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FT editor Roula Khalaf selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The author is a professor at MIT and the Collège de France and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics.
On July 7, France will enter a new political era, regardless of the outcome of the election. Either the National Rally (RN) and its allies will have enough seats to achieve an absolute majority or, if a hastily reinvented “Republican Front” holds, they will be out of power for now, but there will be no coherent majority.
If the second scenario comes to fruition, the credit will go to the left, which in a matter of days after the election was called managed to unite the populist fringe to the centre-left, marginalising in the process the veteran far-left leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a divisive figure who is the right’s favourite scarecrow.
No one knows why President Emmanuel Macron decided to call an early election after his party’s crushing defeat in the European elections. But one possibility is that it was a bid to revive his brand of “extreme centrism,” as a process of unifying a broad left was seemingly just around the corner, excluding its most sulphurous members and including some from the left wing of his own coalition. And on the other hand, the RN is quietly abandoning the pro-poor elements of its manifesto, transforming itself into a more corporate-friendly political force, attracting votes with its authoritarian and xenophobic rhetoric. An analysis of its program shows that the losers are mostly the poor, while the winners are mostly the rich. With the 2027 presidential election looming, the French political landscape is slowly reordering itself along the traditional left-right axis.
Whatever happens on Sunday, the left will have to continue to consolidate its forces and offer a credible alternative to the RN. Many economists criticised the economic platform put together by this coalition as unrealistic and damaging, and it certainly contained its share of questionable ideas. But this criticism is pointless. The platform was put together in a matter of days and, as the left was highly unlikely to win an absolute majority, it was never going to be fully implemented, even though it set out important core ideas. The real work should begin now.
Seven years of Macron, but also five years of Socialist President François Hollande (under whom he was finance minister), have shown that whatever centrist politicians, always keen to prove their sanity, continue to offer is now a losing proposition for most French voters. In 2022, it was largely the better-off who voted for Macron and his party. The urban poor and middle class mostly went left, and the rural poor and middle class went for the RN. In 2024, the richest French people also began to switch to the RN.
The Macron project failed because, while he used the language of reason and competence to justify his reforms as necessary technocratic changes beneficial to all, they were often neither backed by science nor particularly fair.
To take just one example, it is clear that the French pension system needs reform. It is a hodgepodge of different regimes, leading to Kafkaesque situations for people changing jobs, and is not sustainable in the long term. But Macron’s pension reform did not address any of the structural problems (unlike an earlier attempt abandoned during his first term). It was also regressive and in the end had too many exemptions to save significant amounts of money. No wonder it faced massive opposition.
The rejection of the standard-bearers of liberal democracy is not a moment of French exceptionalism. The UK got Brexit, the US got Trump, Hungary got Orbán. Everywhere political elites have been repeating that prosperity is just around the corner if people just tighten their belts a little more, while inequality has risen and living standards have stagnated for almost all but the very rich. Trust in government has been falling steadily in most OECD countries for years. The recent downgrade of the French credit rating and the “discovery” that revenue forecasts were way off made it all too easy for the RN to put the final nail in the coffin of Macron’s image of a competent government.
No one believes in win-win solutions anymore. To replace this illusion, the RN proposes a programme in which immigrants and the poor lose. It is a seductive vision for those who have little and fear losing ground. To reject this dark vision, a very broad left must devise another one that combines production, redistribution and environmental protection; that promotes respect and dignity for all people; that has the courage to lead the major projects that France, Europe and the world need. Chief among them: tax reform, a fair green transition and a way to distribute the benefits of growth in a more equitable way for all.