A weak victory for Macron

It was the result that most European governments wanted: a victory, albeit a tight one, for the current French president, Emmanuel Macron.

In a European situation that is perceived as in itself unstable, the prospect of Marine Le Pen as a new tenant of the Elysée aroused enormous suspicion, if not outright fear.

Macron is a guarantee of the status quo regarding the future of the European project and the position of the European Union on the war between Russia and Ukraine.

At the same time, it should be clear to the current French president that he is emerging from these elections weakened and that, far from a blank check, a considerable part of the votes he has garnered in the second round come from citizens who would have preferred not to have to to vote for him, once again, to confront the extreme right.

There is also the abstention by which a significant number of citizens have opted, the highest level in the last 50 years.

The pandemic and its management by the Macron government, with measures that many citizens have experienced as unnecessarily aggressive against their fundamental rights and freedoms, have generated a deep malaise in French society that is superimposed on what already existed previously and that led to the revolt of the yellow vests in 2018.

Due to the type of personality that the French president has shown so far, it seems difficult that he knows how to be genuinely humble with his fellow citizens.

But his decisions and his policies should be made under this slogan.

Listen and govern for all French without exclusion;

take this buried malaise seriously, beyond condescending gestures;

assume and respect the dissent typical of any democracy, even on thorny issues such as coronavirus vaccines or the energy transition to curb climate change.

There is, however, the risk that the re-elected president isolates himself even more from the public as a sort of defensive mechanism, anticipating social discontent and political pressure that the different organized groups may express.

After all, nothing in the institutional design of the Fifth Republic prevents the type of vertical government of which, precisely, Macron was already accused in his previous five-year term.

In an international climate that is increasingly conducive to a permanent state of exception – first due to jihadist terrorism, then due to the pandemic and now due to the war in Ukraine – the scenario of an increasingly authoritarian Macron should not be ruled out.

The question would then be: what new population control mechanisms, beyond a new resort to the state of emergency, would the Executive promote to prevent the expression of citizen frustration that, almost inevitably, would end up taking to the streets and destabilizing to the country.

If the victory of the candidate of the Republic on the Move should be good news for democracy in Europe, as we know it, it is also a new warning about the unsustainability of the post-war political order for much longer and the urgency of institutional reforms of depth in our systems of political representation, starting with the French.

Olivia Muñoz-Rojas has a PhD in Sociology from the London School of Economics and is an independent researcher.

oliviamunozrojasblog.com

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