Three French governments have collapsed in less than a year, and the political crisis looks likely to continue, overshadowing Emmanuel Macron’s last 18 months in power and his domestic legacy.
This week, the latest minority government narrowly survived its first vote of no-confidence. But it remains the weakest cabinet in decades and could be toppled at any moment if opposition parties join together to oust it. France now faces a brutal two-month battle in parliament to achieve what once seemed the most basic element of governance: passing a budget.
Political analysts argue that that the figure most damaged by the current crisis is the centrist president.
The pro-Europe, pro-business Macron was first elected in 2017, vowing to revolutionise politics and listen to voters like no one had done before. He promised a “pragmatic” cherrypicking of ideas from both left and right to liberalise the economy, create jobs after decades of mass-unemployment and end inequality. Crucially, he said he wanted to stop the rise of the far right by ensuring citizens had no more reason to vote for extremes.
There were major crises: the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) anti-government revolt, followed by the pandemic and then the war in Ukraine. And when he was re-elected in 2022, Macron no longer had an absolute majority in parliament.
But his woes deepened considerably last summer when he gambled on calling a sudden and inconclusive snap parliamentary election while Marine Le Pen’s far right National Rally was at a historic high after its European election win. Parliament is now split between three blocs, the left, the centre and the far-right, which has increased its vote. No bloc has an absolute majority. Meanwhile, Macron’s centrist base has begun to fragment.
“The crisis in France runs very deep,” said Rémi Lefebvre, a professor of political science at the University of Lille. “The problem is there are actually several crises mixed together. There’s a financial crisis of [public] debt, a social crisis of inequality, a weakness of political parties, and then there is the rise of the far right. Macron is not the sole cause of the crisis; it’s all those different factors, but Macron has accelerated those factors.”
To prevent the government being ousted this week, Macron and his centrist ally, the new prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, appealed to the Socialist party. The government offered a highly symbolic suspension of the only major change of Macron’s second term: the 2023 pensions law that introduced a gradual rise in the retirement age from 62 to 64.
Lefebvre said Macron’s second term risked looking “chaotic” and ineffective. His choice not to appoint a left-wing government last year – when a left alliance won the greatest number of seats but fell short of an absolute majority – had been seen as damaging democracy, he said.
Stewart Chau, the director of polling at Verian Group, said: “If there’s one political personality or political movement that emerges extremely weakened from the sequence which began with the snap election of July 2024, it’s Emmanuel Macron and his centrist party, Renaissance. That is clear in every study.”
Polls this month have shown that only around 14% to 16% of voters have confidence in Macron. Even his global presence, which once boosted his image at home, no longer lifts his ratings. “His popularity has constantly declined in recent months, despite a significant international news cycle,” Chau said.
Support had dropped among Macron’s own voters because he was seen as lacking empathy for people’s daily concerns, Chau said.
“One of Macron’s biggest promises as president had been his vow to block the path of the far-right National Rally (RN), saying that no one would ever have reason to vote for them again,” he added.
But since Macron became president, more people have voted for the RN and see them as a credible alternative.
“That is a real shift,” Chau said. “Previously, some people had voted for extremes, saying it was a protest vote. Today, a lot of French people think it’s no longer simply a protest vote, it’s an alternative – and Macron is perhaps responsible for that.”
The political historian, Jean Garrigues, said Macron’s image was now probably the worst of any president since France’s current political system, the Fifth Republic, began in 1958. “He has dropped to an exceptional level of unpopularity, but above all an exceptional level of hatred,” Garrigues said. “[His Socialist predecessor] François Hollande also experienced record unpopularity but didn’t experience the same level of being detested as Emmanuel Macron.”
Garrigues said this public rejection had roots that ran deeper than the current crisis. Macron arrived in 2017 amid strong hope and expectation built up around a kind of mythology of the “man of the moment”, he said, but disappointment followed when voters felt his promises to work with all political sides and “permanently listen to citizens” were not materialising.