In the wake of the failed assassination of Donald Trump and the consolidation of the Maga presidential ticket with the elevation of JD Vance, some American liberals have come to gaze on France’s ostensible political health with envy. While the American left seems helpless, at least for the moment, to stop Trump’s return to power, the Macroniste centre and the left New Popular Front have apparently come together to stymie the hard-right threat. Over breakfast tables from Boston to San Francisco, the question has been resounding: what is France’s secret?
Unfortunately, the truth is that France has no secret. Despite the election results, the country may be entering a political crisis as deep as the one of its “sister republic” across the Atlantic – although, one hopes, without the accompanying political violence. No political bloc has gained anything close to a majority in the French National Assembly after its election at the beginning of July, and, for the moment, none of them seems ready to make the compromises a coalition government would require. France is, therefore, facing the possibility of prolonged political paralysis and widespread unrest. And while Marine Le Pen’s National Rally fell well short of the majority it had hoped for, it still hugely increased its parliamentary representation and now commands a greater proportion of the Assembly’s seats than any far-right party since the 19th century.
France and the US are hardly the only countries facing a crisis of democracy at present. Still, the political situations in the two have important structural features in common – hardly surprising considering the common intellectual currents that went into the two countries’ constitutional evolution. Both have hugely powerful, quasi-monarchical chief executives, whose authority echoes that of 18th-century British and French kings. And in both, in order to function with these offices, democracy has required a relatively stable party system in which the two sides agree to trade the office between them, and to accept the other’s legitimacy. In both countries, this compact has now essentially collapsed, with dire consequences. In one case, extreme polarisation is the cause. In the other, it is more the result. But in both, a key reason is the growing gulf between national elites and the majority of the population, a schism which the personality and office of the president hugely exacerbates.
Ironically, each presidency was originally designed precisely to overcome partisan divisions. The architects of the American constitution, like most elite political actors of the day, had a horror of “faction” and a deep distrust of democratic passions. To ensure that the presidency would help restrain these passions, the constitution entrusted the choice of chief executive to an electoral college of supposedly wise citizens, rather than to the popular vote. The presidency, moreover, was constructed with a specific individual in mind: George Washington, whose popularity dwarfed anything seen at any other moment in American history. Already during the revolutionary war, one disgruntled pamphleteer was grousing that “the people of America have been guilty of Idolatry by making a man their god”. Washington’s tour of the country on the eve of his inauguration in 1789 looked like the triumph of a conquering Caesar, complete with ceremonial arches and crowns of laurel leaves. He seemed to stand above all the country’s manifold internal divisions, and to unite the entire citizenry in his person.
Though France’s modern political history began in the same late 18th-century upheavals, the French presidency as it currently exists dates only from 1958, and the foundation of the Fifth Republic. But its architects – above all, Charles de Gaulle – designed it with very similar goals. De Gaulle, while a committed republican, had a horror of partisan squabbling, and hoped that the president would embody what he called “the spirit of the nation”. In a 1958 speech, he spoke of the need for a “national arbiter, existing above political struggles, charged with ensuring the regular functioning of state institutions”. He of course proposed himself for the office, and his record as the heroic leader of the Free French gave him a non-partisan stature that, if not equal to Washington’s in 1789, greatly exceeded that of any other contemporary French political figure.
In neither country, of course, did the ideal of a non-partisan chief executive survive for long. The fiery factional politics that erupted in the US in the 1790s soon left its mark on Washington, who complained to his compatriots, in a draft of his 1797 Farewell Address, that partisan attacks had managed “to wound my reputation and feelings, and to weaken, if not entirely destroy, the confidence that you have been pleased to repose in me”. In France, De Gaulle as well immediately faced sharp partisan attacks. François Mitterrand even labelled his presidency a “permanent coup d’état”. Faced with such opposition, De Gaulle had no choice but to enter the political fray with a centre-right party of his own, although he tried to disguise its partisan nature by calling it the Rassemblement du Peuple Français (“Assembling of the French People”) – the ancestor of today’s Republicans.
