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France’s gerontocratic nightmare Macron may have won, but it's the elderly who will rule

Macron with his people. Credit: Rick Rycroft - Pool/Getty

Macron with his people. Credit: Rick Rycroft - Pool/Getty


April 23, 2022   10 mins

The results of the first round of the 2022 French presidential elections give a surprising impression of order. Three poles, each with its own fairly simple socio-demographic and geographical structure, seem to emerge: the Macron vote, the Le Pen vote and the Mélenchon vote. The media establishment has reached peak panic, flapping about because the second round is now reduced to a dire choice between the extreme Right and Macron. And yet there is a sense that France’s political sociology is reshaping itself towards more stability. France appears to be fairly united culturally, far less obsessed with Islam than expected, gradually reorganising itself along class, education and age lines.

Three dominant electorates

Emmanuel Macron voters are defined by their fear of change, and by a firm conviction that nothing untoward will happen to them even if the course of France’s Europeanist, fake-open markets does not change. They constitute a kind of wide conservative party. General trends show them to be the most well-off and oldest of the French population, tending to live in the western half of the country. This isn’t correlated to the West retaining its old ethnographic characteristics: religious practise has fallen sharply and its original familial system has largely disappeared. It is because the West is distanced from those problems which have an epicentre in mid-Europe. Western Paris’s bourgeois suburbs are as present as Brittany in this configuration.

The structure of the Le Pen vote looks equally straight-forward. You find it in the North-East and the South, the areas where the industrial fabric has broken down. This is not new. Looking closer at the results, by social category, education and age, Marine Le Pen's electorate is economically disadvantaged, not just by low incomes, but also in terms of education. These voters are mostly young working people. The Le Pen vote is the stable second pole.

The Mélenchon vote is the most interesting. It is largely, but not entirely, made up of people who went through higher education. I have long wondered what caused the strong south-western imbalance in the Mélenchon vote, something which became particularly pronounced in 2017 in Toulouse. There is definitely a southern pull today, and this is mainly based on a generally higher educational level. Yes, Mélenchon came out on top in Seine-Saint-Denis, the northern Paris suburbs inhabited mainly by French people of immigrant origin and modest means, but it’s essentially in large university cities that its rise is striking: Rennes, Nantes, Toulouse, Montpellier, Strasbourg... Mélenchon has demolished Macron among the graduate crowd.

The 2017 Macron vote was stratified, simultaneously by income and educational level. Half of all agrégés (l'agrégation is a competitive examination that gives access to the best jobs in the French educational system) voted for Macron. Macron was, therefore, the candidate who embodied domination in its two main dimensions, economic and educational. This is now over. There is still a narrow majority of high-educated people voting for Macron, but they’re balanced by a majority of poorly educated people who do not have a high-school diploma. The average educational level of Mélenchon voters is now slightly higher than that of the Macron ones.

A significant characteristic of the Mélenchon vote, however, is that income is not correlated to education level. Mélenchon voters are both well-educated and underprivileged (but not altogether poor.) The perfect Mélenchonista voter, to misquote Max Weber, is a young graduate in straitened circumstances. Yes, French Muslims did vote more for Mélenchon than other segments of the population, but this only accounts for about 40%, of the total; while, as a group, French Muslims are already split by variables of class and education.

The geographical evolution of the Macron vote is fascinating. Back in 2017, I found the strongest ever correlation between the Macron and Le Pen votes in our Départements: -0.93 (such a coefficient fluctuates between -1 and +1). I’d never seen one that close in my entire researcher career. A full 86% of Macron vote occurrences were explained by the Le Pen vote (itself extremely stable compared to previous elections). This meant that, knowing the Le Pen vote, we could predict the Macron vote almost exactly. This also meant that the Macron vote was fundamentally triggered by hostility to Le Pen, irrespective of any manifesto, and this from the 2017 first round. 

