Emmanuel Macron was a largely unknown French apparatchik and then junior finance minister under Socialist President, François Hollande. He suddenly resigned in August 2016 in order to form a new party, En Marche, with the aim of fighting the Presidential election of 2017. At the time this seemed like a quixotic campaign against all the established parties by an almost unknown individual with no political base. There followed four totally unpredictable “accidents” which undermined each of the main parties and delivered the presidential election into Macron’s hands.
First, the main conservative party, Les Républicains, chose François Fillon as its candidate rather than the expected and more popular Alain Juppé, the mayor of Bordeaux. Second, and shortly afterwards, Fillon was charged with embezzlement and this largely destroyed his presidential campaign. (He was eventually, after appeal, sentenced to four years in prison, three of them suspended.) Third, the approval ratings of the Socialist President, François Hollande, fell to a record low of 14% and this, coupled with a very colourful personal life involving three different partners, led to his resignation from his nomination for a second term. Finally, Macron’s Front National, opponent, Marine Le Pen, was charged with misuse of public funds as a European MEP and forced to repay significant sums. Macron narrowly topped the poll in the first round with under 25% of the vote and was comfortably elected against Marine Le Pen in the second round. The momentum from this electoral success carried the party through to a parliamentary majority in the National Assembly elections of 2017.
Thus France had a President from a party formed less than a year before with an essentially unknown political position. This book, first published in French in 2019, is an attempt to set out the political philosophy of Marcron’s En Marche party, now renamed “Renaissance”. From this book it is a centre-left, mildly progressive party, somewhat akin to the SDP in its early days. Thus its policies and its stances on issues are all acceptable but generate little enthusiasm. They include: the importance of education for employment opportunities; the stultifying effect of the two-party dominance; both Left and Right accept monopolies for their selfish reasons; education is not an end in itself but needs to develop ideas and purposes; the huge American tech firms are dangerous and stifle innovation; positive discrimination is not “progressive”; the European Union has important roles, such as in migration, but its influence must be kept in check; the secular state is crucial to democracy; and that the party has caused the end of the Left-Right definition of politics. The authors claim that the summary of En Marche is that: “Progressivists must not create the policies of their majority but a majority from their policies.”
Perhaps inevitably, given the party’s lack of a more solid philosophical base, its electoral success has waned. Macron secured a second presidential term in 2022 but the party fell twenty-seven seats short of an overall majority in the Assembly elections of June 2022. Following the relative success of the far-right Rassemblement Nationale (RN) at the 2024 European elections, Macron called early legislative elections. Eventually, through typically French inter-party haggling, the FN was kept in third place but the three main party groups each had significant numbers and France has to find a compromise to enable a government to be formed.
Macron is constitutionally barred from standing for a third presidential term in 2027 and it remains to be seen whether “Macronisme” without Macron can survive. This book is a pleasant read and is a brave attempt to put together the basis for an attractive manifesto but the beginning of the revival of the traditional parties suggests that the party has difficult task ahead.
The New Progressivism - A Grassroots Alternstive to the Populism of Our Times, by David Amiel and Ismaël Emelien, pub. Polity, 2020, ISBN 978-1-5095414-2-3
