Emmanuel Macron better heed the lessons of another brilliant young centrist who became president.

PARIS — A brilliant young technocrat and economy minister breaks with an aging, exhausted president, builds his own pro-European centrist alliance, vowing to break the mold of French politics, and rides a wave of optimism to the Élysée Palace.

Sound familiar?

The story of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, elected president aged just 48 in 1974, is both a precursor and a cautionary tale for Emmanuel Macron, who stands on the threshold of power at the even more tender age of 39.

Both men aspired to rejuvenate and modernize France, create a more dynamic economy and a more liberal, tolerant society. Neither had a stable parliamentary majority of their own supporters. Both faced suspicion from the political old guard and hostility from the unions.

“Giscard understood the bipolarized Fifth Republic system perfectly and exploited it” — Jean-Louis Bourlanges, former MEP

The warning message for Macron is that Giscard failed to dynamite the polarized Fifth Republic political system, which prevented his reelection in 1981, consigning the center to the wilderness for a generation. Elected partly out of fear of a “union of the left” in which the Communist Party still loomed large, his attempt to create a centrist “third force” ultimately foundered on the rocks of the left-right divide.

Blowing away cobwebs

Today, both the center-left Socialists and the center-right Républicains are divided and on the ropes after being knocked out of the first round of the presidential election. With a majority of voters likely to reject Marine Le Pen’s nationalist, anti-European National Front, Macron’s En Marche (On the move) movement has a window of opportunity to reshape the political and economic landscape, but it may be short.

If he fails, France may fall into Le Pen’s lap.

Like Macron, Giscard was convinced that the French were fed up with the class struggle and wanted an “advanced liberal society.” He argued that two-thirds of the electorate rejected the extremes and were ready for pragmatic pro-market reforms.

Often compared at the time to John F. Kennedy, he blew away the cobwebs of a conservative Catholic country, legalizing abortion and making contraception free, reducing the voting age from 21 to 18, introducing divorce by mutual consent, extending public health care to non-salaried workers, increasing unemployment benefits, and widening the scope of the constitutional council.

In the wake of the 1973 oil crisis, Giscard founded the annual informal world economic summits of leaders of the main industrial democracies. He worked closely with West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt to create the European Monetary System, to upgrade the European Parliament by having it directly elected from 1979 and to establish the European Council of heads of state and government as a leadership forum for the then European Economic Community.

After the aloof General Charles de Gaulle, and the more folksy but ailing Georges Pompidou, he modernized the image of the presidency in his early years, projecting a youthful vigor. He was filmed playing the accordion, swimming in skimpy trunks or skiing. He and his wife “dropped in” on ordinary families for dinner, and invited the garbage collectors into the Élysée Palace for tea.

A Giscard of the left

Yet Giscard, now 91, is mostly remembered for the monarchical pomposity of his later years in office, a scandal over his acceptance of a gift of diamonds from Emperor Bokassa of the Central African Republic and a bitter farewell address, in which he walked away leaving the camera lingering on his empty chair. Macron, who rarely if ever cites Giscard, needs to remain humble and focused to avoid his predecessor’s fate.

Alain Duhamel, the doyen of French political commentators, describes Macron as “a Giscard of the left,” who shares the same intellectual brilliance, elite education, political non-conformism and pro-European social liberalism.

“He is the first candidate to campaign on a message of optimism since Giscard. Since then, they have all been in different shades of gloom or semi-mourning,” said Duhamel, who co-moderated the 1974 presidential debate between Giscard and Socialist François Mitterrand.

But Macron, whose rise has been more sudden and steep than Giscard’s, inherits a much darker political and economic situation. Giscard took office at the end of the “glorious 30” post-war boom years, with public finances still in balance, low debt and virtually full employment. France was still fizzing with the creative energy unleashed by the May 1968 student uprising.

Today, more than five million people are without a full-time job. Almost one in four young adults in this nation of 65 million is unemployed. The industrial working class has shrunk and turned in despair to the anti-immigrant far right or the anti-globalization hard left. France is a more divided and less dynamic society in the grip of a profound pessimism after 25 years of economic stagnation.

While Macron polled most strongly in the big cities and the western and central regions that voted for Giscard in 1974, Le Pen outmuscled him in the rust-belt northern and southern regions that were the bedrock of Mitterrand’s electorate. The country is no longer divided into two camps — left and right — but into four almost equal sized families: a nationalist, protectionist far right; mainstream free-market conservatives; a liberal, pro-European center left; and an anti-globalization far left.

The lessons of history

If Macron is not successful, many analysts fear Le Pen will come next.

“Giscard understood the bipolarized Fifth Republic system perfectly and exploited it, governing in the center with a parliamentary majority of the right,” Jean-Louis Bourlanges, a former MEP and centrist intellectual, told me. “Macron understands that we are no longer in a period of bipolarization. But he is struggling to reshape the landscape, hesitating between creating a new party in his own image or trying to unite the centrist and rump socialist parties behind him.”

In Bourlanges’ view, Giscard made two key mistakes: He handed the premiership from the outset to Gaullist political rival Jacques Chirac, who had been his kingmaker, instead of sidelining him once he had won power, and then halted liberal social reforms after his first two years in power.

Once in office, Giscard unified small liberal, Christian democratic and social democratic parties into the Union for French Democracy (UDF) party, but it never gained the upper hand over Chirac’s conservative Gaullist Rally for the Republic (RPR) in the National Assembly and was eventually swallowed by it.

“Giscard was politically naive. He thought he had killed off Mitterrand by winning the 1978 parliamentary elections and Chirac by winning the 1979 European Parliament elections. Yet his two successors were Mitterrand and Chirac,” he said, adding that Giscard had also been unlucky because the second oil price shock of 1978-79 had hit the French economy hard.

Asked how Macron could avoid the same fate as Giscard, Bourlanges said the key was to avoid hyperactive short-termism and courting popularity, and to show a steady hand in implementing a long-term reform program. “The country needs to know it is being governed again,” he said.

Macron has promised to overhaul the electoral system, “moralize” public life by banning multiple office-holding, bar anyone with a criminal record from running for election, introduce term limits for elected officials, reduce the number of parliamentarians by a third, make gender parity compulsory for parliamentary candidates and introduce some element of proportional representation.

That, and an amplification of the current timid economic recovery due to his liberalizing reforms, could increase his chances of building a durable centrist force in French politics.



[POLITICO]