Davos Man shouldn’t get too cocky about Macron’s latest victory
The 934,865,772nd hot take on the French election
From circa 1980 to 2016, life was good for those who were (a) affluent and (b) more or less socially liberal and fiscally conservative. If you were part of the Gauche caviar, you might feel a little uneasy about some of the results of the 1980s free-market revolution. If you were a moneyed conservative, you might lament the effects of the seemingly never-ending cultural revolution that kicked off in the late 1960s. But, either way, a world where the Foucauldian Left had won the culture war and the Freidmanite Right had won the economic argument suited you just fine.
Of course, depending on your location on the political spectrum, you would expect the party you voted for to grumble a bit come election time about the disappearance of either the post-war Keynesian settlement or the social conservatism of the 1950s. But pretty much everyone involved in the process understood this harrumphing was largely performative and that gay marriage, deregulated markets and ambitious decarbonisation initiatives were here to stay.
Until, of course, neoliberalism’s 9/11 happened: the incomprehensible catastrophes of Brexit then Trump.
The peasants are no longer revolting?
It’s difficult to overestimate the psychological impact that the actions of working and middle class British and American voters had on the ruling class in 2016. Many of them remain enraged to this day by the actions of the spitefully stupid lower orders.
I mean, sure, the bottom 80 per cent of society had, at best, been treading water for decades while the top quintile of the income distribution had been making out like bandits. But the ‘left behind’ types had cheap Chinese-made consumer goods, freely available internet porn and affordably priced alcohol/opioids/meth to amuse themselves with, didn’t they? Why would they have any reason to get so worked up about never having their wishes on trivial issues such as immigration, multiculturalism, le wokisme, wealth distribution, taxation, globalisation and pointless wars respected by their elected officials?
The election of Emmanuel Macron in mid-2017 reassured ‘the cathedral’ (i.e. the ruling elites) that perhaps the world wasn’t going mad and that the forces of neoliberalism could regroup and swiftly put down the unseemly helot revolt spreading across the Western world. The election of an erstwhile investment banker reassured those who stalk the corridors of power that programming was finally returning to normal.
Many of the countless hot takes about Macron’s recent re-election rehearse the same arguments that the triumphalist 2017 think pieces did: being a competent administrator means pursuing neoliberal reforms (deregulating the labour market, cutting corporate tax rates, championing globalisation and reining in an overly generous welfare state). Reassuringly, a majority of voters will usually make the sensible choice to put their fate in the hands of a competent administrator rather than engaging in self-harm by voting for an economically illiterate populist.
In Western Europe, patriotism isn’t just for middle-aged, laid-off factory workers
59-41 or 33-77?
French presidential elections involve two rounds of voting. Most commentators have chosen to focus on the second round, where Macron got a little less than 59 per cent of the vote and Le Pen (“the French Trump”) got a little more than 41%. Even if they focus solely on the second-round results, elites have some cause for concern. In 2017, three in ten French voters backed Le Pen. In 2022, four in ten did. If this trend continues, Le Pen – or a Le Penesque candidate – wins in 2027.
Widespread voter apathy and a low turnout suggest Macron is far from being the Gallic Obama his boosters wish him to be. It’s also worth noting it was older French voters – many of whom did well for themselves during the Trent Glorieuses and few of whom have to worry about navigating a more deregulated labour market, delaying their retirement or finding the money to buy a home – who were the most enthusiastic Macronists. As even The Economist felt compelled to point out:
Had only the ballots of those under 60 been counted in the first round on April 10th, Mr Macron would have come third—leaving France to pick between extremists of the left and right in the run-off a fortnight later. Across Europe, many mainstream leaders owe their jobs to a grey-haired (and no-haired-at-all) electoral bulwark loyally trudging to the polls. They will not be around forever. Either today’s youngsters will have to mellow into the middle ground as they age, or Europe will drift away from the predictable centrism it has comfortably espoused for decades.
The situation is even more dire than readers of The Economist might imagine. In the first round, Macron and Valérie Pécresse, the two candidates championing “predictable centrism”, got only a third of the vote. Far Left and Far Right candidates got the other two-thirds.
Centrists, especially those eager for governments to turn the immigration spigot on and get the cheap and compliant labour flowing again now the Covid hysteria is dying down, will also be disturbed to learn that Macron and Pécresse probably would have got even fewer votes if they hadn’t spent a lot of time trying to outflank Le Pen and Zemmour on the right on immigration and their opposition to ‘Islamo-leftism’.
And those in the anglosphere excited at the prospect of woke twentysomethings imposing their successor ideology ever more relentlessly as they increasingly displace old-school liberals might want to give some thought to what is likely to happen in Europe when right-wing young ‘uns start displacing old-school conservatives as they make their own long march through the institutions.
Younger Europeans are, compared to their Les Anglo-Saxons counterparts, shockingly unwoke. And it’s not just those backward Visegrad ethnonationalists who aren’t keen on multiculturalism. As Ed West has pointed out, four in ten French voters in the 25-34 age group backed either Le Pen or Zemmour. Far Right parties in nations such as Spain and Italy also get plenty of support from those still on the right side of 40. As West notes, supporting right-wing populists is déclassé in the anglosphere and hence “cringeworthy and low status”. It’s a very different story in France, Spain and Italy, where either a sizeable minority or a clear majority of those in their twenties and thirties are openly hostile to mass immigration.
Après Macron, le déluge
After the profoundly disorientating shock of 2016, the last half-decade has been kind to ruling elites. There have been irritants, like Victor Orbán continuing to win elections. But after the defeat of Corbyn and Trump in 2019, it must have seemed like the voters had belatedly awoken from their fever dream. Arguably, Bill Shorten losing the unlosable election that same year provided further proof that straying even slightly from neoliberal economic orthodoxy would prove politically disastrous.
But I’m not sure the fragile Pax Neoliberalism will hold. Democrats are likely to receive a vicious shanking in the mid-term elections in November. If there’s a Biden-Trump rematch, or a Harris-Trump contest, in 2024, Orange Hitler almost certainly wins. Given policymakers now have little choice other than to jack up interest rates to fight inflation, a recession is an imminent possibility. And, after spending up big during the GFC and Covid lockdowns, governments will be constrained in what they can do to ease any economic pain coming down the pike. Bad economic times are likely to drive further political polarisation in societies that are already hyperpolarised.
Barring exceptional events, France won’t be governed by a populist for at least five years. But putatively moderate leaders such as Macron may soon be the exception rather than the norm. As Yanis Varoufakis, a former finance minister of Greece, has observed (paywalled):
The young, the precariat and, increasingly, the more insecure segments of the proletariat refuse to assess presidential candidates in terms of the left-right divide. They see a France ruled by an alien world of money that has not just left them behind but is actively holding them there. In their eyes, Macron embodies that world. For them, the new political divide is between respectable politicians promising to maintain this world and mavericks vowing to demolish it… Macron succeeded in presenting himself as the epitome of the efficient, competent administrator who understood the system and could manage it better. But that does not impress voters who want the system blown up, not better managed.
Academic, business, media and political elites are sleeping on a volcano. They might want to give some thought to why so many working-age voters are so agitated and how future elections are likely to turn out if their grievances aren’t addressed.
Side note: Michel Houellebecq’s latest book, Anéantir (Destroy), is set during the 2027 presidential election campaign in a France where "the gap between the ruling classes and the populace has reached unprecedented levels". His previous one, Soumission (Submission), revolved around the consequences of France’s centre-left and centre-right parties allying with a Muslim party to defeat Marine Le Pen in the 2022 presidential election.