President
Emmanuel Macron of France is liberalism’s new poster boy. Hailed as the
answer to Europe’s populist tide, he has brought a buzz back into
French diplomacy by facing down President Trump and President Vladimir
Putin of Russia. “The Macron method,” a leading European think tank gushed recently, is the new Third Way, threading the needle between technocracy and populism.
At home in France, it’s a very different story. A recent poll found
that Mr. Macron’s popularity fell by 14 points in August, after a fall
of 10 points in July. Only 40 percent of respondents said they were
satisfied with the president’s performance.
To be fair, Mr. Macron never had much popular support to begin with. In the first round
of the presidential election in April, when the vote was split among
four main contenders, he won just under 24 percent. (By comparison,
François Hollande received 28 percent of the vote in the first round in
2012. Nicolas Sarkozy won 31 percent in 2007.) Mr. Macron won the second
round handily, but only because he was the lesser-evil candidate in the
runoff — his competitor was Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right
populist National Front party.
Electoral
arithmetic explains only so much. Mr. Macron’s popularity suffers from
something more fundamental: Macronism. His entire political project has
been far too focused on his personality. Much of his appeal has come
from his youth, his dynamism, his good looks and his oratorical skills.
This hyper-personalized approach always carried the risk that once his
charm wore off, there would be nothing left for his supporters to like,
which is exactly what is happening.
Since
taking office, Mr. Macron has put off many people by trying to
recapture the grandeur of the presidency. In a phrase that may stick to
him for the rest of his time in office, he said he wanted to make the
presidency more “Jupiterian,” comparing himself with the powerful Roman
god Jupiter, who ruled the skies. When he brought the Senate and
Parliament together at the Versailles palace and spoke to them about his ambitions for the presidency, many in France bristled at the monarchical overtones.This arrogant attitude about power has destroyed the anti-establishment,
upstart image that Mr. Macron cultivated during the campaign. The
post-ideological platform on which he ran is starting to reveal itself
for what it really is: an emptiness at the heart of his political
project.
Mr.
Macron’s two big policy goals are fixing the economy and fixing Europe.
He has gone so far as to describe his economic policies as a “Copernican revolution,”
but he is merely pushing France a little farther down the road of labor
market deregulation and fiscal austerity, a path well trodden by other
countries.
The
new president says he is determined to make France a “start-up nation,”
borrowing the vapid parlance of Silicon Valley. This has won him the
support of venture capitalists and tech billionaires but has yet to
convince the wider French public. Silicon Valley’s libertarian social
contract, with its cavalier attitude toward inequality, sits uneasily
with a population raised on France’s postwar social-democratic
traditions.
His
main goal is to reduce France’s unemployment rate, which at around 10
percent remains stubbornly high. He hopes to do this by reforming the labor code. One of the new measures
is a cap on the damages that courts can award workers claiming wrongful
dismissal, a move intended to give employers more confidence in hiring.
Another would allow companies with fewer than 50 employees to negotiate
contracts without having to go through trade unions. The French far
left has called this a “social coup d’état,” but the president has been careful not to give in entirely to the business lobby.
What
really matters is the endpoint. Any sustained fall in unemployment in
France would be welcome, but the experiences of other countries suggest
it comes at the cost of new kinds of inequality. In Germany, labor
market reforms have led to a proliferation of “mini-jobs,” part-time
work that is lightly regulated
and has taken the place of full-time jobs in some sectors. In Britain’s
highly deregulated labor market, record employment levels exist
alongside low productivity, stagnating wages and a proliferation of short-term contracts. Is this the future France wants?
Not
since the economic boom of the 1950s and ’60s has capitalism in Europe
been dynamic enough to combine high levels of employment with long-term
material gains for the masses. Today, choices involve painful
trade-offs. Mr. Macron’s economic policies favor employers over workers
and chip away at what remains of the French welfare state.
But
fearful of giving his program any actual political content, the
president wraps up his reforms in the European flag. He tells French
voters that only if they make these sacrifices at home, the rest of the
European Union — especially Germany — will take them seriously and give
France a better deal.
Mr.
Macron’s European plans include a common budget and finance minister
for the eurozone. His ideas have received warm words from Berlin, and
there are signs that such a deal could be possible after Germany has its
federal elections on Sept. 25. But if Chancellor Angela Merkel wins,
her mandate will not be for a European fiscal union where German tax
revenues are placed in a common European pot. She has given her support
to only a very modest version of what Mr. Macron is proposing. The
payoff for all of France’s sacrifice at home will be small — and the
president will surely be no more popular than he is now.
Mr.
Macron’s success in June’s presidential election has shaken up the
moribund political landscape in a deep and lasting way. For that, he
deserves thanks. But as a political project, Macronism is little more
than rhetoric and hubris, backed up with conventional neoliberal
policies. For now, Mr. Macron is still the darling of the global liberal
elite, but his growing unpopularity gives us a better picture of what
he has to offer.
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