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When French President Emmanuel Macron was elected in 2017, there was a palpable sigh among transatlantic elites that he had beaten back an apparently populist wave that was seen as beginning to swamp democracies in Europe and in the United States.
But Macron’s anti-populist campaign was itself populist in that his electoral appeal was of someone not running as a candidate of either party of the traditional right or left in France. His En Marche! was, as Macron argued, a citizen-driven movement whose program was above parties. Adding to this dynamic was Macron’s obvious intent to resurrect what he considered to be the lost mystique, the personal charisma, of the individual occupying the presidential office. In short, Macron was, rhetorically, eschewing governing France through the two fundamental elements of modern liberal democracies—political parties and constitutional authorities. But there’s a reason parties and authorities are the key elements. They grease the wheel that make actual day-to-day governing possible. Macron himself turned En Marche into La Republique En March!, a political party, once his followers were elected to the National Assembly. But composed of dissidents from other parties and many novice politicians, it’s more an ad hoc arrangement than a functional, disciplined governing party. And, as Macron has discovered, his personal charisma goes only so far. It can’t move other European leaders to adopt his EU reform plans when their national interests are seen as at stake, nor can it be a substitute for the exercise of real executive power when his citizens take to the streets.
Rather than learn from political realities, Macron in a letter to the French nation is now doubling down on his populism by “launching…a great national debate” in which, he says, citizens are invited to “express your wills” on the great issues of the day: taxes, the organization of the state and public authorities, the environment, and the state of the democracy itself, with “no questions off limits.” Macron even goes so far as to raise the possibility of choosing at random citizens who would then be asked to involve themselves in public decision making—a feature of city democracies of antiquity. “Neither an election nor a referendum,” the national process is to run until March 15 with the hope that it will turn the current “anger” seen on the streets of Paris and elsewhere by the tens of thousands of yellow-vested protesters “into solutions.”
Macron’s gamble is that he can defuse the current crisis, and avoid a crackdown on the protests, by providing forums to let the gilets jaunes blow off steam. It could work, of course. But it’s also possible that Macron will only have added fuel to the fire when their ideas, their demands, come a cropper because they are either impractical, they run against other policy priorities, or they contradict Macron’s own promised policy agenda. Already, Macron’s call for this national debate is seen by many as political ploy designed to divert attention from Marine Le Pen’s appeal to the protesters to rally to her candidates for the EU parliamentary elections this spring. And, if the polling is accurate about the French public’s initial reaction to Macron’s call, one might have to add “cynisme” to France’s motto of “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.”
At the end of the day, large liberal democracies cannot escape the realities of representative government: the need for elected officials to make laws, to make choices, to make trade-offs, and for an administration to carry out those directions in a diverse society with diverse interests. Populism fits poorly with those facts. As a result, once this national dialogue is finished, Macron is in all likelihood only making matters for himself more difficult by raising expectations that cannot be met.
Rather than learn from political realities, Macron in a letter to the French nation is now doubling down on his populism by “launching…a great national debate.”
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