It has now been eight years since a leader came to power for which Western democracy had little precedent. Before winning the presidency, he had never been elected to public office. Rather, he had immersed himself in the business world, where he single-mindedly focused on making money. Despite his lack of political experience, he aroused great enthusiasm in an electorate exasperated with politics as usual. Not only did he defy the pundits who predicted his defeat, but he completely upended the existing political system. Rather than yield to the existing party structure, he remade it in his own image. We need to think seriously about what this leader has meant for contemporary politics—and how he may resemble Donald Trump.
French president Emmanuel Macron is not typically seen as having much in common with his American counterpart. When Macron was first elected in 2017, he was seen as the antidote to the primal politics of resentment that Trump—first elected less than a year earlier—had pioneered. Where Trump was old, simplistic, visceral, and fearmongering, Macron was young, eloquent, cerebral, and optimistic. Above all, where Trump brushed aside the rule of law and liberal democracy as so many obstacles to his agenda, Macron seemed the perfect incarnation of a modern liberal, blending elements of progressivism and classical liberalism. He was outspoken in recognizing France’s multicultural identity, confident that properly administered capitalism could unleash entrepreneurial energies that would benefit the entire country, and committed to upholding the institutions that, domestically and internationally, populists like Trump were eager to disrupt. To many American progressives, Macron’s victory in 2017 felt like the ill-fated Hillary Clinton campaign done right.
This image of Macron now seems like a distant memory. Though it is hardly unusual for a democratically elected leader to approach the end of a second term with considerable wear-and-tear, Macron has landed France in a political crisis of a scale that it has not experienced in decades. On Monday, September 8, François Bayrou, Macron’s prime minister, resigned after he submitted his debt-reduction policy to a confidence vote in parliament and lost. This was the first time a government had ever collapsed under such circumstances.
Nine months earlier, Bayrou’s predecessor, Michel Barnier, also resigned following a parliamentary-initiated confidence vote—the first time this had happened since 1962. Sébastien Lecornu, a loyalist whom Macron appointed prime minister following Bayrou’s debacle, is now the fifth person to occupy the position since early 2024. Macron’s core problem is that he lacks a functioning majority in parliament and opposition parties have little incentive to cooperate. The far left and far right increasingly resemble vultures circling a wounded animal. Both are calling for new elections and even demanding Macron’s resignation. Anyone familiar with France’s current constitution—the Fifth Republic—knows that it created a strong presidential system precisely to avert this kind of instability. Yet the deeper problem lies less in the institution than the president himself. The sad state of French politics is, in many respects, a direct consequence of Macron’s choice to downplay democratic accountability in favor of his personal and political priorities.
“Illiberal democracy has a counterpart that simultaneously inverts and resembles it.”
Some years ago, the term “illiberal democracy” was coined to describe a kind of regime and ideology that invokes popular support to justify policies that undermine the principles of classical liberalism, such as the rule of law and individual rights. Trump’s populist politics are often considered a textbook case of illiberal democracy. The French political philosopher Marcel Gauchet has recently proposed that illiberal democracy has a counterpart that simultaneously inverts and resembles it: undemocratic liberalism.
This phrase perfectly captures the historical and political significance of Macron’s presidency. He was elected to exorcise the dark spirits of populism and the threat to liberal values that its brand of democratic politics embodied. But once in power, Macron pursued a form of liberalism premised on profound contempt for democratic practice. Macron and Trump differ in many ways, but both instantiate the split between liberalism and democracy.
Macron’s awkward relationship with democracy is the immediate backdrop to France’s current crisis. Last June, after the right-populist National Rally won an impressive but largely inconsequential victory in elections for the European Parliament, Macron surprised France and mystified his supporters by calling snap parliamentary elections. Not only is such a move relatively rare in French politics (it had last occurred in 1997), but Macron’s coalition, at the time, had a plurality of seats in parliament and scheduled elections were three years away.
Though his decision to call new elections was entirely personal and made with almost no consultation, the emerging consensus is that Macron chafed at the prospect of years of political trench warfare with his rivals and decided to roll the dice.
Macron’s wager failed spectacularly. Not only did his centrist alliance lose seats, making the elections a net loss for the president, but the country found itself in an intractable political conundrum. Whereas France until 2017 had traditionally split between left and right, it now found itself divided into three separate camps: a left, a center, and a populist right.