In other words, Macronism is essentially an anti-Lepenism – an empty ideology with no platform. This is the key to understanding why, once elected, Macron was soon all over the place, taking unpredictable, often brutal decisions that led the country to insurrection by the time of the Yellow Vests crisis. Macron was dangerous because he was empty.  

Let’s not get carried away, though. Emmanuel Macron was created by the École Nationale d'Administration, a fulcrum of French economic conformism, a intellectual universe which allows its deeply statist denizens to believe themselves to be free-marketeers; a place first and foremost impervious to any instinctive understanding of the markets. Having achieved power, Macron mostly endorsed his predecessors’ policies, making them a little more radical, a little more arrogant, a little more violent. Nothing he has done is new. The coming of Macron, and the years 2017-2020 in particular, has made a truth visible: at bottom, the fake-free-marketeer ideology has created a vacuum in France, which the concept of nihilism into current political thinking. 

What struck me, in this 2022 first round, was the collapse of the correlation coefficient, linking the Macron-Le Pen vote. It falls to -0.5 (accounted variance falls from 86% to 25%). The diagram above shows a perfect alignment in the départments on the regressive Right in 2017, while in 2022 (the diagram below below) they are apart. Geographically, the Le Pen vote has not moved: it’s the Macron vote that became something else, a conservative, upper middle class, old people's vote. 

What we now see are three very typical groups of voters in the process of stabilising. The old parties — Socialist, Républican Right and Green — are close to disappearing. There is something very reassuring in this ternary organisation of space, both geographical and mental. It suggests a society in the process of finding a form, an order. 

Three populisms

The surprise is that none of these three major voting blocs (easily circumscribed on the basis of income, education, geography and age) is now represented by an organised party, but by a person, a leader, who makes their respective organisations say whatever they want. The leader can expel the representatives of a specific tendency should they feel like it. The leader, ruling from the top, can survive any group defections. This notion of the leader has a name: populism. We are witnessing the creation of three competing populisms, each of which, of course, claims to represent — this being the very nature of populism — the One True French people. 

Beyond the nature of the leader, the changes of programme and the claim to represent the entire people, an essential element of populism is irresponsibility; this leads to the presentation of absurd economic programmes and untenable promises. This could be because membership of the euro and obedience to European trade regulations makes it impossible to come up with a realistic economic and social programme. The standard of living is falling, as we’ve known since the appearance of the Gilets Jaunes.

We have also realised, as a result of the pandemic, that de-industrialisation puts our country at risk. We no longer can produce certain basic goods, including the medicines and medical equipment needed in the event of a health crisis. We already know that the Ukrainian conflict will endanger our energy and food supply chains. We should, therefore, reindustrialise, not simplistically advocate freezing prices (Mélenchon), barring immigrants from social benefits (Le Pen) or pushing back retirement age to 65 (Macron). The constraints of Europe can only give shape to a political representation which can only express useless populist solutions. The French media-political establishment would certainly agree with my characterisation of Mélenchon and Le Pen as populists — but not Macron. 

Yet Macron is constantly saying things that make no sense (I recommend, before starting on any of Macron's speeches, a quick re-read of A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic). Take reindustrialisation. During his campaign, Macron only treated it as a secondary theme. But he was also expressing vigorous, almost hysterical pro-EU beliefs. Yet the conditions for reindustrialisation do require protectionism, the competence to create money, and State investment by the state (in conjunction with private sector efforts), all of which the EU forbids. Projects that bear no relation to any concrete reality, agitatedly pushed by a leader subjected to no control: this is populism. Macronisme is the populism of the rich and the pensioners.

In the interests of balance, we should also address the irresponsibility of the other two leaders.

Look at Marine Le Pen, on the same reindustrialisation theme. As she talks about the nation and protectionism, she seems to have a better grasp of economic reality than Macron. But as soon as she mentions banning the Islamic headscarf, she creates a separate category of French citizens who are not really French, but who are immigrants and a burden. This disqualifies her economic reconstruction platform, which is revealed as fundamentally unserious. Refocusing the country towards a renewed industrial era is impossible without uniting the French people, including hard-working Muslims. Immigrants are similarly a part of the labour force who require protection. The economic project of the National Rally is revealed as a mere collection of words: phrases certainly, but not proposals as logical positivism might understand them.

