President Emmanuel Macron Has Plunged France into Chaos

At the end of July, Lucie Castets was planning to go to Italy with a group of friends. Every year, they rented a house and followed the same ritual: pool, spritzes, a viewing of “Gladiator.” For the past year, Castets had worked as the finance director for the City of Paris. On July 22nd, shortly after noon, she was in the bike garage of her office building, in the Thirteenth Arrondissement, when her phone started buzzing. The caller was Olivier Faure, the head of the French Socialist Party. Just before picking up, Castets texted her wife, then took the call.

“What does he want?” her wife wrote back.

“I don’t know,” Castets replied.

“Maybe he’s gonna ask you to be Prime Minister or something.”

“Haha.”

After Castets hung up, the text conversation continued.

“Actually, he is,” she wrote.

“No shit?” her wife replied.

Soon, Castets would burst onto the political scene in what the French press took to calling her “Warholian summer” of instant notoriety. For the moment, however, practically no one knew who she was. After the phone conversation, Faure ran Castets’s name by his fellow party heads in the left-wing alliance known as the Nouveau Front Populaire, or N.F.P. “Who?” one of them replied. But Castets made an appealing candidate: a thirty-seven-year-old woman from civil society, fresh-faced and sincere, yet not without a streak of swagger; impeccably credentialled and indisputably of the left, but obscure enough to have neither a record that would raise hackles nor political enemies of consequence.

As the party heads deliberated, Castets went on with her day. She got on her bike and pedalled across the neighborhood, arriving at a restaurant where she was supposed to meet an acquaintance. It had already been a wild summer in France. In three days, the Paris Olympics would begin, superimposing live contests of might and savvy over a grunting, deadlocked struggle for political power that had transfixed the country for weeks. Castets didn’t know the person she was having lunch with very well, so she said nothing about Faure’s call. “I think I had a poke bowl,” she told me. That weekend, the plane to Italy took off without her.

On December 4th, members of the Assemblée Nationale, the lower house of the French parliament, passed a no-confidence vote against Prime Minister Michel Barnier, toppling the country’s third government of the year only twelve weeks after it had been formed. “It’s a singular moment, because the vote of no confidence is accompanied by huge questions about what happens next,” Christophe Bellon, a parliamentary historian at the Catholic University of Lille, told me. Messy though France’s politics currently are, it is easy to trace the evolution of the turmoil, and to pinpoint when the political situation tipped from uncertain yet orderly into surrealistic and totally unpredictable.

Back in June, a little more than a month before Castets received the unexpected call, French people went to the polls to elect representatives to the European Parliament. The outlook was not particularly good for the group anchored by President Emmanuel Macron’s party. Macron had squandered a large mandate since taking office, in 2017, as a paradigm-busting centrist who would govern not from the left or the right but, as he liked to say, from the left and the right “at the same time.” The promise of Macronism was social progressivism and economic liberalism. The practice of Macronism was the tenacious pursuit of economic reforms at the expense of sweeping social programs, which were always just about to materialize.

Macron had reduced unemployment from more than ten per cent to around seven per cent, made France a far more attractive place for foreign investment, and streamlined a complicated retirement system. But his comparative neglect of such areas as health care and housing, combined with the fact that he instituted a tax policy that favored the rich and that he raised the retirement age from sixty-two to sixty-four, had eroded support in the left-leaning part of his coalition. In the eyes of many voters, he was a centrist President tacking ever rightward, hardening his stances on immigration and Islam as the extreme-right party, the Rassemblement National, or R.N., soared in polls. Many French people, whatever their politics, loathed Macron personally, citing his arrogance, exemplified by comments such as one that he made to an unemployed gardener: “I could find you a job just by crossing the street.” On a good day, his approval rating was around thirty per cent, considerably lower than Joe Biden’s.

