PARIS — Forget Emmanuel Macron’s idea of a “Jupiterian” presidency. The French leader has become an Achilles, an all-conquering hero with a potentially fatal, hidden weakness.
Macron has been playing a dangerous game: By turning last week’s European Parliament election into a duel with the far right, he turned his party into the only alternative to the populists.
This strategy, which allows Macron to suck votes from the center left and center right, has led a number of pundits to already predict his victory in 2022, when France goes back to the polls to elect a new president.
But look at the small print of how and where people voted in last week’s election, and you’ll see why Macron’s strategists should instead be worried. The resignation on Sunday of Laurent Wauquiez, the leader of the center-right Les Républicains party, is another clue.
The obvious — but insufficient — answer to the question of who “won” the European election last week, is Marine Le Pen. The far-right leader’s National Rally took 23.3 percent of the vote, just ahead of Macron’s “Renaissance” list with 22.4 percent.
Head candidate of the Europe Ecologie Les Verts (EELV) green list Yannick Jadot | Stephane de Sakutin/AFP via Getty Images
There was also an unexpected, and significant, swing to the Greens, who won 13.4 percent. No other party reached double figures.
The result was embarrassing for Macron, but the real threat to his presidency lies elsewhere. Like Achilles, he is vulnerable in an unexpected way.
Although Macron’s 2019 voter base (22.4 percent) is almost exactly the same size as his 2017 voter base (24.1 percent), the difference is that his party is no longer France’s “new center.” It is metamorphosing into a new center right.
In commune after commune, Macron racked up high scores in well-heeled, bourgeois areas that until recently were the fiefdoms of conservative heavyweights and former presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy.
In 2017, Macron was, in spirit at least, the candidate of a young, optimistic, aspirational France. Exit polls last Sunday showed a shift in Macron’s voter base from the center to the center right, from the aspirational to the wealthy, from the young to the old.
A survey of voters by Ipsos-Sopra Steria showed that 27 percent of people who voted for the center right in the first round in 2017’s presidential election decided to cast their ballot for Macron in last week’s European election. Simultaneously, 14 percent of Macron first-round voters cast their ballot for the Greens and 11 percent went with the center left.
His highest score in last week’s election — 33 percent — was among people over 70, as younger, metropolitan ex-Macron voters moved to the Greens in droves. He lost 6 percentage points among 18- to 24-year-olds and 11 points among voters aged 25 to 34.
Most strikingly, Macron’s list piled up scores over 40 percent in wealthier western arrondissements of Paris and suburbs like Neuilly-sur-Seine, the wealthiest commune in France. The poorer, younger, more bourgeois-bohemian eastern parts of Paris migrated massively from Macron to the Greens and the center left.
The danger is that his new base — the 20 percent plus that he’ll need to reach the second round of the presidential vote in 2022 — no longer fits the trade description of Macronism, which, like him, is supposed to be young, energetic and mold-breaking.
This is what makes him uniquely vulnerable: His base is at risk of being squeezed if Les Républicains — the “old center right” that his election nearly annihilated — comes back to life ahead of the presidential election.
The old conservative-Gaullist party may not look like much of a threat at the moment. The political family that dominated French politics for 60 years until Macron’s victory in 2017 got a lamentable 8.48 percent of the vote in last week’s election.
But Macron can’t rest easy.
Laurent Wauquiez has quit as leader of Les Republicains | Philippe Lopez/AFP via Getty Images
Les Républicains’ abject rout prompted the controversial Laurent Wauquiez to quit as party leader on Sunday, calling the election results a “failure.” This gives the center-right party an opportunity — an imperative, some might say — to reconstruct itself over the next three years under new leadership and rid itself of the lingering aftertaste of the financial scandals, internal warfare and ideological wandering of the Sarkozy and post-Sarkozy years.
A couple of sidelined center-right leaders — Valérie Pecresse, the president of the Ile de France region, and Xavier Bertrand, the president of the northern Hauts de France region — will fancy their chances of reinventing the Gaullist tradition as something more conservative and even in more respects more centrist than “Macronomics.”
The results of last week’s European poll suggest that a large segment of the young, metropolitan, leftist and ecologically minded electorate wants a new kind of politics. They no longer believe that Macron will provide it.
Without them, the president will need to hold on to his new conservative and new old voters to survive the first round in 2022.
Much will depend on what happens with the French economy. If it continues its modest revival, all should be well for Macron. Unemployment has fallen to 8.4 percent, the lowest for 10 years.
But if it stumbles in the next three years, he could be in trouble.
Macron’s strategy has been too successful. By blowing up the Wauquiez Républicains, he has cleared the space for a dangerous new rival in 2022.
John Lichfield is a former foreign editor of the Independent and was the newspaper’s Paris correspondent for 20 years.