When judges veto key sections of a flagship government bill, it is unusual for a president or prime minister to see that as a victory. But that may be how Emmanuel Macron views last Thursday’s decision by France’s constitutional council to annul about a third of his highly controversial immigration bill.
Lacking a parliamentary majority, Mr Macron is playing a highly risky game of cat and mouse with the French right, amid polls that give Marine Le Pen’s radical right a 10-point lead ahead of June’s European elections. To get the bill through the national assembly, where the president’s centrist party depends on rightwing votes, it was toughened up with a raft of harsh and discriminatory amendments. Ms Le Pen hailed an ideological victory. Mr Macron seemingly relied on the courts to defend republican values against his own government’s legislation.
Smart – albeit cynical – politics, or reckless playing with fire in a highly combustible context? As a deeply sobering poll published this week demonstrated, the political stakes riding on the answer are uncomfortably high. France is the most important of nine countries in which radical-right parties are on course to finish first in June’s elections, which are set to be the most important for a generation. Mr Macron has decided to neutralise the threat by flirting with some of the themes and tropes that constitute Ms Le Pen’s natural terrain.
In a lengthy press conference this month, he said he was determined for “France to stay France”, echoing the words of the far-right former presidential candidate and television pundit Éric Zemmour. Potential supporters of Ms Le Pen were wooed with repeated references to the need for a restoration of “authority” and “order”. Policy ideas included a drive to increase the French birthrate, mandatory national service for the young, the possible reintroduction of school uniform, and the formal teaching of La Marseillaise in primary schools. The socially conservative mood music has been accompanied by a government reshuffle, bringing in figures associated with Mr Macron’s rightwing predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy.
There are two obvious dangers attached to this strategy. The first is that Mr Macron’s dalliance with a kind of rightwing communitarianism will demoralise much of his own party, and disillusion leftwing voters to the extent that the traditional “republican front” against the radical right breaks down. The second is that instead of luring potential supporters of Ms Le Pen into the moderate centre ground, he may simply confirm her diagnosis of France’s ills and drive waverers into her arms. A recent study of European voting attitudes concluded that shadowing the rhetoric and preoccupations of the radical right is rarely a wise move for progressive parties, because “voters tend to prefer the original to the copy”. Mr Macron’s politics have not really belonged to the centre-left for some time. But the same may well apply in his case.
Mr Macron’s two-term presidency, which once aspired to take France “beyond left and right”, is instead culminating in a climactic struggle to keep Ms Le Pen’s extreme nationalism at bay. A Le Pen victory in June would be a setback. A repeat in the presidential election of 2027, when Mr Macron cannot run again, would be a turning point in European political history. The president’s move away from the liberal centre ground is intended to head off that outcome. It also risks creating the political dynamics that enable it.