The party that is now the R.N. was founded in 1972, in the aftermath of the Algerian War, by the torture apologist and Holocaust denier Jean-Marie Le Pen. “Tomorrow, immigrants will stay with you, eat your soup, and sleep with your wife, your daughter, or your son,” he once warned. The party is essentially a family firm, now fronted by his more politically supple daughter Marine Le Pen. It has never produced a President or a Prime Minister, but it is getting closer. Since 2022, the R.N. has constituted the largest opposition party in the Assemblée.

Domestically, the R.N. espouses a form of nationalist populism—more deportations, lower taxes on gas. In recent years, Le Pen has tried to detoxify the party’s reputation, but some members still promote colonial nostalgia and racist theories such as the “great replacement.” Regarding foreign policy, the R.N., historically a reliable friend to Vladimir Putin, could fairly be called more Europhobic than Euroskeptic. After years of lobbying to withdraw from the eurozone, the party reversed its position, but it continues to rail against, per its platform, “the woke excesses imposed by Brussels.”

Le Pen is sometimes compared to Donald Trump, but the analogy is not quite apt. Certainly, their movements share an anti-immigrant, selectively isolationist brand of nationalism—“Les nôtres avant les autres” (“Ours before others”) is the R.N.’s version of “America First.” Both have ties to strongmen and a taste for tariffs and fossil fuels. But Trump is more plutocratic than populist when it comes to policy. And, whereas the Republicans romanticize a bygone world, the R.N. is keen to present itself as a forward-looking concern. Trump is a soft man obsessed with seeming tough; Le Pen is a tough woman forever trying to project a soft touch.

“With Le Pen, in France, you have a strong element of continuity with historical fascism that doesn’t exist with Trump in the U.S.,” Jean-François Drolet, a professor of politics and international relations at Queen Mary University of London, told me. But, he added, “increasingly these far-right-wing movements share a sense of global interconnectedness. They all understand that in order to pursue their domestic programs they have to destroy the liberal international agenda as we know it.”

Elections for the European Parliament are paradoxical, in that the parties that enjoy disproportionate success in them often question the value of the entire European project. Le Pen’s party has historically fared better in these races than in France’s Presidential or legislative elections. This summer’s vote was the first since the implementation of Brexit, with wars raging in Ukraine and Gaza, and the R.N. was projected to pull ahead of Macron’s group. But when the results came in, on June 9th, they were unexpectedly lopsided: 31.5 per cent for the R.N. and just 14.6 per cent for Macron’s group. This represented the R.N.’s largest victory ever in a nationwide race, and the best performance by any French party in a European election since 1984.

Libération called the results an “earthquake.” Macron’s response was to shake things up further. Just before eight o’clock that evening, his office announced that he would address the nation. Millions of screens lit up with speculation as the political class and regular citizens alike tried to figure out what the President could possibly be up to. In the control room at BFMTV, one of the country’s leading news channels, correspondents found themselves at a loss. “We joked that maybe he was going to do a referendum on banning mobile phones in schools,” Philippe Corbé, then the channel’s editorial director, told me. Roland Lescure, Macron’s industry and energy minister, was on a radio show discussing the election results when a journalist, during an ad break, asked him about a rumor that Macron was planning to call a snap election. “No way,” Lescure responded.

At nine o’clock, cameras cut to the Élysée Palace, its rooftop flag flapping melancholically under a pink-and-black sky. More than fifteen million people—sixty-five per cent of the French viewing public—watched as Macron appeared onscreen, perched on a balcony with the plane trees of the palace gardens behind him, filtering the day’s last light. After a curt denunciation of the extreme right, Macron got to the point: he was dissolving the Assemblée Nationale and holding new legislative elections, with a first round of voting in just three weeks. “At the end of this day, I cannot act as if nothing happened,” he said. His plan, he claimed, would provide an “indispensable clarification.” Never mind that the people had just spoken, rather unmistakably. Macron, leading boldly from behind, would force them to think hard about whether they really meant what they said. “To be French,” he reminded them, is “to choose to write history rather than to submit to it.” And, with that, he was gone.