In the case of Mélenchoniste populism, the reality is even simpler. Mélenchon rejects nuclear power. His project would be a fast road to underdevelopment, affecting all economic sectors. If his voters understand reality, Mélenchon’s ideology, sovereigntist one day, Green the next, doesn’t. His far-Left doctrine could best be called narcissism-Leninism, given the personality of the leader. But I am being unfair: Mélenchon’s refusal to demonise Islam as well as immigrants, in an Islamophobic cultural atmosphere, is admirable.

Marx rather than Mohammed

Traits of the current French situation do evoke classic populism ­— but with a difference. And this is related to the three different populisms currently in competition. Classical populism is born from a fluid, unstable electorate in an atomised society. Atomisation is now a fact in a French society once powerfully structured by regional opposition: there is the large secular Parisian area between Laon and Bordeaux, plus the Mediterranean coastline, and strongly Catholic regions with solid religious practice (the periphery).

But the French Church no longer exists sociologically. Its fall has been mirrored by that of competing secularisms, the last and most important of which was the Communist Party. Abstentionism, especially among young people, should it continue to rise, could lead to true populism. Instead, we see the emergence of three stable forces in a France that is evolving homogeneously albeit while regressing. The standard of living is falling for all social and age categories, a fall very obvious in the mapping of age, income and education in France. The country’s education levels are falling, but as much for the children of managers as as for the children of workers — a democratic decline, so to speak.

What is emerging is a poorer, well-structured France; it is not divided, like the United States, by any culture wars. Class contempt, which is real, does not have the intensity in France that it does in England: we have no equivalent to the expression "chavs". Moreover, the success of Rassemblement in regularly reaching the second round of presidential elections, with a working-class base (classified as extreme right), suggests that the working classes are by no means broken in France. 

The problem facing France is that this emerging ternary political structure — a conservative party (Macron); a popular party (Le Pen), a petty-bourgeois party (Mélenchon) — is blocked by the institutions and the electoral system from having a fair parliamentary representation. In a German-style proportional system, the existence of these three forces would lead to an Assembly in which all of them would be represented and where MPs would negotiate issue by issue. This would lead to different majorities on issues of reindustrialisation (i.e. on the exit from European constraints), on religious issues, on pensions and on public services and so forth. The system would work by negotiation. But the majority vote eliminates one of the three components necessary for the balance, instead producing a political scenario that doesn't relate the actual social situation in France

Yet let's not romanticise the virtues of cultural balance.  The fracture between Mélenchon's and Marine Le Pen's electorate reflects an ethical division on issues of immigration and Islam, and the like. It would seem that the two groups are today not so much in agreement with each other as with the situation in France. It’s their leaders who really are the true prisoners of Parisian obsessions. They are lagging behind the country’s real fears, which are economic rather than ethnocultural, rather than Islamophobia or anti-Islamophobia.

That Eric Zemmour, with his older voters, achieved a comparatively small score, is a sure sign of this. Marine Le Pen’s relative success arises from a campaign centred on cost of living rather than immigration. If she fails in the runoff, it could be because she reintroduced the Islamic headscarf theme in her campaign between the two rounds. The current French system dynamic downplays religious or ethnic criteria, replaced these by sharply rising economic worries. What we’re seeing is the return to Marx rather than Mohammed. The remarkable efforts of the central elites to keep religious themes alive would not seem to be the central problem. The rise of a gerontocratic power, on the other hand, seems to very worrisome.

The gerontocratic question

Second round voting intentions suggest two categories are poised to vote overwhelmingly for Macron: young people under 25, and more importantly, in terms of proportion and mass, pensioners, 70% of whom plan to vote for Macron. A narrowly-elected second-term President Macron would owe his victory to the retired, since Marine Le Pen would in this hypothesis enjoy a majority among those who actually work. One might say that he would not, in political philosophy terms, be legitimate since he had been elected by the old.

