When the machine stops.

France votes for Apocalypse Later.

There was a Presidential election in France last Sunday. Even if you don’t take an interest in French politics normally, you should think about how this one turned out. Why? Well, if you look at political systems and elections as mechanisms for de-conflicting and implementing the different interests and objectives  of the electorate without violence, then this is a good example of how that mechanism can break down. It’s also a worrying augury for other countries.

In 2017, a little-known political newcomer called Emmanuel Macron was elected President of France. A year or so before, such an outcome would have seemed bizarre. Even when Macron announced his candidature, he seemed to many less a serious candidate for the Presidency than a caricature of a caricature of everything that was wrong and unpopular in the French system. Not yet forty years old, a pure product of the elite of the elite, backed by enormous amounts of money, graduate of the best educational finishing schools, job in the personal staff of a Minister, merchant banker, back as a junior Minister and an aide to the Socialist President Francois Hollande, he had never had a proper job in his life, or experience of anything outside the Paris bubble. He had never been elected to anything, he was a mediocre political campaigner, and his natural arrogance and intolerance were always breaking through. He could speak well, but had nothing of importance to say. He could sound passionate in defence of any idea, but hadn’t had an original idea himself in his life. Yet he won. How?

Largely by default. The Socialists, in pieces after the disastrous Hollande Presidency, chose the amiable but useless Benoît Hamon through a US-style primary to be the designated sacrificial victim. The Right’s candidate, François Fillon, also chosen through a primary, would probably have won in a normal electoral year, but he was entrapped in sordid corruption allegations, which ultimately led him to a prison sentence. As a result, he did less better than hoped, as some of his likely voters stayed at home in disgust, or went to Macron. Jean-Luc Mélenchon mounted a substantial challenge from the libertarian-Id Pol sort-of Left, but it wasn’t enough. Macron went into the second round, against Le Pen, the other leading candidate, after which his victory was more or less assured. None of this was pre-ordained, and none of it represented some kind of collective national choice. French voters often vote tactically, but in this case there were just too many moving parts to the machine for anyone to know what the effect of pressing a particular button was going to be.

In power, Macron rapidly disappointed many of his voters, some of whom had voted tactically for him only out of fear that Fillon, a nasty little man, would otherwise slither into the second round, and carry on with the neoliberal ruination of France. But Macron himself turned out to be just another neoliberal technocrat, his head full of management theory, his heart full of nothing much except the desire for power. He was obsessed with the idea that the French should work longer for smaller pensions, and that they should suffer Anglo-Saxon levels of insecurity and precarity. His attempt to raise money for his much-vaunted Ecological Transition by putting up petrol taxes, sparked the Gilets jaunes movement of 2018, and badly shook his grip on power. Someone who couldn’t have found his way to a poor immigrant community with an iPhone, he accepted without demur the ruling narrative that immigration was an unalloyed good and could never give rise to any problems. (After all, someone had to wash the dishes in the restaurants he patronised.) Islamic fundamentalism was a myth got up by racists, or at least it was until the murder and decapitation of the teacher Samuel Paty in 2020, which hit him with a sickening crunch, because his wife was a teacher.  Even then, he still couldn’t understand the French peoples’ stubborn attachment to a secular society: the class he represented  dismissed that, as it dismissed French history, culture, cooking, and local and national traditions, as a relic of the past, which only neo-fascists and racists could possibly want to preserve. His core constituency, trendy young urban professionals always taking the Thalys to do lunch in Brussels, where they would speak bad English to other expatriates and talk about all the American TV series they were watching on Netflix, lived as far removed from the life of ordinary French people as had the Court of Louis XVI; though to be fair, the Court had infinitely more in the way of culture.

Macron formed a political party because he had to: otherwise there was no chance of having a compliant Parliament. Fittingly, its name was suggested by his own initials: En Marche. But he didn’t have anyone to form a government, so he set about attracting talent—or at least names—from elsewhere. He managed to persuade a number of deputies from traditional parties to jump ship and, once the elections were over, enticed more of them to join his government by offering them important jobs. It was a very successful strategy, and one that permanently weakened not only the traditional parties, but the whole political structure. It’s this weakening of the system, not any strengths of his own, that really secured his re-election a few days ago. He was perfectly aware that few French people would actually vote for him if there was a decent alternative, so he set out to make sure there were no decent alternatives. His advertised objective of going “beyond Left and Right," as well as his slogan En même temps (“at the same time”) are just a way of flattening and destroying everything around him. His objective, finally achieved, was getting into the second round against Le Pen, and so winning by default again.

Macron’s desire to be King of Europe is barely disguised. He views the Presidency as just a step on the career ladder, like the time he spent at Rothschilds. He has little interest in, or appreciation of, France, its history or its culture. Indeed he went out of this way to sneer at the poor and unemployed, and informed the French casually that there “was no such thing as French culture.” His core supporters, looking up from their Netflix boxes, really loved that. But the fact is that in five years at most, conceivably less, Macron will be gone. What will he leave behind him? 

A field of ruins. Not Apocalypse Now, as would have been the case with a Le Pen victory, but Apocalypse Later. The destruction of the traditional parties leaves the French electorate with no actual way of registering its wants and concerns, except by voting for whoever is against the current government. It’s striking that the three parties that were essentially built around individuals—including Mélenchon’s LFI and Le Pen’s RN— walked off with two-thirds of the vote between them. But Mélenchon is 71 and may not run again. Le Pen is still in her mid-50s, though it’s not clear whether she would actually want to run a fourth time. The 2027 election is likely to be chaos beyond belief, therefore, even assuming that the political system survives that long. I’ve suggested before that the fundamental problem with politics today is that the supply no longer corresponds to the demand. This is especially true in France, where Macron has managed to create an empty space around himself where the traditional parties used to be, and will leave only a void behind him when he goes. This election showed that if people cannot rely on traditional parties to express their desires, they will turn to non-traditional parties. In this case, the RN. But the situation is inherently extremely unstable: effectively, voters were asked to choose between more of what they didn’t like, and some of what they were not sure about. In the end, they voted for what they saw as their short-term interests: most well-off pensioners voted for Macron, for example.

There’s been a lot of talk already of rebuilding the traditional parties, especially on the Left. But a party isn’t a mailing list or a giant Facebook group, nor even a personality cult. The mass political parties of the past were machines organised around collective economic needs and identities to influence and to seek power. Those needs haven’t gone away, and there are still economic identities to defend and advance, so in many ways, the current situation of poverty and insecurity should be at least as fertile a ground for a new party of the Left as the situation a century ago was for the SFIO, and later the Socialists. But nobody is interested in organising a party of that sort. On the other hand, the local communities and local social structures that helped to create the traditional parties of the Right have largely vanished. But political parties don’t organise themselves, nor are they just collections of like-minded activists. Politics doesn’t tolerate a vacuum for very long, and if the RN fails to satisfy, other new forces will arise. But supposing they don’t want to work within an exhausted and dysfunctional political system? Power in France has changed hands more than once in the streets. I’m going to make sure I remember to look out of the window regularly.