Macron’s centrist dream fades amid rising left, right extremes Albanian media article

The Albanian website Pamfleti has published an article on the political chaos in France. Caliber.Az reprints this article.

When he was elected president of France, Emmanuel Macron seemed to personify the wind of change blowing over ageing Europe. Or at least that's how it was presented. The good student of the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, the new minister of François Hollande, who had rejected socialist suspicions of the free market, the founder of a new culture that went beyond the ancient rust of left and right and promised to radically renew the French political system – and not only that.

Seven years later, a little more popular, he found himself alone in the stadium where he was watching the closing ceremony of the Paralympic Games, which is not very common. The story is familiar: after the far right advanced in June's European elections, Macron called parliamentary elections, in a move interpreted as a marginal risk aimed at saving himself in the role of regulator. However, he had not counted on the possibility that the unifying reflex of the wider left would work.

The New Popular Front successfully challenged Le Pen's party, winning more seats in the second round and serving the strategy of republican mobilization against Le Penism. The Macron faction also owes this, since the 159 mandates it eventually won (86 fewer than in the previous election) were taken, and because Front candidates, among them the otherwise undesirable Melansons, were withdrawn where necessary so that the Candidate of Macron to win the seat from Le Pen's candidate.

And after accepting their votes without protest, Macron denied them the right to form a government, under the pretext of the country's stability. After endless haggling, he finally appointed Michel Barnier, from the fourth party, as prime minister, heading a minority government of dubious stability. Even if the rumour that Marine Le Pen took part in the negotiations is not confirmed, it will soon be seen whether the new government will also rule France with the vote or tolerance of the extreme right.

Macron was saved, France got a government and Le Pen was the de facto kingmaker, Tout va bien!

In fact, nothing was resolved. French society remains divided as the crisis of confidence in the political system deepens. It is not a theoretical scheme or an abstract concept, the crisis of faith is the growing distance of people from the political system, what in other terminology is called anti-systemism. But what is it that fuels the anti-systemic engine in our societies?

French society remains divided as the crisis of confidence in the political system deepens.

Its fuel is social and institutional. Wider sections of the population feel vulnerable in an era of multiple crises. The response to this material and mental insecurity can be conservative (national folding, protectionism, attributing all ills to immigration) or progressive (social justice, redistribution, emancipatory politics for all), but in any case it is a response to a public problem .

A problem to which Emmanuel Macron, the "president of the rich", did not give any answer, since in his program arsenal he had from the beginning the policies of "liberating" the labor market, to take a typical example, which worsen the uncertainty of life. But there is also the institutional aspect. Procedurally, Macron is right, under the French constitutional order, he can appoint "his gardener" as prime minister, as he did. However, it fundamentally failed to respect the fundamental function of democracy and elections, which is political representation.

The New People's Front, with what can be attributed to it, was the political body that carried out the republican task of blocking the advance of Lepenism. Not having a say in the governance of the country two months later, practically cancels the democratic will of the relative majority of citizens.

Worse, the anti-democratic treatment does nothing to resolve the deep polarizations of French society. Macron built his political dominance on the basis of a simplistic scheme: he claimed to represent an enlightened centrism against two anti-systemic symmetrical "extremes". The intervention of Macron's plan led to the shrinking of this "centrist" pole, in favor of an extreme Right that rushes to govern and impose policies of national preference on the one hand and a united Left on the other.

Macron chose to make democratically invisible one pillar of polarized French politics and co-opt the other, which until yesterday he denounced. How can such a democracy be trusted?

In a well-known passage, Paul Ricoeur writes that "a democratic society is a society that admits that it is divided, that is, that it is permeated by conflicting interests and that aims to connect each citizen precisely with the expression of these contradictions and conflicts.”