“He acted as if elections had no consequences.”
Though Macron had no one to blame for the outcome but himself, he acted as if elections had no consequences. Despite the three-way split, the New Popular Front—an uneasy coalition of leftist parties, including the center-left Socialist Party and rabble-rousing Unbowed France, two parties always at loggerheads except during elections—eked out a slender plurality. When no party has an outright majority, it is standard practice for the president to ask a member of the political force with a plurality to try to form a cabinet. And it is understood that the president should name as prime minister a member of the “victorious” party even if they belong to the opposition. The former happened in 1988 and again in 2022, following Macron’s reelection; the latter, which the French call “cohabitation” (because it involves a president and prime minister of different parties) in 1986, 1993, and 1997.
After some squabbling, the left eventually agreed on a candidate for prime minister—an obscure civil servant working for the Paris municipal government named Lucie Castets. Had Macron nominated her, her government would most likely have quickly succumbed to a confidence vote. This would have allowed him to then name someone closer to his own political sensibility, while credibly asserting that he had given the winning party a chance. Instead, Macron refused to consider her, while berating parliament for being incapable of cooperating and forming coalitions, despite the fact that the muddle was entirely of his own making.
In September, Macron finally announced his choice for prime minister: Michel Barnier, a conservative politician best known as the official in charge of negotiating Brexit on behalf of the European Union. Yet though Barnier was considered politically competent and a skilled negotiator, there was no hiding the fact that he hailed from Les Républicains, the mainstream conservative party. In the elections, the Républicains had come in a distant fourth place. Though Macron no doubt thought that Barnier might be able to appeal to the parliament’s central column, his nomination was a clear affront to the parties on the left and the right that had received considerably more electoral support than Barnier’s movement. Barnier began his hapless premiership with both the left and far right declaring that his nomination proved the president’s contempt for the French people.
If Macron selected Barnier, it was most likely because he could not tolerate the idea of a prime minister who might threaten his record. One of the few tangible achievements of Macron’s second term was a reform that raised the retirement age for most working people, which he considered essential to keeping the retirement system financially viable. Both the left and the populist right were committed to repealing this reform, and Macron insisted on a prime minister whom he could trust to protect it.
At the same time, it had become apparent that France’s public finances were in a disastrous state. Public debt was over 6 percent of GDP and Moody’s had downgraded France’s credit rating. Though many Western countries spent their way out of the Covid crisis, the situation was also due in part to the tax cuts and other financial advantages that Macron had given to business. To make matters worse, the first issue that Barnier’s minority government had to grapple with was the national budget. Barnier made clear that significant cuts were critical. Macron’s playbook was clear. To preserve his retirement age reform and ensure an austerity budget, he had to disregard populist anger expressed on the right as well as the left and name a government loyal to his agenda, regardless of whether voters had repudiated it.
Overcoming their differences, the opposition taught Macron a lesson in democratic politics—however dysfunctional—by voting down Barnier’s government last December. Yet even the first successful no-confidence vote in 62 years was insufficient to make the president a student of popular sovereignty. Macron’s reflex was to choose as his next prime minister a die-hard loyalist: his defense minister, Sébastien Lecornu. Yet Macron’s intentions were frustrated by a figure who shared his undemocratic proclivities. François Bayrou, an older politician who had run for president three times and who, as the leader of a dwindling centrist party, had been a forerunner of sorts to Macron, essentially blackmailed the president into naming him by threatening to bolt and join the opposition. Supported neither by voters nor by Macron, Bayrou took the new cabinet’s helm.
A bit like Rudy Giuliani, Bayrou was a once serious political figure who evolved less into an elder statesman than a self-caricature. Having forced Macron to name him, he seemed lost about what to do next. He acknowledged the “Himalayan” obstacles that public finances represented, while trying to peel off the socialists from the left coalition by suggesting a willingness to renegotiate the retirement age reform. But his premiership was marked by blunders that, were it not for the country’s perilous situation, might even elicit indulgent nostalgia for a simpler era of political corruption and self-absorption. While serving as prime minister, Bayrou insisted on remaining the mayor of Pau, the provincial town near the Spanish border, a position he has held for decades. After Mayotte was hit by a cyclone in December, Bayrou opted, rather than visiting the devastated overseas territory, to use an official plane to fly to Pau for a few hours to preside at a town council meeting.
