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April 25, 2022 - 2:05pm
Paris
French political candidates love writing (or at least publishing) books. In a country where literature commands immense prestige, campaign books send important messages. In November 2016, some five months before the 2017 election, Macron published Revolution which was a surprising name for a centrist candidate.
But most importantly, his campaign had relied heavily on the need for “optimism.” In a country already rocked by profound identity crisis, Macron ran what Michel Houellebecq then described as a “sort of group therapy to convert the French to optimism.”
Macron’s election in 2017 felt like a landmark event in French politics. There was an energy and drive behind the newly-elected president that felt genuinely different. “I want us to rediscover optimism, to rediscover the ‘spirit of conquest,’” Macron stated, even making this renewed optimism one of his main promises that night. “The World and Europe need a France that knows how to invent the future.”
Fast forward five years later to Macron’s rally last night and the atmosphere was decidedly flatter — despite the DJ’s best attempts. There was no ‘spirit of conquest’ and none of the Obama-style rhetoric that characterised his 2017 campaign. In fact, the victory speech in front of the Eiffel Tower was mostly littered with cliché buzzwords (including a commitment to a fuzzy “new method”).
Macron added that the results “oblige” him to lead, but even his supporters on the Champ de Mars last night would have been hard-pressed to list the policies they were looking forward to ahead of his second term. The only part of his platform that caught the eye in the campaign was his very unpopular promise to increase France’s legal retirement age from 62 to 65, and even then Macron signalled he would be ready to water it down to woo Left-wing voters.
Macron’s transformation from the energetic candidate who wanted to make France a “start-up nation” to safe pair of hands, shows in the polls. According to the pollster Ipsos, only 10% and 16% respectively explained their Macron ballot by his platform or his desire to “to really change things”, the lowest figures among all major candidates by a considerable margin. On the flip side 65% and 71% of them cited his capacity to deal with major crises and his “presidential stature” as his strongest assets, leaps ahead of any other candidate
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SubscribeOne of Macron’s problems is that he doesn’t know how to translate ideas into actual workable policies. Astonishingly, one of the selling points listed in his second round blurb was his lack of political experience which was contrasted with Le Pen’s long career in a dynasty of politicians. On the contrary this lack of experience (for the MPs of his party EM as well as himself) is a major handicap – one of the reasons he is repeatedly described as ‘hors sol’ – a Johnny head in the air.