This, effectively, is the definition of a gerontocratic political system. It is quite significant that the current central issue of Macron's campaign is retirement.  His flagship first -ound measure, which he frantically tried to forget in the last two weeks, was to delay retirement until 65. This project seemed to please pensioners who seem to think, according to polling, that it is quite normal to make younger people work longer than them. 

Classical political philosophy, from Hobbes to Locke, Montesquieu to Rousseau, based its assumptions on political actors with a median age of 25 to 30. When universal suffrage was finally established, first for men, then for women, it also corresponded to a median voter age of about 30. Today we are faced, as a result of  accelerated ageing, with voters above a 50 in median age. 

Many political decisions (or indecisions) taken over the last decades could be the result of this growing gerontocracy. Advanced, extreme free trade has resulted in the crushing of young people’s income and employment opportunities in our "Western democracies", even those with a higher education. The Heckscher-Ohlin theorem demonstrates that the most scarce local group finds itself most disadvantaged in international exchanges: these are the young people in rich countries.  The old men in power and the politicians who represent them don’t care.

As far back as 2011, Ronald Lee and Andrew Mason sought to model intergenerational money transfers. In rich countries as a whole, average consumption age was still lower than average production age, but not by much, indicating that the old were not yet pumping out an exaggerated share of production. In countries such as Germany and Japan, however, the tipping point was near.  Nine years later, the Covid epidemic saw the confinement of youth and working people to save the elderly, who were the only ones truly threatened en masse by the epidemic.  The Great Lockdown was perhaps the most spectacular manifestation of the new gerontocratic power. An update of Lee and Mason's calculations is urgently needed. It is perhaps here that the French election takes on its most universal meaning.

We must consider the distinct possibility that France will elect Sunday a president who is against the will of the French of working age. This gerontocratic problem is far more dangerous for democracy than all the worries expressed about populism, the far right, Islam or terrorism.

The unpalatable truth emerging from the growing weight of pensioners in the overall electorate is that, for the first time since 1789, there is a valid argument against universal suffrage and representative democracy. It is not normal that the inactive should decide for the active, who produce goods and children. No society can long survive massive transfers of resources to the old at the expense of the new generations. If we want to save representative democracy, we will have to find an electoral formula that allows the active population to remain in power, or even better, to return to it.

Additional data journalism by Sophie Muscat. Translated from French by Anne-Elisabeth Moutet. 


Emmanuel Todd is a French historian, sociologist, political scientist and author.


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Stephen Walshe
Stephen Walshe
2 years ago

Resentful low earning graduates were the backbone of Corbyn and Bernie Sanders support, and here too with Mélenchon. Filling the heads of school leavers of mediocre ability with ideological nonsense in poor quality universities in order to leave them without skills of use to the economy must the most destructive waste of resources in peacetime since the Ancient Egyptians piled up precious goods in burial chambers. If 40% of Mélenchon’s support was Muslim, then 9% of all voters were Muslims voting for Mélenchon, and he got over 60% of the Muslim vote. The hard left’s support is concentrated in two demographics which are rising as a proportion of the total. That is the future.

Last edited 2 years ago by Stephen Walshe
Jacob Mason
Jacob Mason
2 years ago
Reply to  Stephen Walshe

While we have plenty of “degree inflation” here in the US, I don’t think that conflicts with the reality that employment opportunities for the young are generally worse than for our parents.

Francis MacGabhann
Francis MacGabhann
2 years ago

This reads to me like a very long-winded way of saying that France is screwed. It’s divided between the greedy (Macron voters), the stupid (Melenchon’s voters) and the rest (Le Pen). The greedy and the stupid are varieties of Eloi, and the continue to live off the misery of the Morlocks. Since greed is a form of stupidity, the Eloi will flock together in the second round, but since collectively they contribute noting, it’s questionable how long the Morlocks will continue to carry them. It ain’t looking good, long term.

