What do we learn from a presidential mandate? Reforms, we could answer with the force of evidence. Words or a style, will add the most sensitive to the embodiment of the function. A head of state also leaves behind… a successor. It is his legacy to the Nation. Sometimes desired, often feared. He recounts the past five years. Illustrates success or failure.
Emmanuel Macron has no desire to be accompanied by Marine Le Pen in the main courtyard of the Elysée in 2027. The pro-European liberal, stepping stone of the far right. The self-proclaimed “progressive” paving the way for nationalism. What a retrospective failure! “That’s all we would keep from these ten years in power. It drives him crazy,” notes a minister. Macronism would be dead and guilty. His autopsy would reveal the betrayal of the oath taken by Emmanuel Macron on May 7, 2017 on the Louvre esplanade: to do everything so that the French “no longer have any reason to vote for the extremes”. “No Republican can get used to the presence of the extreme right in the second round of each presidential election,” the leader of En Marche said on November 4, 2016.
Economic program “poked to the far left”
The fight against the RN is in the genes of macronism. This shifting doctrine was constructed as an inverted mirror of Marine Le Pen’s training, even if it meant dancing a strange tango with her. Eternal suspicion. The head of state is accused of staging this duel to stifle his other adversaries and take advantage of the Republican barrage in the second round. To methodically destroy left and right to nip any republican alternative in the bud.
As if his warning in 2016 of the Democrats being “held hostage” by a “truncated one-round election” was pure cynicism. Emmanuel Macron denies carving a ballot by hand. He does not create reality, but composes with it. “You only have one opponent on the ground: it is the National Front. We must confirm this opposition because it is the French who chose it,” he said on September 16, 2019 during the potluck. return of majority parliamentarians. The RN remains insensitive to these blows. Marine Le Pen obtained an unprecedented result in 2022 (41.45%), her camp is promised a historic score in the European elections on June 9. The history of Macronism is written in parallel with the continued rise of an extreme right feeling carried by the wind of history.
This story is also that of an inflection. Through his words and his actions, Emmanuel Macron corrected his fight against Marine Le Pen. This January 16, 2024, the president is holding his third press conference since entering the Elysée. In a fiery tirade, he criticizes the RN, party “of lies” and “collective impoverishment”. He pinpoints the “incoherence” of an economic program “pilfered from the extreme left”, and warns against a deindustrialization of the country. In short, draw the life of the French under Marine Le Pen. “Emmanuel Macron considers that the most effective against the RN is the ‘what if scenario’ (Editor’s note: And if), confides a relative. We must explain what would happen if the RN measures were applied.”
Immigration, the absent becoming omnipresent
Economic measures, mainly. There is hardly any question of values in the presentation of the Head of State, who does not venture into moral terrain. Here, no attack against the discriminatory project of the RN. Emmanuel Macron instead delivers a road map. We should “tackle” what fuels the extremist vote: mass unemployment, but also “illegal immigration”. “I fully accept the policy we have pursued at the French and European level. No naivety, but doing it within the framework of our Republic and our principles.” In small steps, the president is completing his right-wing transformation. He follows in the footsteps of LR against the common enemy. Like the right, he puts the RN’s economic program on the left to disqualify it. Like her, he uses control of migratory flows as a political weapon.
However, there is no question of immigration on May 1, 2017. The word is not uttered even once. Emmanuel Macron holds his big Parisian meeting between the two rounds of the presidential election. He then uses left-wing rhetoric against the FN. He certainly dissects the economic program, but above all opposes it with a “spirit of resistance”, an allusive formula. He denounces a “discourse of discrimination” from a France “cooked with hatred”. The far-right project? “Extreme violence against political opponents. […] The reduction of freedoms and the negation of differences.”
On that day, it is “the intellectual, political and moral heritage of the French Republic” that is summoned. This moral tone permeates his entire campaign. When he portrayed the FN in January 2017 as a party “of hatred, exclusion and withdrawal”, it was more to denounce its essence than its uselessness. Symbols are added to words. As during this visit, on April 28, 2017, to the martyred village of Oradour-sur-Glane, scene of a Waffen SS massacre. The same evening, the candidate spoke in Châtellerault of this “wound” inflicted on rurality by “nationalism and its odious stupidity”. The allusion is clear. Three days later, he laid a wreath of flowers in memory of Brahim Bouarram, thrown into the Seine by far-right activists.
