Has France’s Anti-Trump Taken A Trumpian Turn?

Emmanuel Macron’s political career has been defined by being whoever people want him to be. He was the banker who was also a card carrying member of the French Socialist Party, the consummate political insider who ran an insurgent campaign for the French Presidency. When he first took office in 2017, Macron had a vision of enacting nothing less than a political revolution, as he titled the book he released on the eve of his election. One had to admire the audacity of this coming from a man who had served in a high Cabinet position of the previous President Francois Hollande, who was leaving office with single digit approval ratings. Macron’s opponent in the election, Marine Le Pen of the far right Front Nationale, was often described as France’s Trump. Macron proved far more up to this challenge than Hillary Clinton, however- in the second and decisive round of the election, he defeated Le Pen by a whopping 66 percent to 33 percent. However, upon taking office, Macron has struggled to live up to the hopes that were placed in him both at home and abroad, most notably the “Yellow Vest” protest movement that rocked France beginning in the fall of 2018. In order to deal with the mounting difficulties facing his Presidency, Macron has had to pull out all of the stops, including, arguably, co-opting the populist approach that has defined his rival at home and his counterpart in the White House.

As his Presidency began, Emmanuel Macron almost immediately set himself the loftiest possible standard for leadership. Macron almost immediately drew raised eyebrows when he invoked “Jupiter” as a model for how he would lead France, creating an air of perceived arrogance that became even more pronounced when he opined that his thoughts were “too complex” to be accurately reflected by journalists. Within months of taking office, his approval ratings began to drop, prompting one of his rivals, the left-wing firebrand Jean-Luc Melenchon, to quip that if Macron fancied himself King of France, he should take care not to end up like Louis XVI. Melenchon’s words would prove more prophetic than perhaps even he knew at the time.

Macron would soon find himself facing the most significant social upheaval France had known since May of 1968. The Yellow Vest movement began on social media but soon spread like wildfire to the streets of Paris, attacking banks, government buildings and other symbols of the political and economic establishment. The movement incorporated seemingly every frustration and grievance of the French people, with a released manifesto calling for measures by turns left-wing (renationalization of privatized state property, breaking up monopolies, an end to the “Françafrique” neo-colonial policy) and right-wing (limiting individual tax rates). Though the movement was not explicitly anti-immigrant, it did call for greater integration of immigrants into French culture as well as “abolishing the causes of forced migration.” Nevertheless, with his capital being trashed on a weekly basis and Macron’s approval rating in the teens, talk began to stir of whether or not he might have to resign.

Those who spoke that way should have known that “Jupiter’ would not stand aside so easily. Since last fall, Macron has rallied with a two-pronged counter-attack. The first was his “great debates.” These were a series of thousands of town hall meetings organized by the government where citizens could air their grievances on topics ranging from inequality or privatization to the cost of state dinners. By holding these debates, combined with suspending the highly unpopular fuel tax that was a chief spark of the protests, has given just enough of an impression that “Jupiter” had descended from Olympus to care for the mere mortals. Over the past six months, his approval rating has risen from the teens up to 34% in recent polling.

In February, as his approvals were starting to tick back up, The Guardian noted that most of Macron’s regained support had, in fact, come from right-leaning voters. Has Macron also gained back some support by covertly appealing to France’s right-wing? Not long after the Guardian article, French far-right blogger Guillaume Durocher wrote an article outlining what he called Macron’s “alt-right pivot.” However, the tone of the article was clearly sarcastic, aimed mostly at mocking those who hold such a fear about Macron. Durocher did, however, touch on some recurring themes in Macron’s rhetoric that liberal and left-wing critics have held against Macron- that he is something of a closeted French nativist on the issue of immigration.

Even before the Yellow Vest protests began, Macron’s Republique En Marche party had already received criticism for an asylum bill passed in January of 2018, which increased the amount of time asylum seekers could be detained. The “great debates,” however, saw Macron go a step further and suggest quotas for non-European Union immigration. The reaction from the Front Nationale was predictable, instantly saying that Macron had not gone far enough, while some in Macron’s own party feared that he had gone too far in appeasing the baser instincts of the Yellow Vests. But considering the success that Macron had in 2017 in threading the needle between the left and right of French politics, what both may not appreciate is that that may be just the reaction he was hoping to provoke, restoring the image of Macron the man as being someone willing to go outside the system of any party, even his own. And, as even the right-winger Durocher acknowledged in his piece, Macron remains committed to the idea of a liberal European project; Macron’s proposed quotas are hardly the erection of a Fortress (white) Europe he and others in the French far right would envision if they were to come to power. Macron certainly knows this, and likely hopes to head off any further radicalization of Yellow Vest-style protest movements in an ugly, illiberal direction.

For someone who has been such a chameleon throughout his political career, Emmanuel Macron has also been remarkably consistent. He remains unshakeably committed to the idea of a united Europe as a powerful presence on the world stage. He also has been consistent in his vision of a modernized, vital France retaining its place among the world’s essential nations in a changing world. What the past year has shown is that he has been willing to adapt to difficult circumstances in order to make that vision a reality. Approve or disapprove, his tenacity in the face of virulent opposition has been remarkable. In the short term, however, he may be hoping to co-opt some of the darker aspects of French populism if, in the long run, it serves his greater project. Is this a cynical ploy, or a genuine attempt to avert the greater blow to his vision that a defeat at the hands of Marine Le Pen in the 2022 election would be? Only time will tell.