By the summer, however, Bayrou realized that he, too, would founder on the reef of public finances. He proposed a draconian budget that weighed heavily on working people, notably by eliminating two one-day holidays. But because this budget had no broad support in parliament, Bayrou realized that it would never pass and that he was headed for the same fate as Barnier. Rather than let his budget trigger a no-confidence vote against him, Bayrou decided to preempt an attempt to remove him. He invoked a never-before-used constitutional provision that allows a prime minister to request a confidence vote on a general policy statement. Knowing he would be kicked out anyway, he essentially decided to go out in style, as a champion of fiscal responsibility rejected by a chamber of irresponsible politicians. Bayrou’s single-minded and solitary decision to fall on his own sword echoed Macron’s decision to call snap elections nine months earlier. Not only did both decisions bring needless political uncertainty, but each testified to their disdain for the democratic game: Macron because he ignored the elections’ results, Bayrou because of his inability to cooperate with other political parties. Even so, both presented themselves as noble champions of a reform, spurned by irresponsible populists.
In many ways, plowing forward with liberal reforms while showing contempt for democracy has been the leitmotif of Macron’s presidency. In his first term, his decision to impose a carbon tax triggered a popular uprising that became known as the Yellow Vest movement. The rebellion was spearheaded by working- and middle-class populations, often living on the outskirts of urban areas, whose family budgets were highly sensitive to the price of gas. It blossomed into a broader revolt against a president seen as out of touch with ordinary people. Acknowledging the problem, Macron cynically called for a grand débat, a kind of national town hall, in which citizens were asked to bare their souls in “notebooks of grievances,” a term that cynically appropriated the names of the documents that inspired the French Revolution. Years later, the endless stream of words in which people expressed their frustrations remained largely unread and ignored, relegated to digital archives (for instance, here) and obscure government reports.
Macron’s retirement age reform, in which the retirement age was raised for most workers from 62 to 64, was also undertaken with minimal popular support. It was one of the few measures he firmly committed to in his 2022 reelection campaign. Even presidential elections—which, under the Fifth Republic, are intended to be the decisive moment of popular sovereignty in the political cycle—have become, under Macron, strangely empty events. The fact that Macron has been (in 2017 and 2022) the only candidate in a position to stand in the way of Marine Le Pen and the National Rally has meant that he has won lopsided majorities with virtually no mandate—other than a commitment to reject the hate, resentment, and “Little France” proclivities he attributes to the Le Pen’s party. For his retirement reform, Macron argued that the reform was necessary to the financial viability of the retirement system. He then essentially bound himself, Ulysses-like, for an entire political season, to ensure that he would not yield to the siren song of popular outrage. Lacking a majority (but still enjoying a decent plurality) in parliament, Macron did not even risk a parliamentary vote on the signature reform of his presidency (the French constitution allows a government to promulgate a law by decree if the parliament is unable to vote it down with a no confidence motion).
A dominant interpretation of Macron’s presidency is that he was elected to halt the advance of the far right, but that he has failed, his noble ventures in foreign policy notwithstanding. This perspective misses the deeper complicity between Macron and the politics he opposes. For a long time, the politics of Western countries were a blend of democracy—that is, a government that recognizes the people as sovereign—and liberalism—in other words, a series of political and economic freedoms that are ratified by law (and protected against popular whims).
Progressives and their champions in the media regularly bemoan the way that figures like Trump invoke democratic mandates to undermine the liberal underpinnings of American society. What progressives ignore is the way in which a parallel split has occurred on the opposing side. The Macronian proposition is that to defend society’s liberal foundations, repudiating democracy itself is at times necessary. This is what Macron’s strange moment at the forefront of French politics has demonstrated.
In many ways, the Democratic Party and American progressives endorse a similar formula. Populists have indeed cut at the bond between democracy and liberalism, but their opponents have done the same. Rather than tout figures like Macron as heroic opponents of populism, it would be more appropriate to recognize them as its mirror image. For Macron and his fellow anti-populists, liberalism is too important to be left to democracy.