationale.
The immediate problem was the budget. In the fall, it emerged that the national deficit was even bigger than anyone had admitted publicly—a gaping hundred and sixty-seven billion euros. Debt-related expenses were estimated to exceed next year’s education budget. Ratings agencies had downgraded France’s credit rating, and, at more than six per cent of the G.D.P., the deficit considerably exceeded the European Commission’s three-per-cent cap. A government spokesperson admitted in October, “The risk, for France, is to become Greece in 2010.”
The revelations only aggravated the instability of the Barnier government, built on the wobbliest base of any since the start of the Fifth Republic. The N.F.P. had already called for a no-confidence vote in early October, in protest of Barnier’s appointment. I sat down with Manuel Bompard, a deputy and the national coördinator of Mélenchon’s party, in his spartan office just before the vote. Even though the motion was almost certain to fail, and eventually did, Bompard saw it as a necessary riposte to the “democratic trauma” that he believed Macron had inflicted on the country. “The idea is not to do things only when we are sure that they will work, that they will succeed, but also to fight battles even when we’re not leading, or that we can’t win,” Bompard told me.
Because the left-wing coalition had declared itself unwilling to work with Barnier’s government from the beginning, and the centrist bloc didn’t have the numbers to go it alone, Barnier needed the support of the R.N. to pass a budget bill, which he had to do before the end of the year. He made significant concessions to the R.N., agreeing not to raise taxes on electricity, and to remove a measure that would have reduced insurance coverage for some medications. His gestures, however conciliatory, were not enough to satisfy Le Pen. Without sufficient support, on December 2nd, Barnier resorted to a maneuver known as the 49.3, by which a Prime Minister can push a bill through without a vote. “The French have had enough of being fleeced and mistreated,” Le Pen told reporters, outside the legislative chamber. “Maybe some thought that with Michel Barnier things would change—well, it’s even worse than it was.” Her party would join the N.F.P. in voting to oust his government.
It behooved Le Pen to keep public attention focussed on the budget fight: she and twenty-four co-defendants are being tried in a Paris criminal court, accused of using the E.U. as a piggy bank for the party and funnelling funds to apparatchiks. (The defendants have denied all allegations, and some of Le Pen’s supporters have complained that she is being targeted by “a government of judges.”) In mid-November, prosecutors announced that they were seeking heavy penalties, including a two-year prison sentence for Le Pen and a ban on running for public office for five years, which would make her ineligible for the 2027 Presidential election.
After Le Pen’s announcement, time seemed to accelerate. By Wednesday, just forty-eight hours later, Barnier was up for a no-confidence vote. As the debate opened, the Assemblée was rowdy and restless, crackling with the heady feeling of history being made. The left spoke first, denouncing the government’s betrayal, its rebuff of the N.F.P.’s priorities, and its pandering to Le Pen. Then Le Pen got up, intense as ever, dismissing Barnier as an “optical illusion” and charging his group with displaying “intransigence, sectarianism, and dogmatism.” An impassioned last-minute plea by Attal to the conscience and sense of responsibility of the deputies—“It’s not too late!” he implored—did nothing to forestall Barnier’s fate. Hours later, it was official: three hundred and thirty-one deputies had voted to support the motion, toppling the government for the first time since 1962 and rendering Barnier the shortest-lived Prime Minister in the Fifth Republic’s history.
“It’s a huge waste,” the centrist deputy Mathieu Lefèvre told me. Barnier “tried to find the compromises necessary to construct a budget despite a very restricted timetable. Unfortunately, he had to face an alliance of opposites who are harmful to our country and its stability.” It remains to be seen whether France will descend, as some experts have predicted, into a deeper chaos of financial turbulence and social unrest. The Constitution contains provisions that prevent a total government shutdown in the absence of a budget, permitting the country to carry out basic functions such as collecting taxes and paying civil servants. But French people are likely to face uncertainty about pension payments and tax rates, as well as jittery financial markets. Farmers from the Burgundy area have already announced that they will pay “a visit” to deputies who voted to bring down the government and, in doing so, deprived them of eagerly awaited measures to ease their financial plight. Still, for some deputies, the prospect of starting over is cause for optimism. “I voted without hesitation, but with a certain gravity,” Arthur Delaporte, a Socialist deputy, told me. “It’s not an anodyne gesture, to topple a government. But it’s meant to enable the return of a regime that functions differently.”
Macron will have to appoint a new Prime Minister—once again, of his own choosing. This time, he says, he will do it within days. If another government falls, however, calls for his resignation are likely to grow deafening, and he may have a difficult time justifying his viability as the head of an executive branch that changes Prime Ministers more often than many people see their hairdressers. In a recent poll, sixty-four per cent of French people indicated that they want Macron to resign, but he says unequivocally that he will finish out his term, which ends in 2027.
Le Pen professes, for now, to be uninterested in forcing Macron out, but an early election could be advantageous, given her legal problems. Already her party has begun to deploy what one R.N. deputy called “the slow poison” of suggestion, letting the idea seep into the public consciousness that Macron should step down. Mélenchon, who makes no secret of his desire to depose Macron (“Even with a Barnier every three months, Macron won’t last three years,” he quipped soon after the vote), is focussed on finally getting a left-wing Prime Minister. Only days ago, he vowed that the N.F.P. would insist that Macron appoint the candidate of its choice—Lucie Castets. But in France at the moment, today’s ultimatum is tomorrow’s obsolescence. On Friday, the Socialists declared that they were ready to negotiate with Macron’s group and the center right, throwing the fate of the N.F.P. into question and rejiggering the political landscape once again. ♦