But in both countries, a system developed in which two major parties regularly exchanged control of the presidency and came to recognise each other’s legitimacy. In the US, the Democratic-Republican opposition to Washington’s Federalists eventually evolved into the modern Democratic Party. Following the demise of the Federalists, the Whigs and then the Republicans acted as its competitors. Since the Republicans emerged in the 1850s, they have controlled the White House for 93 years, and the Democrats for 75. In France, the left-centre coalitions that ran against De Gaulle eventually gave way to the Socialist Party created by Mitterrand in 1969. Mitterrand himself finally captured the presidency 12 years later. Between then and 2017, the Socialists and the successors to the Gaullists exchanged power twice more.
In both countries as well, the presidency long retained something of a mystique that distinguished it from other political offices. Charismatic figures like John F Kennedy, while by no means immune from partisan attacks, reinforced the sense that the office existed in some senses above the coarse tumult of party. It was not just Kennedy’s political supporters who felt his assassination had broken something in the country and looked back to his presidency as Camelot. In France, meanwhile, the Socialist Mitterrand, though elected on a strong left-wing platform in 1981, soon retreated from it, began to savour the presidential powers he had previously denounced, and devoted much of his time in office to leaving a quasi-monarchical stamp on his capital with mammoth construction projects such as the new Louvre and the Bastille Opera.
It cannot be said that either constitutional arrangement was exactly a failure. At the age of 235, the American constitution has outlived most of its competitors. France’s Fifth Republic is a mere stripling of 66, but that still exceeds the lifespan of any other post-revolutionary French regime except the Third Republic (which survived only to age 70).
But there is a big, obvious danger to having a constitutional system dominated by such a powerful office. If partisan conflict grows too deep and too bitter, then a presidency designed as unifying instead becomes a lightning rod for division, with neither side able to trust its opponents with it. The history of the US offers the clearest and most disastrous example. While the Civil War of course had large, long-term causes, especially the slave system, its immediate trigger was very simple: the refusal of the southern states to accept Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency in 1860, but instead to secede and declare their independence. While the large number of successful and attempted assassinations of American presidents has much to do with the country’s gun culture, the fixation of so many people on the presidency as an office too dangerous to entrust to political enemies has also clearly played a role.
In the US, this dreadful dynamic is now playing out again. Political polarisation, and the rise of Donald Trump, has turned the Republican Party into an extremist organisation that regards presidents from the other side as ipso facto illegitimate. The party mostly supported Trump’s baseless charges that the Democrats stole the 2020 election, and mostly praises the insurrectionists of 6 January 2021, as unjustly incarcerated political prisoners. Today, Trump and his followers call Joe Biden a dictator who is waging corrupt “lawfare” against Trump and trying to “destroy the country”. These charges are false, but if Trump wins the election they could serve as justification for real assaults on the constitutional system, with criminal charges filed against leading Democrats, opponents purged from the federal bureaucracy, and the courts and the electoral system manipulated to weight future contests in the Republicans’ favour. The 13 July assassination attempt on Trump, which has ratcheted up even further the paranoid, conspiratorial atmosphere of American politics, makes this scenario even more likely. And, of course, if the Republicans win and follow through on their threats, then the Democrats, with good reason, will not be able to accept Trump as legitimate, either.
In the US, where the party system was calcified, populist extremists could only succeed by capturing one of the major parties, as Trump and his Maga supporters did with the Republicans. In France, where the party system was weaker, citizens resentful of the country’s elites increasingly flocked to a party from outside the mainstream: the National Front, initially founded by the racist, anti-Semitic Jean-Marie Le Pen, and which his daughter Marine has since rebaptised and attempted to “de-demonise”, notably by cultivating Jewish support. Its rise, combined with the failure of the Socialist François Hollande’s 2012-17 presidency, and a series of scandals for the Republicans, has brought the party system to its knees. The 2017 election dealt it the coup de grâce. When Hollande’s former economics minister Emmanuel Macron ran to succeed him, he did not do as a Socialist, but with a newly founded, wholly personal party (it was no coincidence that its initial name, En Marche, had his initials). In the first round of the election, the Socialist and Republican candidates together won barely a quarter of the votes. In the second round, Macron had to face off against Marine Le Pen.
