France's right and left wing parties are surging. Can it hold the center?

French President Emmanuel Macron took power in 2017, the same year President Trump first moved into the White House courtesy of the Electoral College. Both were insurgents but stood on opposite sides of today’s new political barricades.

Macron upended his country’s established ruling parties, conjuring up an entirely new centrist bloc as a bulwark against Marine le Pen’s far-right National Rally. Trump took over the Republican Party, ousting traditional conservatives and turning it into a vehicle for a belligerent MAGA populism.  

Both leaders are still in power, but their fates have diverged. Macron is mired in a crisis of collapsing governments and risks becoming a lame duck with two years yet to run in his second and final term. Meanwhile, the National Rally has become France’s most popular party, taking the pole position in the 2027 presidential sweepstakes.

Trump, triumphantly reelected last year despite his farcical attempt to steal the 2020 election, is riding roughshod over his political opponents — and the rule of law — with the acquiescence of a do-nothing Republican Congress.

Macron’s fall from grace — his public approval has sunk to 19 percent — raises a host of knotty questions. If he can’t do it, who can pull Europe’s second largest economy out of a protracted slump? How can the European Union take greater responsibility for Ukraine and collective security if Macron, its foremost champion of “strategic autonomy,” can’t rally domestic support for his policies?

And what lessons should Democrats and other liberal parties draw if the center crumbles and France becomes the next domino to fall to illiberal populism?

The shakeup in France began last year, when Le Pen’s anti-immigrant and Euro-skeptical party shockingly finished first in the voting for the National Assembly. Yet a leftist coalition did nearly as well, leaving Macron’s Renaissance Party without a parliamentary majority.

The election split the anti-National Rally front and realigned French politics into three blocs rather than two: A solid neo-nationalist right, an uneasy coalition of left-wing populists and center-left Socialists and Macron’s shrinking liberal center. 

Since then, Macron has run through three prime ministers who could not cobble together a workable majority. The chaos peaked last month, after Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu quit less than a month after taking office. Macron reappointed him four days later, but with a basketful of concessions. 

To secure Socialist votes, Lecornu agreed to suspend the hardest-fought reform of Macron’s second term: a gradual rise in France’s retirement age from 62 to 64. He also promised to dial back the government’s push for big budget cuts. 

Amid this retreat from fiscal reform, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Macron’s bold bid to tackle France’s deep structural problems has fizzled out.  

He was just 39 when elected in 2017, France’s youngest president ever. A former Socialist, Macron invented a brand-new party dedicated to reinvigorating France’s sluggish economy, getting social welfare spending under control and liberalizing rigid labor market restrictions that make it hard for young workers to launch careers.  

Eight years later, however, France’s economic and fiscal outlook remains dismal. Growth this year is expected to be less than 1 percent, while the budget deficit could reach 5.4 percent of gross domestic product, far above the European Union’s 3 percent fiscal responsibility target. 

France has one of the world’s most generous welfare states. Government spending is nearly 57 percent of GDP (compared to 36 percent in the United States), the highest in Europe. 

Lavish social spending took root during “les trentes glorieuses,” the three decades of robust economic growth following the end of World War II, notes Sandro Gozi, a French member of the European Parliament and secretary-general of the centrist European Democratic Party.

That expansion slowed decades ago, but France financed its social commitments with heavy taxes and borrowing. Essentially, political leaders sacrificed economic growth and social mobility on the altar of distributive equality.

To his credit, Macron tried to disrupt this tacit policy of managed economic decline. In his first term, he reformed labor markets, cut the corporate tax rate and abolished a wealth tax. While hardly draconian, these reforms met fierce resistance from students and unions. Critics assailed the president as a heartless technocrat. 

The French frequently take to the streets to protest what they regard as assaults on their social rights. Macron’s 2018 fuel tax sparked the nationwide gilets jaunes (yellow vests) demonstrations outside the metropoles. Paris became an odiferous mess in 2023 when garbage collectors went on strike to protest his pension reform.   

What went wrong? Many French political observers fault their embattled president for his elite polish, “Jupiterian” aloofness and lack of empathy for the struggles of ordinary workers. That’s plausible, but it’s also fair to ask whether popular addiction to state subsidies and protections petrifies politics and makes societies unduly resistant to change.

In any case, France is left with an unreformed social model it can no longer afford. That may pose an even bigger problem than a surging populist right.

Will Marshall is founder and president of Progressive Policy Institute.