In the face of Macron’s heroic narcissism and two ghastly alternatives, corporate bosses have made their choice.
National Rally's Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella are tactically vague about their economic plan.
French big business has issued the ritual anathema against the hard-Right – but this time its heart is not in it. The signs are ever clearer that corporate bosses would rather deal with a Le Pen government than face either of the two ghastly alternatives. Everybody has written off Emmanuel Macron completely.
The business lobby MEDEF is more worried about the Gothic fiscal plans of the Left’s Front Populaire, running a close second in the polls. It aims to roll back the retirement age to 60 and reverse every economic reform pushed through by Mr Macron since 2017.
“Their programme is an absolute red flag. It would lead to €200bn of extra public spending each year, financed by taxes or borrowing. That will end badly,” said Patrick Martin, the group’s president.
The original Front Populaire of Leon Blum 1936 triggered systemic capital flight – mostly to London – and forced France off the Gold Standard in short order. The experiment ended two years later in full crisis, a denouement forgotten in the iconography of today’s Left.
MEDEF is just as worried by what it calls the “catastrophe scenario” of another hung parliament, this time dominated by two irreconcilable blocs on each wing, with Mr Macron’s dying centre reduced to a skeleton. It is the most likely outcome. The constitution forbids another election for a year.
Europe 1 says Mr Macron is toying with Article 16, which would give him powers of a Roman dictator to uphold the “regular functioning” of the French state, subject to judicial review after 60 days. Charles de Gaulle invoked Article 16 after the Algerian Putsch in 1961. Such drastic action today would risk civil resistance.
French business circles take comfort from the hard-Right template in Italy. Economists warned in late 2022 that Giorgia Meloni was preparing a spending blitz worth 10pc of GDP. “Lo Spread” jumped 150 points from its Draghi-era nadir. Corriere della Sera solemnly predicted a showdown with Brussels.
Nothing of the sort happened. Meloni was astute enough to pick her fights, focusing on migrants and the culture war. She needed money from the EU’s pandemic recovery fund, and she needed to keep the European Central Bank sweet so that it would “skew” its balance sheet towards Italian needs. She understood the lesson of the Berlusconi coup, when the ECB manipulated bond yields to force regime change.
France is a different political animal. “It is out of the question that the French will ever follow our path in Italy. Le Pen will never swallow the austerity pill, and the ECB would never dare to play the spread game with France,” said Senator Claudio Borghi from Italy’s Lega party.
Even so, the National Rally has been tactically vague about its economic plan, a fudge that mixes Marine Le Pen’s anti-American, protectionist, welfare socialism with the protean market corporatism of the 28-year-old Jordan Bardella, immigrant child of Italian and Algerian origins, and the party’s prime minister-in-waiting.
The manifesto lavishes economic confetti. If taken literally, it would add €80bn to the deficit and provoke war with Brussels. It is best understood as mood music.
Mr Bardella has quietly delayed most of the policies until after an audit of the public accounts, giving him political cover for a wholesale retreat later, should he win an absolute majority.
“Bardella has already sold out completely. It is not the patriotic economic model that I wanted,” said Bernard Monot, a former Euro MP and once the party’s chief economic strategist.
“He’s changed the party’s position on fundamental positions. He’s pro-Zelensky and pro-Nato, just like Meloni. He is entirely compatible with liberal Atlanticism,” he said.
Mr Bardella assured business leaders that his party will uphold France’s treaty commitments. His body language all points to a concordat with capital. “I have come to reassure you. Financial constraints oblige us to make choices,” he told a MEDEF forum on Thursday.
To misuse an historical parallel – the National Rally is not fascist – it resembles the courtship between Adolf Hitler and German big business in the wild year of 1932, when corporate barons concluded that they could work with the Nazis after all. Hitler, in turn, dropped the anti-capitalist wing of his movement like a hot potato. The money flowed.
Mr Monot said there is nobody left in the party who understands economics, so it should prove easy for the MEDEF elites to co-opt the National Rally – but first there may be trouble.
“It is the Liz Truss syndrome, and it is going to lead to a French debt crisis. Bardella used to be my parliamentary assistant and I can assure you that this lad has no training and is not fit to be prime minister at a dangerous moment. That is why I slammed the door and walked out of this sect of know-nothings,” he said.
It is hard to see how Mr Macron can retrieve anything from his act of political vandalism. An atmosphere of sauve qui peut reigns. His own bitter deputies cannot forgive him for what he has done. They no longer put his picture on their flyers.
“Macron’s record is quite remarkable: he has fanned the flames of populism, and broken the responsible parties of Left and Right, without building anything to replace them,” said Jean-Louis Debré, a veteran Gaulliste and ex-head of the Constitutional Court.
The Macron meltdown puzzles those who live in a world of macroeconomic data and Excel sheets. France has the lowest unemployment rate for decades. Its growth over the last seven years has outperformed Germany or Italy, though flattered by the worst structural deficit in the G7.
It tells us that there are larger matters in the life of a nation than a decimal point of GDP here or there, and one of them is the spirit of democracy. Mr Macron betrayed this when he refused to accept the loss of his parliamentary majority two years ago, convincing himself that he had a political right to bulldoze his way through as if nothing had changed.
He has governed ever since by decree (49.3), imposing his pension reform against the will of parliament, against all eight trade unions, and against the vast majority of the French public. That is why they have turned on him.
Mr Debré told Le Point that the deeper cause is “a worry about uncontrolled immigration, and a palpable sense of national decline, and an intolerable feeling of insecurity that nobody is tackling.”
Mr Macron’s diminishing band of groupies are still trying to discern some brilliant masterstroke in his snap election. The truth is more banal: he could not bear to be a lame-duck president for three years after his crushing defeat in the European elections. So he has thrown over the tables in a petulant and reckless move. France must now live with the consequences of his heroic narcissism.
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