“There is no need to run after the National Front”
Élisabeth Borne may turn pale at the memory of these words and gestures. On May 30, 2023, the Head of State reframes his Prime Minister, guilty of having returned the RN to its Pétainist roots. He considers the use of “moral arguments” specific to the “1990s” ineffective. “You will not be able to make millions of French people who voted for the extreme right believe that they are fascists,” said the president in the Council of Ministers. Thus he mocked on April 2, 2022 during a meeting at La Défense the “soft thinking […] who believed that we could fight the extreme right by giving moral lessons to our voters”. As if the summoning of values against the RN was worth making its supporters feel guilty. “Macron understood that the moral argument was not useful for nothing,” judges a minister from the right.
Six years of power have passed by. They have redefined macronism and its response to the RN. The head of state has gradually taken up the theme of immigration, absent from his first campaign. The migration crisis has imposed itself on the executive, opinion has become tense on the subject. This takeover is theorized by the president. It is a tool to bridge the divide with the working classes, an electorate seduced by Marine Le Pen. “The bourgeoisie have no problem with this phenomenon because they do not come across them. The working classes live with it,” the president justified on September 16, 2019 before LREM parliamentarians.
Seize immigration to weaken the RN. Yes, but to what extent? On March 17, 2017, Emmanuel Macron issued a solemn warning during a meeting in Reims. “There is no need, to protect the French, to propose the loss of nationality for a few. […] There is no need to run after the National Front: many have already done so and without result.” The French prefer the original to the copy: the candidate embraces this left-wing dialectic. Six years later, the immigration law provides the loss of nationality of dual nationals perpetrators of crimes against the police. Emmanuel Macron defends on December 20, 2023 a “shield that we lacked”. “A highway towards the National Front”, feared in December a minister, worried about the right-wing of the text in the Senate.
A war of movement
Eternal debate. Does biting into the historic lands of the RN allow it to be contained or does it legitimize it? Our political history is dense. Everyone can draw from it to support their thesis. In 2007, didn’t Nicolas Sarkozy asphyxiate Jean-Marie Le Pen by promoting a ministry of Immigration and national identity? Didn’t Marine Le Pen resurrect her camp in 2012 despite the head of state’s “busy” campaign? Emmanuel Macron has settled this debate. Marine Le Pen understood this well. She responds as a judoka to the presidential initiative. As soon as the immigration law was passed, it hailed an “ideological victory” for the RN and the advent of “national priority” in our law. What does this partial and biased reading of a law that does not follow its project matter? The member for Pas-de-Calais wants to escape her doctrinal isolation and continue her normalization operation. Clever rhetoric, which aims to devitalize any moral discourse in the face of the RN.
Emmanuel Macron did not wait for this law to divest himself of it. The executive has observed the transformation of the RN, which is stripping away the trappings of the past. The far right has smoothed out its speech, while La France insoumise is mired in controversies. “She has become acceptable to the far left. The more Mélenchon has moved away from the Republic, the more the RN has demonstrated that it is respectful of it,” analyzes a minister. Marine Le Pen took part in the march against anti-Semitism on November 12, 2023, when Jean-Luc Mélenchon was conspicuous by his absence. Emmanuel Macron adapts to the metamorphoses of his opponent in this war of movement. The candidate led her 2022 presidential campaign on purchasing power, we must respond to her on her ground.
Europe, eternal angle of attack
But when his interests are at stake, the head of state allows himself small relapses. On April 16, 2022, eight days before the second round of the presidential election, he established the vote in Marseille as “a referendum for or against our Republic”, without expanding further. A few days earlier, he denounced his “racist” project Parisian, at the turn of a diatribe against his economic and European project. The moral, no, but so close to the verdict, it costs nothing to try.
Often macronism varies. The president’s European commitment is constant. From 2016 to 2024, this cause fueled his duel with Marine Le Pen. “It is the fight for progress against withdrawal, the fight for patriotism and Europe against the nationalists,” he said on April 2, 2022 during a meeting in Nanterre. An echo of his criticism of the FN’s “isolationist” project in 2017. For six years, the head of state has continued to portray his rival as a threat to the European Union and the independence of France in the world. . A party in the pay of foreign influences, like Russia, who would watch for its election to encroach on our sovereignty. In this moving fight against the far right, this European pillar has never trembled.
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