R Wright
R Wright
2 years ago

“But as soon as she mentions banning the Islamic headscarf, she creates a separate category of French citizens who are not really French, but who are immigrants and a burden. This disqualifies her economic reconstruction platform”

This is where the wheels begin to fall off a previously high quality essay.

Ri Bradach
Ri Bradach
2 years ago

The picture shows him shaking the hand of an elderly gentleman. That man is a British Paratrooper, not a Frenchman.

It was men like this whose enormous sacrifices that Macron and the EU abused when Britain voted to leave the EU. In exchange for millions of our young men dying in two wars we did not start to save France and Europe from despotism, when we voted to restore democracy we were treated as an enemy.

The EU and most of all Macron’s France declared economic war on Britain for daring to remove itself from the yoke of European Commission rule.

Never ever forget that.

Let no British blood or penny ever be spilt for these people ever again.

Peter B
Peter B
2 years ago
Reply to  Ri Bradach

In typical Macron style, he is not shaking the veteran’s hands. He’s ingratiatingly put his hands on the old gentleman’s shoulders. I hope the old boy told him “don’t tutoyer me”.
Zero time for Macron. But there were a good proportion of courageous, honourable Frenchmen and women who fought on alongside us during WWII. They were not all collaborators like Mitterand.
At the same time, whenever we beat ourselves up about Munich (1938), we would do well to remember that it was the French – and not the UK – who has the treaty commitment to come to Czechoslovakia’s defence.

Dustshoe Richinrut
Dustshoe Richinrut
2 years ago
Reply to  Peter B

For goodness sake, it’s clear Macron is affectionately embracing the veteran. He is showing his sincere admiration for him. And the veteran appreciates that. And Macron may well have just shaken the veteran’s hand, too, a second before.
I am irritatingly criticising you, no doubt.

Francis MacGabhann
Francis MacGabhann
2 years ago
Reply to  Ri Bradach

A person should also remind themselves that they personally were not on these battlefields. When assigning collective guilt to entire continents, there is a danger of claiming personal credit for victories won by one’s ancestors. The English are notorious for it. “How WE won at Normandy, how WE won at El Alamein…” etc.

Last edited 2 years ago by Francis MacGabhann
Colin Elliott
Colin Elliott
2 years ago

Who’s assigning guilt to entire continents? I was too young for the war, but my father fought in France and Belgium in 1940, returning in 1944, after which he fought through those countries again into the Netherlands and Germany.
And the British, Canadians, US and a few others did win in Normandy and at El Alamein, etc., and a good number of Irish citizens also fought, despite their country’s neutrality.
(And no, I don’t ignore the enormous effort by Russia, after 1941, who justifiably remember it, without being labelled ‘notorious’.)

Ri Bradach
Ri Bradach
2 years ago

We, the British servicemen and women. Every generation of my family have served for hundreds of years. In WW2 both my Grandfather (Hurricane, Typhoon, Tempest pilot) and my grandmother (WRAF radar plotter) fought in the war.
The first, my Great Grandfather fought in all of the major battles, 1915-1918, meeting my grandmother, an army nurse whilst recovering from being shot at Ypres.
So yes, WE and bloody hard earned too. “We”, a defined people, however much you hate us, is a legitimate term. Please keep your anti-English pathetic drivel to yourself and enjoy the final act of surrendering your own sovereignty when the EU ends the Celtic Tiger tax game.

Last edited 2 years ago by Ri Bradach
Simon Diggins
Simon Diggins
2 years ago
Reply to  Ri Bradach

I have to say that is probably the most delusional rant I’ve ever read on UnHerd.

I was a Remainer, who, nonetheless, now accepts we are out of the EU, probably for at least a generation, but the idea that the EU declared economic war on us is, truly, absurd. When the country voted for Brexit, in 2016, there had been little or no discussion as to what that meant; the idea that Brexit = ‘hard Brexit’ only really emerged after the 2019 election.

