In the latest of his visionary speeches on the future of Europe, Emmanuel Macron called for the EU to transform itself into a military power or face “death”. Yet his own presidency of France may be about to enter a long twilight zone unless he can reverse his party’s deepening slump in June’s European parliament election.
Macron’s unpopularity is the main reason why his centrist pro-European Renaissance party is trailing a distant second in opinion polls behind Marine Le Pen’s hard-right National Rally (RN). Le Pen’s list is led by Jordan Bardella, 29, the rising star in the populist anti-immigration party. Renaissance, whose list is headed by little-known MEP Valérie Hayer, is down to 17.5% in the latest survey while the RN is on 31%. The two parties were neck-and-neck in the last European election, five years ago .
The EU ballot is seen as a test because it is the last scheduled national vote in France before the 2027 presidential election, in which Le Pen is expected to make her fourth, and most promising, bid for power.
Macron is barely two years into his second term in the Élysée Palace, yet lacking a parliamentary majority at home and with his government under the permanent threat of a no-confidence motion, he risks becoming a premature lame duck. His European influence is also at stake because the liberal group (Renew Europe) his party sits with in the European parliament is set to lose seats, and the number of liberal leaders is also shrinking as European electorates swing to the right. Besides, France’s standing is diminished in the eyes of many by its chronic high budget deficit and mounting debt, which is set to incur an EU disciplinary procedure after the election.
The 46-year-old president mostly has himself to blame for his political predicament. He has so personalised his style of governance that voters blame him for everything from the cost of living to the rise of youth violence and the risk of terrorism during this summer’s Paris Olympic Games.
“Macron thinks it doesn’t matter that no one has heard of his lead candidate because he’s convinced he can swing the pro-European vote behind his name”, a senior MEP in the president’s own group told me. “Everything is decided at the Élysée so we are waiting for the oracle”.
The party still hasn’t agreed who will be on its list of candidates, due to be announced on 7 May. Intense struggles continue behind the scenes between incumbent MEPs clinging to their seats and the four allied centrist parties seeking to place their own candidates, while the need for gender balance and pressure to field some new faces all complicate the task. Of the French centrists’ 23 seats in the outgoing parliament, pollsters reckon only 13 are safe on current ratings.
Renaissance faces growing competition for centre-left voters from the other surprise star of the campaign so far, Raphaël Glucksmann, leader of the small Place Publique party, who heads the Socialist list and is credited with 13% in the latest polls. The intellectual son of philosopher André Glucksmann, campaigning on a platform of massive support for Ukraine and greater social justice, is hoovering up disaffected Macron supporters as well as leftwingers alienated by the strident pro-Palestinian rhetoric of hard-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
Indeed, Mélenchon’s political career could be another casualty of this election. If, as polls suggest, his La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) party finishes a distant sixth in the vote, trailing not only the Socialists but also the Ecologists, the 72-year-old firebrand’s ambition to lead the French left into the 2027 presidential election will look threadbare.
At the other end of the spectrum, the mainstream conservative party, Les Républicains (LR), could be another victim of the June vote. The once mighty Gaullist movement, riven by in-fighting and policy rifts, looks set to be dwarfed again by Le Pen’s RN, which is consolidating its position as the leading force on the French right, and the only one that has not yet had a chance at power.
Political scientist and pollster Chloé Morin argued in a book entitled On aura tout essayé (“We’ve tried everything else”), that Le Pen could win the next presidential election because French voters feel that successive presidents of the right, left and centre have failed to solve their problems or reverse what many perceive as the decline of their country.
That may be premature. There’s a long way till 2027 and Macron still has options to regain momentum, even if none is easy. He could reshuffle his government again, but he did that recently to little lasting effect. He could dissolve parliament and force a new legislative election if a no-confidence motion passed, but that might well hand victory to the RN. He could also call a referendum on some popular issue, but voters might use it to punish an unpopular president.
Perhaps his best hope of escaping his domestic predicament is to seize the vacant leadership of Europe and drive forward the agenda he set out in his speech at the Sorbonne. He called for a defence build-up funded by joint borrowing and a more dirigiste and protectionist economic policy to compete with the US and China. However, he will face a tough task convincing frugal Germans to raise common debt to fund joint defence spending, free-trading Dutch, Nordics and Poles to accept a “buy European” policy and smaller states to give up their national vetoes over EU foreign policy.
Macron’s big vision for Europe may not save his party from a drubbing in the election, but it might just position him for a comeback on the EU stage if France can win those arguments.
Paul Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre.