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PARIS — The French won’t love the comparison. Charles de Gaulle, François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac — those proud French leaders of past days — might turn over in their marble tombs to hear it. But this country’s politics, its approach to the global economy and even believe it or not its foreign policy have all gone à l’américaine.
The unwitting godfather of this transformation is the currently beleaguered French President Emmanuel Macron.
This is the backdrop to the recent dramas here, starting with the far-right’s blowout in European Parliament elections and the snap French parliamentary election called by Macron in response.
Macron never set out to remake France in the American image. He is both a throwback to past French leaders in his conception of himself — a distant and godlike “Jupiter” who believes deeply in French exceptionalism — as well as a 21st century political disruptor.
The American comparison that he does like is to Barack Obama. Modern, cool, cerebral. Like Obama, who went around his party’s establishment in 2008 to claim the White House, the Frenchman blew up his own Socialist and in the bargain the center-right legacy parties to win the Elysée Palace in 2017. Both men told compelling stories about themselves and their and their countries’ aligned destinies. Obama the first Black president, son of a Kenyan, representing American redemption and generational change. Macron, even a younger 39 at the time of his coronation, a product of the elite who would shake France out of its decades-long torpor.
There are other similarities neither will like — especially not in this global political moment. Their cool was a little too cool, distant. They changed their nations in unintended ways. Not least by opening doors to forces and personalities that both detest.
Former President Donald J. Trump is, in an underappreciated sense, a natural successor to Obama: The 44th president showed the 45th and possibly 47th the unconventional path to the White House, and his election gave way to the backlash of the Tea Party and birtherism, Obama-era creations that marinated Trumpism. Now Macron has made it possible for his country’s previously beyond-the-pale far-right to take power.
This isn’t exactly a failure as much as a byproduct of Macron’s vision.
By upending the established political order, he cleared the way for other insurgents to find viability. His break with the country’s traditional economic and foreign policies has led to real achievements but also fueled unrest from a weary public. Macron has succeeded in changing France — and it may lead to his undoing.
I spent most of the aughts living in Paris, and the differences here strike me immediately today.
In his two presidential election campaigns, Macron said that France needs to compete in the world as it is. Economically, that means you can’t leave your job in your prime years with a full state-funded pension. He forced through an increase in the retirement age. He “opened” France for business, making Paris a destination for international investors — like for his VivaTech conference held every May — and for hot AI firms like Mistral. The city is buzzy, a global tech hub in the making.
The change to the French approach to the world is dramatic too. You hear things from people at the Elysée that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. We need to cope with realities as they are. Or: The war in Ukraine has changed us all. So France, which hated the expansion of the EU to eastern Europe, now talks about the block having to take in new members or die. Macron is more hawkish on Russia and supportive of Ukraine than nearly any other NATO leader. On NATO itself, which he once called “brain dead,” he leans in. Russia is the biggest military threat to Europe, China the economic one. As the U.K. continues to spiral since Brexit and Germany stalls economically and politically, Macron and France are at least trying to lead Europe and doing it with Washington’s support. Macron and Joe Biden have exchanged pompy state visits — with Biden taking his turn in Paris last week.
In politics, Macron succeeded by understanding the power of the platform and the word. Like Obama, he gives great speeches and delivers interviews in perfect sentences. A former banker, he also thinks about politics like a startup entrepreneur, almost Trumpian in that sense. His shortcoming is that he can’t make those personal connections with the audience that someone like Trump does. He talks at them, condescendingly and without empathy, which accounts for his low popularity ratings. But he has disrupted French politics: There are suddenly new parties and faces here that have emerged only in recent years.
In all these ways, and in an irony that he won’t appreciate, Macron has ended up making France far less exceptional and more like other countries — more like, well, America.
The end of French exceptionalism isn’t to be mourned. The French were exceptionally moribund economically for decades, holding on to a model whose time passed in the 1960s. Their haughtiness on the world diplomatic stage was rooted more in their traumatic 20th century than any past glory. De Gaulle nurtured a myth of French grandeur to try to heal the trauma of French debasement — first at German hands in both world wars and then in losing its empire and global power pretensions in an American-shaped postwar order. For the past eight decades or so, France was led by a small elite, mostly educated at a single mandarin-training school called ENA.
While Macron is an alum, a so-called enarque himself, he has broken the system. The two mainstream left and right parties are barely alive. A new generation is coming up. The left was led into the European elections by a promising young intellectual and activist named Raphael Glucksmann. In a less exceptional France, the far-right became more accepted too. They moderated their views on the European Union. The National Rally party, which dates back to the Holocaust-downplaying and race-baiting Jean-Marie Le Pen, is increasingly popular because like it or not, they address the concerns many of the French have. Parties that grew out of the right or left extremes have come to power in Austria, Greece, Denmark, Spain and most recently Italy and adapted to government. France has until now put in place a cordon sanitaire around its far-right. Removing it would be unexceptional.
After the RN, which is now led by Marine Le Pen, won 31 percent of the European Parliament vote, more than twice what Macron’s movement got, he rolled the dice. His bet is the French will behave like in the past. A vote on Europe is a high-sugar, low-stakes protest. When presented with a stark choice between the accepted and the rabble in a second round of a national parliament vote that will decide who leads the next government, the French have tended to play it safe. He might even be looking to history if the RN does win and he is forced to share power. This is the Jospin scenario: The last time France had a so-called cohabitation between a president and the opposition in Parliament, former Socialist leader Lionel Jospin saw his popularity drop so quickly in office that he came in third in the 2002 presidential election — behind Jean-Marie Le Pen no less — opening up the door for the unpopular incumbent Jacques Chirac to hold on to office.
The problem with these scenarios for Macron is that he doesn’t seem to fully appreciate just how much France has changed under him.