As for the EU, it’s a club: when you are in it, you follow the rules; if you choose to leave, then you cannot, reasonably, expect to enjoy the same access and privileges as before. Tell me what is difficult to understand about that?

Andrew F
Andrew F
2 years ago
Reply to  Simon Diggins

If it is so, can you explain how Greece join the Euro when failing to meet membership criteria?
What about Lisbon treaty and various referendums which went against it but project carried on regardless?
What about appeasing Russia and allowing Germany to sign to Nord Stream 1 and 2 (economic Ribentrop-Molotov pact)?
So yes, EU is the disfunctional club where members votes are ignored by executive.

Ri Bradach
Ri Bradach
2 years ago
Reply to  Simon Diggins

Who said Brexit meant having the “same access and privileges”? Wake up!!! Nobody expected that, but a FTA like Canada’s was denied purely so that the EU (France) could wage economic war and split the UK using a 1991 agreement as if it were signed AFTER Lisbon, 18 years later.

Rasmus Fogh
Rasmus Fogh
2 years ago

Very interesting electoral analysis – slightly less impressive underlying politics.

If it is a problem that an ever larger proportion of the population is pensioners, to the point where they can overwhelm the working population electorally – what is wrong with raising the pension age? Increase the block of workers, reduce the block of pensioners, have more people pay taxes to pay for the pension costs? If you refuse raise the pension age because that is unjust – how can you think it is just to take away the political rights of the old?

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
2 years ago
Reply to  Rasmus Fogh

It’s not right, and shouldn’t be considered. Eventually as these older people die off they’ll cease to be a majority, and the millennials who have been done over constantly will be a more important voting bloc and be able to dictate policy.
Generally the baby boomer generation has been incredibly selfish in my opinion, selling off and privatising everything built by the silent generation before them, then doing away with every leg up they received to get a start in life for the generations that followed, at least in the English speaking world anyway, and in France it appears they’re happy to raise the retirement age now that they’re safely retired. However the fact is once they’re no longer an important voting bloc the younger generations will be free to set policy as they please, and the oldies that are left can’t really have any complaints

Stephen Walshe
Stephen Walshe
2 years ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

It is fantasy to imagine that a country with a life expectancy of 83 years can sustain a retirement age of 62 or lower. Refusing to raise it now will mean no pension at all for people later.

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
2 years ago
Reply to  Stephen Walshe

I’m not arguing with that, as you say to support a longer retirement you either have to work later or significantly increase taxes. My point was that the elderly seem happy to force the youngsters to work later now that they themselves will no longer be affected. However God forbid them having to put their hand in their pocket to assist the youngsters

Russell Hamilton
Russell Hamilton
2 years ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

Billy Bob – have you heard of ‘the bank of mum and dad’? Lots of people assist their children, now that the kids have student loans, and housing is ridiculously expensive. I read a comment the other day on a blog about the coming Australian election – it said “People over 70 shouldn’t have the vote, after all, the future isn’t theirs”, and I thought “he has a point”.

I don’t like my entire generation being blamed for everything, there are a lot of poor baby boomers, particularly women who got divorced in middle age. We have wealth in the form of a house, but you have to live somewhere. Many of us were at work long before compulsory superannuation, so not a lot of money in retirement. I passed pension age (it’s 67 in Australia) years ago and one of the reasons I’m still at work is because the world economic situation seems pretty fragile – I would be frightened to have only a pension to depend on. So maybe the pension age will become increasingly irrelevant – ordinary working class people will work ’till they drop!

