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Another month, another French government falls. Sébastien Lecornu’s resignation as prime minister on Monday came less than four weeks after his predecessor, François Bayrou, lost a confidence vote. The one before that lasted just three months. Since snap elections in mid-2024 produced parliamentary deadlock, France has appeared increasingly ungovernable. It is even more so now.
Such instability is unprecedented under the country’s 1958 constitution, which was designed to secure executive authority. The next victim of this systemic failure is likely to be the isolated figure at the top, Emmanuel Macron. The president has three options: name his fourth prime minister in 15 months, call another snap election, or stand down himself. Any of them could spell the end not just of Macron’s power but of his brand of centrism.
Any new prime minister needs support from an assembly that is hopelessly split into three blocks—left, center right, and far right. Macron’s last three appointees relied on an alliance with moderate conservatives. Lecornu fell when they withheld their backing. Socialists are urging him to pick one of their own. France has seen “cohabitation” between a president and a prime minister from opposing sides before, but always with a majority in parliament. There is none now. Unlike previous “cohabiting” presidents, Macron cannot even choose a viable opponent to work with.
Sooner or later, Macron may well be forced to call another snap election. The hard-right National Rally (RN) is particularly keen on this: credited with about 32% support by pollsters, it is by far the most popular party in France. No one knows whether this could translate into a parliamentary majority in the country’s two-round voting system. What is clear, however, is that the left would also do well, and the president’s centrist rump would shrink further. Whatever the timing or outcome of any new election, the president’s legitimacy will be under renewed attack.
Macron insists he will serve his full term until 2027. But most French voters see him as the problem and a vast majority want him gone. Moreover, political uncertainty carries a financial cost: economists reckon that growth this year will be 0.3 percentage points of GDP lower than it would have been without the turmoil. Meanwhile France’s borrowing costs continue to surge amid an unresolved budget crisis. Until recently, calls for Macron’s resignation came mainly from the extremes, notably far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Senior conservatives now back the idea as the only way out. Most strikingly, longtime Macronista Édouard Philippe, a former prime minister, has joined the chorus.
If that scenario unfolds, Macron faces humiliation. He would be the only French president of the Fifth Republic to be forced out (when Charles de Gaulle resigned in 1969, he did so out of wounded pride after losing a referendum, not from necessity). Furthermore, if a new presidential election were held now, power would almost certainly fall to Mélenchon’s hard left or to the nationalist RN.
Macron first won the presidency in 2017 promising a “revolution.” Traditional divides, he said, were woefully outdated. The vast majority of French people yearned both for the social safety net pioneered by the left and individual opportunity championed by the right. But each side had become corrupted by partisan spirit and collectivist shibboleths, whether misguided egalitarianism or narrow nationalism. He would retain the best traditions from the two camps at the same time (“en même temps” was his early catchphrase) and bring that legacy into the 21st century. Prickly, state-heavy France would turn into a pro-Western, market-friendly power that took inspiration from its European partners the better to lead them. The future belonged to the open-minded, pragmatic center as the old left and right faded into ideological irrelevance.
Eight years on, this vision lies in ruins. Macron is hemorrhaging support to the very extremes he had staked his reputation on fighting. The main political battle in France will now pit tax-and-spend leftists against right-wing xenophobes, with both sides bent on looser ties with the EU and NATO. Whichever side prevails, it will mark defeat not just for a man, but for everything he embodies.
How did we get here? Many blame Macron himself. In 2022, he made history by winning re-election. Yet he squandered the opportunity. Neglecting the parliamentary campaign, he lost his majority but still commanded a sizable bloc that could have anchored a coalition on favorable terms. Instead, his prime ministers stoked anger by using a constitutional device to ram legislation through parliament without votes. Then came last year’s dissolution—a rush of blood after a minor EU election setback. That spectacular own goal shrank his representation further and produced the present stalemate.
Since then, Macron has been widely accused of ignoring the voters’ message and ruling as if nothing had changed. He appointed loyalists as prime ministers—Lecornu, who had served in all his previous governments, being both the most loyal and least successful of them. The president courted conservatives, who had far fewer MPs than the left-wing bloc. Another complaint, often heard during his first term, is that Macron irresponsibly set out to destroy traditional parties. By aggressively poaching moderates from both sides, he abandoned the right and the left to demagogues.
Some of those accusations are justified. Macron certainly lost his touch after the 2022 re-election, which was really a vote against his second-round opponent, Marine Le Pen. His subsequent miscalculations stem from the illusion of a warm endorsement by voters. And his initial project of gathering center-right and center-left figures under one big tent was flawed: a functioning democracy requires a contest between alternative governments-in-waiting, not a single party of reason opposed only by radicals on the margins.
Still, most of the charges against the president are unfair. You can accuse Emmanuel Macron of recklessly calling a snap election or of disregarding voters, but you can’t accuse him of both. His turn to conservatives made sense after Mélenchon, speaking for the united left, insisted on a big-spending programme without compromise.
More fundamentally, the rise of populism was not Macron’s doing. Mainstream parties of right and left have been in retreat across the West for a decade—often with justification. In France, the center right and center left crumbled because of their own mistakes, not Machiavellian planning. The socialists failed to articulate a clear, modern vision. Their president, François Hollande, ended his term in 2017 with even lower approval ratings than Macron has now. That year the conservative Republicans fielded a terrible candidate and have continued their slide ever since. Their rival chieftains now fight over the remnants of a once-dominant party that attracted barely 10% of the vote last year.
Uniquely in France, the anti-establishment spirit of the late 2010s benefited a charismatic centrist. In many ways that was lucky. Despite many hiccups and headwinds—the “Gilets jaunes” tax revolt, urban riots and a pandemic, among others—Macron has a solid record. His labor reforms and tax cuts, notably for businesses, have sparked an investment boom and ended mass unemployment. Much remains to be done: France’s GDP per capita still lags far behind Germany and the Netherlands, and even trails Britain’s. But unlike his immediate predecessors, Macron has reversed the country’s slide at a time when others have struggled.
Now enemies emboldened by widespread anger propose to unpick those achievements. Whether they will actually risk a full-blown financial crisis with repercussions across Europe remains to be seen. But there is no question that, deserted by all, Macron has failed to secure his legacy. This is not surprising. All his predecessors have ended up trapped in what one of them, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, called “the lonely exercise of power.”
French presidents wield outsize powers that leave them exposed as lightning rods for all discontent. Every incumbent has ended deeply unpopular. For a maverick without a strong party behind him, that failure can be fateful for the project he represents. If Macron had instituted a more collegial rule, he might not have taken his ideas of centrism down with him. Instead, he followed the heady logic of an absolutist system. The collapse of Macronisme reveals the tragedy of France’s imperial presidency.
Henri Astier is a London-based journalist who writes for French- and English-language publications. He writes the Substack Out of France.
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The Logic of any presidential system! They are all very dangerous for at modest improvement in governace.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/uW77FSphM6yiMZTGg/why-not-parliamentarianism-book-by-tiago-ribeiro-dos-santos
The intersection of being French as an existential concept, the over extension of socialist ideology, and the presence of disruptive illegal and even legal immigrants, will not be resolved by labels on parties. Clearly the collapse of Macronisme , for all its elegance and technocratic centrism, is not a consequence of the structure of France’s imperial presidency, but of the failure to lead the people of France to avoid the tragedy of the current irresolvable collision. Of such failures come revolts.