Macron, a man whose time has come
Victor Hugo’s line about the power of an idea whose time has come has been quoted a few times by commentators and writers about the French presidential elections in recent months, but usually in relation to Marine Le Pen. Evidently, the quote was used neither for the right person nor the right idea. Le Pen has been the focus of so much media attention, with Emmanuel Macron frequently brushed over as “more of the same”. But a closer look shows that it should have been the other way around.
Le Pen is a former lawyer from the leafy west of Paris, where the so-called Establishment thrives. Her nationalism is not a new idea whose time has come, but part of a divisive backlash against globalism and surfing old fears. We’ve had that before, not just in the 1930s and 1940s but even in the 1770s when the US and UK both turned inwards to destroy the idea of an Atlantic parliament (worth reading about here).
Now look at Macron. For a country that so many writers have decried as unreformable (and Google will point you to dozens), I am surprised they overlooked him.
Three things should have roused their attention.
First, his age, under 40, and we all know how old French presidents usually are. And he has only been in politics for a few years.
Second, there’s his background: Macron is from Amiens, Picardy, the home of Amélie (not Poulenc but Mauresmo the tennis champ), and John the Baptiste’s head, which you can see preserved in the city’s glorious cathedral. Picardy has had glory days in the past and is feted in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, but is now a struggling region and very far from the Gascogny-Lyon-Burgundy-Paris-Neuilly addresses of previous presidents.
Third, look at what Macron has done: in two years he formed a movement without a party, and left government before the campaigns even started, in a bid to pursue an idea, yes, an idea: that the establishment of the PS and PR, propped up on each side by extremes, could and would have to be broken once and for all if France was to change. He stepped around the scrum of the primaries, built alliances with civil society people on the ground, and has managed to up-end the old regime. Unreformable? It remains to be seen. Unprecedented? Definitely yes. Never in our lifetime has so much been done in France in so little time.
Macron has made it to the presidency, and all eyes will now focus on the parliamentary elections in June: even before the presidential elections Macron prepared that ground, putting candidates across the country and in France’s islands too. Cynics will try to stop him but expect him to fight back with tenacity. Rather than allow France succumb to their old idea, Macron is urging everyone to be lifted by the possibility of a new prospect: that left-right divides in France could end, that good ideas and workable policies can be gathered from across the political spectrum or co-created, that people who want to march forward should also want to reach out, to each other, to other countries, continents and even planets, and not turn in on themselves and rebuke progress.
The cards are surely stacked in the new president’s favour: the public mood, the ongoing crisis, the cry for change and leadership, his own chessboard, and a likely parliamentary majority.
Macron is 39. He comes from one of those regions which have not shared the spoils of globalisation and indeed whose social infrastructure has been blindly and somewhat stupidly hacked back by government cuts. He understands the pulse there, and sees the woeful lie they’ve been sold. He also sees the rupture that has been opened up, in France and in Europe, and his idea is to bridge it and fix it.
These are the ideas whose time has come.
The French have led revolutions before. They also like a good horse. Like the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe race which was held in the Picardy town of Chantilly in 2016 for the first time, they see Macron as the horse to back.
Not just because it might go all the way, but because it is the right way to go.
We should all egg Macron on to victory.
©Rory J Clarke, 7 May 2017