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
2 years ago

Name me one policy the baby boomer generation voted for/enacted that benefitted a generation other than their own.
I’ve seen them privatise all the utilities the silent generation built up and pocket the cash, sell themselves all the council houses for cheap and never replace them, benefit from either free further education or on the job training then do away with it once it was their turn to pay for the following cohort. They’ve put nothing away for their end of life care yet expect the pension to rise faster than average wages. They have the cheek to label the youngsters as entitled yet while seeming to believe the world owes them a favour.
Just because a few are in the position to help a family member doesn’t change that fact

Stephen Walshe
Stephen Walshe
2 years ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

But its not the Boomer generation who stand to benefit from a refusal to raise the retirement age – it is those born in the 1960s and perhaps the early 1970s. Anyone aged under 50 is exposed to the risk that the money will quite literally have run out by the time their turn comes.

Russell Hamilton
Russell Hamilton
2 years ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

There are dozens of such policies – at the start of my voting life I was able to vote for Australia having a national health service, and not long ago I was able to vote for Western Australia having Voluntary Assisted Dying – along the way I could vote for same sex marriage and all the other anti-discrimination laws. So much of the environmental legislation, and schemes such as Landcare, were baby-boomer projects. Native title for Aborigines. A national disability support program. On and on …

I agree with many of your examples, and why/how people can be persuaded to vote against their best interests is an interesting topic, but really, money talks in politics. Given the decline in power of unions, churches etc. the influence of money in politics is greater than ever. So, don’t blame an entire generation, follow the money and see who benefited from those decisions.

Michael K
Michael K
2 years ago

It’s ridiculous to blame “a generation” but Billy Bob does have the right of it, conceptually speaking. It’s true that the previous generation has done a lot for environmental protection and so on, but their resources depended on polluting the environment in the first place. We now call travelling by train “sustainable” simply because it pollutes the environment less than taking an airplane would. We have practically nothing that’s actually sustainable, and much of it stems from a refusal of funding it, because it never was “cool” enough to care.
Of course, it’s not any single person’s fault, but simply the overall air of consumerism, materialism and self-centeredness. If everybody is under the pressure of selling crap to the next guy, then obviously something has to give. And that something is both the environment and the coming generation.

Jeanie K
Jeanie K
2 years ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

Eventually as these older people die off they’ll cease to be a majority, and the millennials who have been done over constantly will be a more important voting bloc and be able to dictate policy.”
So, the old people die off but the ‘millenials’ don’t get any older and become retirees themselves? And when they get to the age of 63, they will be happy to vote to raise the retirement age to 65?

Billy Bob
Billy Bob
2 years ago
Reply to  Jeanie K

What they choose to vote for is up to them, I was merely saying they’ll be able to selfishly vote to look after their own interests much like the older generations have done

Michael K
Michael K
2 years ago
Reply to  Billy Bob

I rarely agree with you, but this was eloquently put.

Dustin Needle
Dustin Needle
2 years ago
Reply to  Rasmus Fogh

Nothing to add to the interesting spread of comments below other than observation – the elderly in an EU country are stealing the future of the young? That’s going to blow the minds of some UK journalists.

Jon Hawksley
Jon Hawksley
2 years ago

A very informative essay that is illuminating on the political divides in France. The opinions of the author do though show through. There is no mention of the brakes stopping businesses from being more enterprising – the unions, the taxation of small businesses and the black economy. As to the politics of the elderly this is not necessarily self interest – they have seen what happens with the extreme left and right.

