Ronald Tiersky
June 15, 2017
Macron and France: finally time for a little optimism
Some thoughts on the second round of the French parliamentary elections this coming Sunday, June 18.
1. Newly-elected President Emanuel Macron may be a historic leader—for France and thus for Europe.
2. Macron’s triumphant election four weeks ago and his new party’s big victory in the first round of parliamentary elections last Sunday have exploded France’s history-soaked war between la gauche et la droite. The rigidities of this system were based on ideological warfare traceable, amazingly, to conflict about whether the French Revolution was a good thing or not.
3. Excepting a few tumultuous periods, the typical fruit of French party politics has been failure. In particular, the story of French governments for the last twenty years is a pitiful saga of time lost. The presidencies of Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande have been lamentable.
4. The most important fact in the first round of the presidential election was not that the populist National Front’s Marine Le Pen made it into the second round against Macron. It was that she almost didn’t despite having led the pack for a year. She finished only a few points behind Macron, true enough, but also—generally overlooked—only a few points ahead of the third and fourth place finishers, François Fillon and Jean-Luc Melenchon.
The National Front then collapsed last Sunday. The second round will leave the FN with only a few deputies. The great fear of French populism was overcooked.
5. Macron’s new party, La République en Marche (The Republic on the Move) is projected to win 390-450 of 577 parliamentary seats, perhaps an unprecedented 70% absolute majority. Even if he loses some deputies on specific legislation Macron will be able to implement a major reform program. He’ll need to treat his majority with respect and the opposition with magnanimity.
6. Macron’s first priority has to be creating jobs. France has had a ten percent unemployment rate for three decades, it’s not a problem of the past few years. And for years unemployment has been a soul-crushing 25% among young people, those 16-34 years old. The lack of economic opportunity has profoundly demoralized the country’s sense that the future might be better than the past.
7. Significant job creation, turning pessimism into optimism, requires significantly increased economic growth. Macron’s levers will be the force of his personality and government policy—lowering taxes and reducing the heavily regulated labor code’s protection of existing jobs. Both will attract more business investment, which will mean more entry points to permanent, well-paid jobs for those starting out. Heavily protecting existing jobs used to be a good thing for all but in a stagnant economy it means shunting off young people to a career of temporary jobs.
8. Reducing job protections means that, as before, the fiercest opposition to Macron’s legislation will be in the streets, classic French labor union and student demonstrations. Previous presidents caved. Macron’s comfortable majority and his evident tenaciousness are good signs.
9. Regarding the European Union and Europe’s role in the world order: what’s coming now is renewal of the traditional French-German alliance at the core of European integration, the source of the E.U.’s political propulsive force. (Brexit, Britain’s departure from the EU, will de-complicate things, although Macron is saying it’s not too late for the U.K. to turn around.)
10. German chancellor Angela Merkel has long needed a politically strong, intellectually and morally determined French partner. Now she will have one. Unless Merkel is unexpectedly defeated in September German elections, already one can imagine the high moments of European self-assertion: de Gaulle and German chancellor Konrad Adenauer in the1960s, François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl in the 1980s. Even if Merkel is defeated, a Social Democrat chancellor will have the same incentives.
11. This will be a “European Europe,” no longer a self-sabotaging Europe wrapped in American foreign and economic policy considerations. A Europe not against the U.S. but for Europe in its own interest, a Gaullist view of European-American relations. The result will be a stronger European ally for the U.S. though the change may have to be forced on Washington’s reflexively hegemonic mindset.
12. If this is the direction of events, American policy-makers will have to get accustomed to more determined European leadership emancipated from a policy of convenient subservience. The symbol was Macron’s arm-wrestling handshake with President Donald Trump in Brussels, in which the smaller French president surprised and dominated the burly American (whose claim to fame was to push aside the Montenegrin president to get to the front of a NATO photo-op. A small thing, Macron said, but he had planned it. A kind of declaration of independence. Maybe the beginning of a good war without bloodshed.
