Florence Lehericy is a nurse, but she is now starting a new career as a parliamentary deputy for Calvados, in northern France. Jean-Marie Fiévet, a fire fighter, is joining her from a constituency in Deux Sèvres in the west.
Both are political novices. They belong to La République en Marche!, the movement behind President Emmanuel Macron, who last month also won his first-ever election—and duly took control of the Elysée Palace. Welcome to the revolution.
Across France people have risen up against a political class that failed them.
Macron offers a fresh answer to the popular discontent that has swept through Western democracies. He promises a new politics that ditches divisions between left and right. He wants to restore dynamism and self-belief to France and, with Germany’s help, to the European Union. He is being watched from abroad by politicians who, in their own countries, cannot seem to make themselves heard above the din.
For his revolution to succeed, he needs to have good ideas and the ability to carry them through. Does he?
Macron is the right man at the right time. Voters tired of France’s stale politics wanted an outsider. Although he comes from the establishment—he is a graduate of an elite college, an ex-banker and served as economy minister under his predecessor, President François Hollande—Macron has never been a party man. He has designed LRM to act as a break with the past. Half of its candidates are new to politics, and half are women. It has campaigned against corruption. In the outgoing assembly the most common age is between 60 and 70, whereas the average age of LRM’s novices is 43.
Whereas most populists cleave to right or left, the Macron revolution is to the center. He steals policies without prejudice—from the right a desire to free markets and businesses to create jobs and wealth, and from the left a belief in the role of government to shape, direct and protect. In the battle between open and closed, Macron is broadly for open in both trade and immigration. In French terms, he is an economic liberal.
Somehow Macron has convinced the French that progress is possible. He has hit back against populist taunts that free markets are a concession to the bankers and the globalists with refreshing patriotism—whether by crushing the hand of President Donald Trump or by restoring pomp to the presidency. Against warnings about immigrants and foreign competition, he asserts that both will invigorate France, not enfeeble it. To Euroskeptics who accuse Brussels of sucking the life out of the nation, he insists that, no, the EU magnifies French power.
Good ideas are not enough, of course. Macron also must break the habit of 30 years in which France’s reforms have been blocked by the hard left. Success rests on early, visible progress in two areas: employment and relations with Germany.
French unemployment is double what it is in Germany. For the under-25s, it is stuck above 20 percent. Macron wants to lower employment taxes and to make workplace bargaining more flexible.
Success in the labor market would help him win over Germany, which has lost faith in France’s ability to keep up. So will getting a grip on France’s public spending and its army of bureaucrats. Germany, often standoffish, should give Macron the benefit of the doubt. He is the best, and possibly last, chance to create the impetus for the euro zone to shore up the structure of the single currency.
A strong EU economy will create jobs—and, if he is not to jeopardize that, he needs to go easy on the budget cuts. As the hapless Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain can attest, firm control of the National Assembly will cement his good fortune.
The French president is indeed powerful—but in recent years the problem has been the weakness of the Elysée, not its dominance. The turnout was low, but it has been falling for years and is not much lower than in America or Canada. The unions speak for only the 8% of workers who are their members. That is no mandate. It is what ordinary citizens like Lehericy and Fiévet have been elected to sweep away.
© 2017 Economist Newspaper Ltd., London (June 17). All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
Image credits: Stephen Crowley/The New York Times