Norman Powers
Norman Powers
2 years ago

Hmm. Overall a very high quality essay and thanks to Sophie for (presumably) the useful maps and graphs. Most of this feels plausible and directionally correct.
I was nodding along until the part about the part about how Le Pen’s re-industrialization platform makes no sense because she’s anti-Muslim immigrant. This is the first section where I couldn’t follow the argument. I feel nearly alone in not having any particularly strong opinions on Islam but my understanding is that Muslim immigrants in France are mostly either unemployed or in low skill work. “Reindustrialization” is a socialist academic concept that I don’t think makes much sense to talk about anyway, but if we accept the premise for a moment, then the people France would need to reindustrialize are generally highly trained workers with the skills needed to design and run factories. To be profitable in a country like France that has sky-high labour costs, industry would need to be highly automated in any case. So putting any issues of morality aside I don’t see any obvious contradiction between wanting reindustrialization and wanting to restrict certain types of immigrants.
The equivalent argument for Macron makes more sense, but again, takes as a premise that France would need to be protectionist within the EU, in order to …. uhm … ensure the supply of masks the next time some mad scientists unleash a virus into the wild? The reason the west had to import masks from Asia is not due to some generalized lack of industry but because masks don’t appear to work, so organic demand is low. In fact at the very start of the pandemic I remember reading about the only company in the USA that could manufacture masks. They were being asked by the government to scale up and they were refusing because they’d been through public health hysterias before, and had been burned before when sudden obsessions with masks evaporated overnight.
Overall this essay seems strongest when analysing the trends in the French electoral system, and weakest on economic issues. Perhaps not surprising given that despite the talk of faux-capitalism, the author is a French academic.

Dustshoe Richinrut
Dustshoe Richinrut
2 years ago

The young might soon end up a more intolerant, intransigent bloc than those voters over 65. After all, many of the young have indeed learned about the world from their parents and grandparents.
Those who are 70 now were young as recently as the disco-days of the 70s. They have been good and reasonable people in the main, I imagine. But France, I fear, is going to go the way of America in 2020. What happened in America, with the numerous violent outbursts on the streets two summers ago, is but a harbinger of the future. American culture is now carried around by the young French in their pocket.

France is too hoity-toity for its own good. It pretends to be smart and radical when it simply is not. When the Notre Dame cathedral was damaged by a fire, the country brought out its accordions and lamented the damage to the “soul” of France. That’s just Russian levels of feeling sorry for themselves: most secularists probably only mention the word “soul” once a year, at best. It was a hard job finding the word Catholic or even Christian in the Guardian’s account of the fire. But the word “gung-ho” did crop up, I recall reading, in one Guardian piece on the fire, in 2019.

Well, maybe France is being smart and radical when it no longer speaks the language of the very old (who have become wiser through experience).
Boris, on the back of party-gate, and his (sobering) trip to Kiev, at least gave out an Easter message. Just to utter a Christian message may seem like a tall order for even the leader of a country that is nominally Christian.
I don’t know about France. Do France’s presidents and prime ministers issue an Easter message? Was one issued by Macron?
Has one ever been issued by Macron?
They tweet, people do, about all sorts of jolly things. But civilisation is barely noticed in its bid to be acknowledged. Civilisation jumps up and down in vain.

polidori redux
polidori redux
2 years ago

 “France appears to be fairly united culturally, far less obsessed with Islam than expected…”
And yet this article is peppered with references to Islam. I wonder who the obsessed one is.

Arnold Grutt
Arnold Grutt
2 years ago

“Class contempt, which is real, does not have the intensity in France that it does in England”
In the UK, class-contempt is mainly the left hating those who do not belong to its university-spawned millennial movements. It is simply not true that the right foment class-hatred in Britain. This was shown by the Brexit vote, where the greatest contempt was levelled against the Leave contingent by exactly this nouveau-‘educated’ cohort. There was plentiful religious bigotry flying around from those people too, especially in Scotland.

Last edited 2 years ago by Arnold Grutt
Simon Diggins
Simon Diggins
2 years ago

Sack your picture editor, O UnHerd!

The photo is of President Macron with a British Para Veteran. It’s probably even been printed the wrong way round; most veterans wear lapel badges on the left – tho’ this gentleman may be different.

Laura Sharpe
Laura Sharpe
2 years ago

“we have no equivalent to the expression “chavs”. Yes you do! “Racaille”,“beauf”, for example.

Last edited 2 years ago by Laura Sharpe
Jorge Espinha
Jorge Espinha
2 years ago

It’s something I’ve been thinking for a while, once you retired you should lose your right to vote in national elections. Also there shouldn’t be any active politicians older than 65. (PS: I will 50 this year)