Macron initially cast himself as a Gaullist unifier. After his inauguration, he posed for an official portrait with De Gaulle’s memoirs prominently displayed on his desk and said he would govern in a “Jupiterian” manner, above the fray. He promised to balance neoliberal reforms with a strengthened social safety net. But once in office, he moved decisively to the right. And when he did not have the votes in the Assembly to pass neoliberal reforms, he took advantage of a provision in the Constitution (“article 49.3”) to impose them by executive fiat – notably with last year’s increase in the retirement to age 64.
These moves, combined with Macron’s haughty, arrogant, “take your medicine” attitude, spurred large-scale protests during both of his terms in office, starting with the gilets jaunes in 2018. Today, Macron is more widely and intensely disliked than any previous president of the Fifth Republic. His approval has not (yet) fallen to the catastrophic levels experienced by Hollande (which at one point reached an astounding 4 per cent), but Hollande was pitied more than he was hated. Macron’s own current approval level of well under 30 per cent expresses something much more intense. A large proportion of the French now see him as France’s greatest problem.
[See also: France’s Liz Truss moment is yet to come – and it may be worse]
Earlier in the history of the Fifth Republic, such a collapse in a sitting president’s support would have principally benefited the mainstream opposition party. But the fall of the party system, combined with the rise of Le Pen’s National Rally has led to a very different result: they have strengthened the extremes and threaten to increase political polarisation yet further. True, the story of the successive elections of 2024 might seem to undermine this point. In May, the National Rally scored a stunning first-place finish in the European elections in France, prompting Macron to take the wild gamble of dissolving parliament. In the more important legislative elections, however, fear of an extreme-right government remained powerful enough to keep a “republican front” in place, thanks to some electoral collaboration between the hastily assembled New Popular Front and Macron’s Ensemble coalition.
But the National Rally was not the only extreme party running. There was also France Unbowed, founded by the former Trotskyist firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon. It differs radically from the National Rally on issues of immigration, social policy, and much else, but the two also have things in common: a fundamentally populist outlook, a strong French nationalism, an unfortunate weakness for foreign strongmen (at least on Mélenchon’s part), and, not least, a particularly fierce loathing of Macron. France Unbowed did the best of all the groups in the New Popular Front, electing 76 deputies. The National Rally won 143, meaning that, with other small parties factored in, more than 40 per cent of the new Assembly comes from the political extremes. It is precisely this 40 per cent which, for the moment, is making the formation of a coalition government in France look impossible.
In both France and the US, the current crisis has been inseparable from specific political personalities: specifically, those of Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron. That, of course, is the hallmark of political systems centred on powerful presidencies. But the crisis also has deeper causes. Through the 20th century, in both France and the US, most ordinary citizens had at least a baseline confidence in the people who ran the countries’ political systems – whatever their party – born in large part out of the memory of common wartime sacrifice, and also out of a reasonable expectation that material conditions would continue to improve over time. They might well loathe individual politicians, and even whole parties, but usually not to the point of wanting to pull the entire political structure down around their heads. The mystique that still attached to both presidencies reinforced this baselines confidence. If the president addressed the nation on a matter of urgency, people listened.
But in recent decades, this confidence has largely evaporated. Spiralling inequalities and pointless wars have played their role, but also, for many people, the way cosmopolitan elites seem to have abandoned core national values related to patriotism and the family. Partisan media and social media have played their toxic part in focusing and magnifying the resulting resentments towards particular parts of the elite (intellectuals, “deep state” bureaucrats, financiers) as the enemy: “the professors are the enemy” as JD Vance himself put it in 2021. The resulting conflicts threaten to break America and France apart. And the presidency, again, thanks to its oversized role in both political systems, is the reef on which it will smash.
[See also: The French far right is one step from power]
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