On April 23, 2017, the bureaucrats, businessmen, politicians, and academics who have made it their lives’ work to maintain the global liberal order heaved a massive sigh of relief. The election of Emmanuel Macron (a 39-year-old investment banker with a chin like Tom Hiddleston and a wife 24 years his senior) appeared to have stemmed the tide of right-wing populism that has threatened the global order which has defined the stability in the post-war era.
Those hopes are misplaced: good looks aside, Macron isn’t a panacea for right-wing populism; he’s an emergency intervention that is temporarily staving off a catastrophe. This time it’s going to work, but if underlying issues aren’t resolved there is no guarantee that the same treatment will be effective next time.
The malaise and discontent of France’s current political moment should come as no surprise. It has been festering for decades, flaring up when conditions were particularly aggravating, each episode increasing in severity. France’s present predicament is best understood by looking back to the mid-1970s when the well of easy GDP growth from post-war reconstruction ran dry and the French economy needed to find new ways to power its future.
1974 marked the end of the trente glorieuses or thirty glorious years, the postwar catch up period during which France rebuilt the infrastructure it had lost in the Second World War. Thirty years of post-war rebuilding provided a surfeit of low-hanging fruit for the French economy and a lack of obvious alternatives and rising energy prices thanks to the Arab Oil Embargo made it that much harder for France to switch from an economy based on infrastructure development to one centered on consumer spending and/or exports.
From the mid 1970s on France’s economy continued to slow and the working class reacted by electing politicians who said they would protect them. Their main agenda items included restricting immigration and writing France’s 3,400-page code du travail which made French full-time employees some of the best-protected workers in the world with short workweeks, long paid vacations, and strong protections against dismissal. Combined with generous unemployment and social benefits France became a place where those who had a foot on the economic ladder could depend on being insulated from the tremors of the global economy.
Over the years France has built a veritable Maginot Line to protect its full-time workers; and those protections work well for members of French society who are at least moderately established. However they don’t extend to every French worker. The young, minorities, immigrants, and exurban communities have been left exposed, missing out on most, if not all, of the code du travail’s protections. For these groups, unemployment and underemployment have increasingly become facts of life and those trends seem poised to continue. These constituencies have separate but overlapping issues and they are united in their lack of labor protections when compared to their counterparts in the full-time French economy. Now their lack of protection could undermine the stability of the French system and the previous model, focused only on the well-being of those with full-time employment, appears anachronistic and unsuited for the realities of the modern economy.
Decades of ineffectual shuffling between conservative and socialist governments have benefited certain segments of society, but when those left behind have raised their voices, their spokesmen have come from the peripheries of the French body politic. Characters like father-daughter team Marine and Jean Marie Le Pen on the right and Jean-Luc Melanchon on the left have given voice to all of these sentiments at one time or another. Enough ink has been spilled describing the horribleness of the Le Pen duo and how they have been successively vanquished when they have made it into presidential runoffs. What hasn’t been discussed enough is that over the last fifteen years the number of French voters willing to support candidates linked to the far right. In 2002 less than one in every five voters supported Jean Marie Le Pen in the presidential runoff. Fifteen years later his daughter Marine, who supports the same policies as her father while avoiding his most obviously hateful rhetoric, won the support of over a third of France’s voters.
Neither of the Le Pens are ever going to be president of France. We have Jacques Chirac and Emmanuel Macron to thank for that. However, the increasing popularity of the far-right in France should cause alarm to every stakeholder of the liberal order. The Le Pens might be finished but there are other, tidier members of the French far-right eager to take the stage. Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, an “utterly respectable” former mayor and current member of the French Assembly lacks the sordid collaborationist neo-fascist past of the National Front while sharing most (if not all) of their isolationist anti-EU anti-immigrant policies. He got 5% of the popular vote in the first round of the presidential election this year but when Marine Le Pen stated that Mr. Aignan would be her prime minister if she won she anointed him the new standard bearer of the far right. Now, he and his camp are laying the groundwork for him to add a few more layers of veneer to the acceptability Marine Le Pen has spent years building in hopes of launching a new presidential challenge in 2022.
The French presidential runoff of 2017 temporarily arrested the spread of right-wing populism in the Western World, but it didn’t put a stop to it. Now Macron needs to deliver. If his administration stumbles, it risks losing power to a cast of characters whose first major policy goal is to undo the greatest peace project in European history. As a society, we can’t afford to let that happen.