La République En Marche: Macron's Resolute Walk Towards Radical Centrism

Abstract

The year 2017 saw the unravelling of the prevailing order that had dominated the French political scene since the late 1950s (the end of the Fourth Republic). For nearly sixty years (1958 – 2017), the authoritarian centre-right Gaullists shared France’s ‘fromage’ (cushy public jobs, neoclassical Left Bank mansions and lightly-clad assistants) with the moderately Marxist Socialists. Apart from a short hiatus (1976 – 1980 Raymond Barre government), that period was marked by the progressive decline and eventual marginalization of the eminently French Radicale tradition – once Western Europe’s leading political philosophy. It took Emmanuel Macron less than a year to revive it by using a bold combination of modern managerial techniques, digital marketing and age-old tactical manoeuvrings: to that day, France’s Labour party (‘Socialists’), Gaullist Conservatives (‘LR’) and right-wing nationalists (‘FN’) don’t seem to know what hit them. Macron’s shrewd cultural wink to the ‘New-New-Thing’ crowd came in the form of a derogatory term he used to describe his rivals, be they mildly Marxist Social-Democrats or rigid Conservatives: “L’Ancien Monde” made of fossilized political dinosaurs harking back to the pre-digital age… But En Marche’s venture-capitalist vision went far beyond top-down support from generous IT and telecom nouveaux-riches. The new party itself was consciously and conspicuously modelled after Silicon Valley startups.